MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bakugo | 2025-08-12 02:35:40+00:00
I believe at least some of them are, yes. The rest might just be riding the hype to get on the front page, but the effect is the same.

There are dozens of solid vibe coding CLIs (soon probably hundreds, a new one is released every week), yet the only one that is guaranteed to be discussed 24/7 here is Claude Code, the other ones might as well not exist in comparison. The talking points are always the same, too: the expensive $200 plan and the fact that it's actually an amazing deal that everyone should buy are guaranteed to be brought up every time, hell, it's the top comment on this very post.

I'm beginning to see it brought up in unrelated posts all the time, too: "I made something like this with Claude Code", "I implemented this by letting Claude Code run overnight", and so on. Combined with posts like this one where people obsess over it to the point that it almost seems like satire (there's another post on the front page right now talking about how it's literally magic and how you should let it run wild on your prod servers), it's starting to feel more like a cult than anything else.
by gottorf | 2025-08-12 02:36:28+00:00
The data is publicly available: https://mpdc.dc.gov/dailycrime. By any measure, it shows a horrifying level of crime, disorder, and antisocial behavior. If DC were a country, it would be among the top 20 most murderous in the world.

DC has had home rule for over 50 years. If this is a 30-year low in violent crime, it's all the more proof that radical change needs to happen soon, not something to be proud of.
by spauldo | 2025-08-12 02:36:56+00:00
If you have to use an explicit stack, you're still doing recursion. Useful if you're implementing the Ackermann function in FORTRAN 77, I suppose. Unless you're worried about running out of stack space, it's generally easier to reason about if you just use regular recursion.

That only applies for non-primitive recursive functions, though. Most people rarely encounter those. For primitive recursive functions, it's all down to the nature of the function and what's idiomatic for your language. If you're using Scheme, for example, recursion is the name of the game.
by tharkun__ | 2025-08-12 02:37:48+00:00
Never mind LLMs.

I'll age myself here but about exactly 20 years ago I experienced exactly this. No LLM in sight.

Boss wanted to ensure we document something for our client. Cow-orker that didn't want to spend time writing boring documentation that might obsolete him (we were consultants working at a client) created an awesome looking table of contents structure and pages on the wiki. The first few entries had actual pages that had content in them. Of course they were also very "introductory" i.e. "naturally lean" on real content.

I checked every single page. Almost all of the rest of them were entirely empty pages.

He got through with this BS and it probably wasn't the first time (I was much more junior than him at the point) and it won't have been the last time. He got out of work he didn't want to do and nobody was the wiser until he was very far away.

LLMs just make this worse but they're definitely not required.
by profsummergig | 2025-08-12 02:38:17+00:00
Back when Anderson Consulting hadn't yet disgraced itself, a corp I worked for hired them for a cost-cutting project. "Find ways we can cut costs."

Blew my mind that 22-year olds, fresh out of good-brand universities (their "qualification"), were doing the research on how to cost-cut. Chesterton's fences all over the place were violated. It was sad watching the slow-moving disaster.
by dreamcompiler | 2025-08-12 02:39:01+00:00
> At Boom, every engineer is expected to code and to leverage AI.

As an engineer I find "leveraging AI" to be a very troubling idea. I'd want to know detailed specifics of just what management believes AI should be used for before I accepted such a job.

As a passenger, I damn well don't want to fