MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by akssri | 2025-08-30 00:19:50+00:00
This doesn't work the moment the module you're importing something imports something else that you've changed.

Worse, you can't redine methods, because the classes get "redefined". This means that you need to first redefine classes, then "reload" (hoping it doesn't break for to silly implementation limitations mentioned above), then initialize objects, then retest.

Obviously this is quite painful which is why I use this decorator to mimic Lisp's defmethod to patch methods on "live" objects without class redefinition,

https://gist.github.com/akssri/431f2dfe037bbdbb3c8668872edfd...
by _heimdall | 2025-08-30 00:20:20+00:00
> The article's example shows the main reason (besides having old libraries shipped with Java) why XSLT didn’t have a significant adoption: UX/DX

I wonder if react would be popular today if it started out with the UX/DX we have today. It started out as a comparatively simple component-based library for rendering templates in the browser. It got popular and built a huge community before becoming the complete DX mess that it is today.
by byryan | 2025-08-30 00:21:40+00:00
> Their intent can be noble, well-intentioned, and not meant to offend. They simply don't beat around the bush or worry about whether your fragile ego will be bruised when they make an observation.

I mean maybe, but maybe Carmac is just an ass hole... He can be a "legend" in the software development world and also just not be a super great person socially. The two things aren't mutually exclusive.

I don't disagree with you entirely, but being "direct" isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card for poor interpersonal skills. It's not always about "fragile egos" or "entitlement", it's about basic professionalism and communication.
by robwwilliams | 2025-08-30 00:21:58+00:00
You are right. To the best of my knowledge there has notbeen a way to share conversations with Anthropic, and therefore with future versions of Claudes. There was no Opt-in option as far as I know.

Straighten me out if I am wrong.

I need this opt-in to improve the foundational model that they have trained. It is good, but not good enough.
by hilbert42 | 2025-08-30 00:22:37+00:00
"Seriously how many of us are still on FB?"

Billions unfortunately! Almost everyone I deal with is. I reckon I'm about the only person I know who is not on one form of social media or another and or deeply involved with Google apps/using its Cloud.

I've banned relatives taking my photo because I know it'll end up on Facebook, Google or others despite my wishes to the contrary. No matter what I say I know they can't help themselves (so does Big Tech—that's its modus operandi).

I've come to the conclusion there's no point trying to convince others about privacy, data mining by Meta et al. All I can do is to try to minimize others spilling my personal data onto Big Tech's data collection highways.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-08-30 00:23:09+00:00
If you truly feel this has any value and are feeling delusions of grandeur from this, you may need serious psychiatric help.

To answer seriously, it's awful, absolutely awful, to a level which could only be achieved by AI mimics.

I suggest you take the time to seriously learn how LLM's work. Know what you are working with. They are probability engines, and have no way to determine what happens in "2066/2067", etc. Look, I spend my days trading financial markets, and work with LLMs... they can't predict the next day of human events. They generalize based on backwards looking knowledge.

Humans are forward looking. If you want to empower yourself, stop using backwards looking tools literally using baked in probabilistic responses based on historical data, and start pushing forward into new territory.

You can lay out tests easily. Ask what will happen with the Modi/US tariff negotiations, and the Putin/Ukraine war, and ask for specific dates. You will soon see them violated. Or better yet, review the code. Literally look at the code and see how the probability machine works. It's not magic. You're basically like someone worshipping Google in year 2001.

You would be much better off reading legitimate philosophical texts if you want to gain enlightenment. You are giving up your autonomy and humanness by subjugating yourself to the sum total of calcified historical inputs. Live in the moment, and push forwards. Stagnation is death. In many ways, I see this post as a manifestation of true "evil". That's my view, since you asked.
by leoc | 2025-08-30 00:23:09+00:00
Look at the outcome of Meta's performance in AR/VR over the past few years: a fortune has been spent; relatively little has been achieved; the whole thing is likely about to be slashed back; VR, something Carmack believes in, remains a bit commercially marginal and easily dismissed; and Carmack's own reputation has taken a hit from association with it all. You can understand perfectly well why he doesn't feel that it would have been harmless to just let other people have whatever fun they wanted with the AR/VR Zuckbucks.

(Mind you, Carmack himself was responsible for Oculus' Scheme-based VRScript exploratory-programming environment, another Meta-funded passion project that didn't end up going far. It surely didn't cost remotely as much as XROS though.)
by treyd | 2025-08-30 00:23:28+00:00
MS has deep ties into the state department and intelligence apparatus that few other companies do. Just as deep as the defense contractors who have a near monopoly-monopsony relationship with the federal government. You can argue about how exclusive they are in particular qualities but the scale and depth they operate at makes their relationship approximate the relationship Huawei does with the Chinese government. They're just what state-backed enterprises look like under liberal-ish capitalism.
by aksss | 2025-08-30 00:23:33+00:00
I do not think that word means what you think it means. Proto boomer would be pre-boomer or at least the very early boomer, and chronologically that makes zero sense. Understand what you're trying to say though -- Quasi, Para, Pseudo, Demi would each be more appropriate prefixes. A Demiboomer could be in the Monster Manual.
Show HN: I created redux-lite: easy-use, high-performance React state manager
by oldbig | 2025-08-30 00:24:03+00:00
Hi HN,

I'd like to share a project I've been working on: `@oldbig/redux-lite`. It's a state management library for React designed to be:

1. *High-Performance & Lightweight*: Zero runtime dependencies, a tiny footprint, and built-in optimizations to prevent unnecessary re-renders. It's incredibly fast. 2. *Super Easy to Learn & Use*: The API is so simple you can learn it in 5 minutes. It eliminates boilerplate by generating everything from a single store definition. 3. *Extremely Easy to Test*: Since the state is just a plain object and there are no complex reducers to mock, writing unit tests for your components is trivial. 4. *Fully Type-Safe*: End-to-end type safety with excellent autocompletion.

Here’s a quick look at the API:

// 1. Define your store const storeDefinition = { user: { name: 'Guest', age: 0 }, tasks: optional<string[]>(), // Optional state slices };

// 2. Initiate const { ReduxLiteProvider, useReduxLiteStore } = initiate(storeDefinition);

// 3. Use the hook in your component const { user, dispatchPartialUser } = useReduxLiteStore(); // dispatchPartialUser({ name: 'John' });

The library is designed to prevent unnecessary re-renders by performing deep equality checks on state updates.

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/oldbig/redux-lite NPM Package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@oldbig/redux-lite Demo (Todo List): https://github.com/oldbig/redux-lite/tree/main/examples/todo...

I built this because I wanted a state manager that was powerful without the complexity and boilerplate of traditional Redux. I'd love to get your feedback and answer any questions. Thanks for checking it out!
by phailhaus | 2025-08-30 00:24:33+00:00
Big fan of the columnar topographical sort, most graph visualizations get this wrong and render everything as a "soup" of nodes and edges. With your viz I can tell exactly how far away everything is.

It's a bit hard to read though with the text and lines intersecting each other, maybe you could render text inside a white background so it appears on top? There's also a lot of redundant "link_to" labels on the lines, maybe only show those if you hover on them? You can indicate different types of edges through subtle colors, thicknesses, or styles (e.g., dotted).
by zealtrace | 2025-08-30 00:25:20+00:00
I agree my reply would be improved if reframed to be less cross-examining, particularly given I was responding to two different comments at once. That said, the substance I raised is around services that were shared, and something a business owner in the mental health field can be fairly expected to receive feedback on.

I have benefited from psychedelics. I have also spent a lot of time with many survivors of severe domestic abuse / IPV / coercive control. Inducing psychedelic states in a workplace context in general would give me pause, but particularly so since it is likely to involve this population. The lifetime prevalence for US women is about 25%[1], and 10% for men[2], so this is a live issue in a workplace of any size.

I disagree that it's reasonable to expect readers to fully assess these service offerings. Issues around informed consent when doing psychological/spiritual work are complex and benefit from many perspectives. This is one of the reasons mental health is a regulated industry, with strict rules around client relationships, and ongoing ethics classes required to maintain licensure. If this were a piece of software impacting human health and I saw such potential technical issues, I would raise those as well.

I don’t believe this person is a fraud, and did not intend to give the impression I did. They are navigating a difficult and undeveloped regulatory landscape. There may be some social nuance I am missing, and I'm hoping this context improves the discussion.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(21)02664-7/full... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/intimate-partner-violence/about/intimate...
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-08-30 00:25:29+00:00
I've got front and rear cameras on my bicycle and both of them have a simple crash protection feature. If the cameras detect the bike falling over, they'll mark the current video segment (typically split into 5/15 minute segments on the SD card) as protected and won't be overwritten when the SD card fills up which is the usual operating mode.

If Tesla are marking crash data to be deleted, then that's not designed to help the customer, but to protect Tesla.
by mr-wendel | 2025-08-30 00:26:01+00:00
I was selected to represent my high school as a candidate for computer science at a state-level competition. The teacher in charge of selection made it clear that he very much didn't want to pick me -- there just weren't any better options. He explained that my portfolio was all based on user skills. Nothing showed a deeper understanding of the underlying principles of computing. I didn't incorporate any of this feedback and was thoroughly humbled later on. It was a well-deserved loss.

Twenty plus years later and I've still never had more useful interview-related feedback and I'm still grateful he was willing to share that criticism. Now, having been on the flip side of the process quite a bit, I especially appreciate how hard it is to provide meaningful "negative" feedback.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-08-30 00:26:57+00:00
Taxis are different.

I might be willing to take a robotaxi because if something does happen it's not my fault. Same with a bus or train. But I won't trust FSD on my own car (LIDAR or no LIDAR), except in certain circumstances like highway driving, because if something did happen, I'd be at fault even if it was the FSD that failed.
by scheeseman486 | 2025-08-30 00:27:47+00:00
When saying things like "Unlike truly decentralized systems where users can participate equally regardless of their entry point" it helps to give examples of what those are, because thinking of my own, like E-Mail, confronts me with the fact that most of the issues raised also apply to it.

Server administrators also wield enormous power over their users. They can unilaterally decide to "defederate from other instances" in a sense (there's shared DNS blocklists that servers can and often adopt). Servers have content policies, they filter mail. Running your own server requires technical knowledge. Migration is a hassle.

There are differences, there aren't as many competing microblogging implementations of ActivityPub, but given ~92% of E-Mail servers are either Postfix or Exim that's basically a duopoly. I guess that's better? In any case, Mastodon is FOSS and anyone who wants to take it in their own direction can fork it.

In terms of comparing Bluesky and Mastodon's decentralized-ness, Mastodon is clearly more so. That doesn't necessarily make it the best microblogging platform, though.
by fijiaarone | 2025-08-30 00:27:57+00:00
Mostly I agree with what the author is saying. But there is a clear distinction between the simplest “system” and do the simplest thing.

The simplest thing to do is almost always the easiest, but knowing what is easiest thing to do is a lot trickier —- see Javascript frameworks.

But I think I disagree with the author’s second axiom:

“2. Simple systems are less internally-connected.”

Creating interfaces is more complex than not. Even if it leads to a cleaner design because of interface boundaries. At the least, creating those boundaries adds complexity, and I don’t mean “more effort”. I mean it in the sense that creating functions is more complex than calling “goto”. And it took decades to invent the mechanism needed to call functions —- which is probably the next most simple thing.

However, using call stacks and named pointers and memory separation (functions) leads to vastly improved simplicity of the system as the system as a while grows in complexity.

So in fact, using your own in-memory rate limiter may be a simpler implementation than using Redis, but it it also violates the second principle (using clear interfaces leads to simpler systems.)

And it turns the author’s first premise — Gunicorn is simpler than Puma. Because Puma does the equivalent of building their own rate limiter — managing its own memory and using threads instead of processes.

And Gunicorn does the equivalent of using Redis — externalizing the complexity.

What Gunicorn did was simpler to implement (because it relies on an existing isolated architecture - Unix processes and files) but means it has a greater complexity (if you take into account that it needs that whole system to work.

However that system is a brilliant set of reductions in complexity itself, but it runs up against limitations and performance at some point.

Puma takes on itself more complexity to make administering the server less complex and more performant under load. Also, because it is, in a sense, reinventing the wheel, it lacks the distillation of simplicity that is Unix.

So, less internally connected systems are easier to expand and maintain and interface boundaries lead to less complex systems as a whole, but are not, in themselves less complex.

Limitations in the system that cause performed problems (like Unix processes and function calls) are not necessarily “more simple than can possibly work” —- but the implementations of those abstractions are not perfect and could be improved.

Sometimes it’s not clear where to push the complexity, and sometimes it’s not clear what the right abstraction level is; but mostly it’s about making due with the existing architecture you have, and not having the time or resources to fix it. Until the complexity at your level reaches a point that it’s worth adding complexity at a higher level due to being unable to add the right amount of complexity at a lower level.
by lucb1e | 2025-08-30 00:28:23+00:00
On the first fricking pageload I got blocked and couldn't open it at all, no captcha shown. That's a success only insofar as you want to exclude random people who don't have a second person whose cookie state to copy

Also mind that not every request we make is malicious. A lot of it is also seeing what's even there, doing baseline requests, normal things. I didn't get the impression that I got blocked more on malicious requests than normal browsing at all (see also the part where a bot could go to town on a login form while my manual navigation was getting captchas)
by robwwilliams | 2025-08-30 00:29:08+00:00
Yes, I share your take on this change—a way to improvements in many domains.

Agree that the fact that these improvements will accrue within in a proprietary for profit. But still a net positive fir my work.

Give me a FOSS LLM with Claude 4 Sonnet performance and a 1 million token context and I will work even harder toward improvements in my areas of biological NIH-funded research.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-08-30 00:30:00+00:00
But designing "the simplest thing that could possibly work" may make harder than necessary to modify later. (and any time the requirements change after it's built, you're inching towards a big ball of mud, so this whole idea should be reviled whenever possible)

An example is databases. People design their database schemas in incredibly simplistic ways, and then regret it later when the predictable stuff most people need doesn't work with the old schema, and you can't even just add columns, but you have to modify existing ones. Avoid the nightmare by making it reasonably extensible from the start. It may not be "the simplest thing that could possibly work", but it is often useful and doesn't cost you anything extra.

Just as much as people say "don't prematurely optimize", they should also say "don't prematurely make it total crap".
by quietbritishjim | 2025-08-30 00:30:24+00:00
> At scale, you can continue to operate, but the amount of man-hours going into keeping the lights on can grow exponentially. Is the simplest thing possible still the DB?

Don't worry, the second half of the title has this covered:

> ... that could possibly work

In the scenario you've described, the technology is not working, in the complete sense including business requirements of reasonable operating costs.

Perhaps it really did work at first, in the complete sense, when the number of users was quite small. That's where the actual content of the article kicks in: it suggests you really do use that simple solution, because maybe you'll never need to scale after all, or you'll need to rewrite everything by then anyway, or you'll have access to more engineering talent by then, etc. I'd tend to agree, but with the caveat that you should feel free to break the rule so long as you're doing it consciously. But none of that implies that you should end up in the situation you described.
by Twirrim | 2025-08-30 00:30:58+00:00
The only bot that bugs the crap out of me is Anthropic's one. They're the reason I set up a labyrinth using iocaine (https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/). Their bot was absurdly aggressive, particularly with retries.

It's probably trivial in the whole scheme of things, but I love that anthropic spent months making about 10rps against my stupid blog, getting markov chain responses generated from the text of Moby Dick. (looks like they haven't crawled my site for about a fortnight now)
by zdragnar | 2025-08-30 00:31:11+00:00
The distinction you make is known to me as natural complexity (the base level due to the nature of the domain) and accidental complexity (that which is added unnecessarily on top of it).

Your definition rubs up against what a UX designer taught me years ago, which is that simple and complex are one spectrum, similar to but different from easy and hard.

Often, simple is confused for easy, and complex for hard. However, simple interfaces can hide a lot of information in unintuitive ways, while complex interfaces can present more information and options up front.
by Scubabear68 | 2025-08-30 00:31:55+00:00
I get it.

YAGANI.

A term coined by consultants who don’t understand an industry who basically say “do the least possible thing that will work” because they don’t understand the domain and don’t understand what requirements are often non-negotiable table stakes of complexity you need to compete.

It reminded me of a Martin Fowler post where he was showing implementation of discounts in some system and advocating to just hard code the first discount in the method (literally getDiscount() {return 0.5}).

Even the most shallow analysis would show this was incredibly stupid and short sighted.

But this was the state of the art, or so we were told.

See also Ward Cunningham trying and failing to solve Sudoku using TDD.

The reality is most business domains are actually complex, and the one who best tackles that complexity up front can take home all the marbles.
by dreamcompiler | 2025-08-30 00:32:38+00:00
I'm a computer engineer, EMT, and firefighter. I have scooped up brain matter from hot asphalt and run into burning buildings (without even getting paid for it). People ask me how I can do this. I dunno. Training and experience I guess. Doesn't bother me.

But the idea of standing on a stage pretending to be someone else fills me with sheer terror. Even worse would be trying out for that job 100 times and getting rejected every time.

I don't know how actors do it. My hat's off to you.
by elliotto | 2025-08-30 00:33:10+00:00
Do you reckon the KPI's and performance indicators used in big tech count as meaningful ways to measure performance? Wouldn't someone implementing a complex resume-driven project score highly on these measurements, despite a simpler solution being correct? I am not sure that job-hopping every 18 months to maximise TC (ie optimise against your incentives) is a great way to learn about long-term design and organisational implications.

I'm not saying that these jobs are bullshit in the same way that a VP of box-ticking is, just that it's not a conspiracy that a cathedral based on 'design-doc culture' might produce incentives that result in people who focus on maximising their performance on these fiscally rewarding dot points, rather than actualising their innate belief in performant and maintainable systems.

I work at a start-up so if my code doesn't run we don't get paid. This motivates me to write it well.
by dwaite | 2025-08-30 00:34:19+00:00
Infrastructure-wise, XML digital signature implementations have to do transforms to convert the XML to the signed octet stream, and commonly use XSLT engines to do so. There was a fun early bug where one of the transforms that Xerces had was that you could include base64 encoded data, and it would load that as a java class against the transformer interface and execute it.
by jhhh | 2025-08-30 00:35:21+00:00
I remember the my 'one day'. I was messing around making a podcast app awhile back and thinking it shouldn't be hard to make a floating footer in css that's (1) always at the bottom, (2) always visible, (3) doesn't permanently occlude content and (4) doesn't require any hacks or artifacts eg. putting a same sized buffer in the scrolling content to handle item #3. Turns out it's just not possible. Great system.
by jrflowers | 2025-08-30 00:35:44+00:00
> Every nine fingered woodworker knows that some things just can't be built with all the guards on.

I love this sentence because it is complete gibberish. I like the idea that it’s a regular thing for woodworkers to intentionally sacrifice their fingers, like they look at a cabinet that’s 90% done and go “welp, I guess I’m gonna donate my pinky to The Cause”
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-08-30 00:36:27+00:00
> A 99.9% accuracy rate isn't good enough because I might kill a child for every 1000 school buses I pass

You don't need a high level of accuracy for that - the rule is to not overtake a school bus, so that would equate to one illegal overtake for every 1000 (stopped) buses encountered. Also, not every illegal bus overtake would necessarily put a child in immediate danger.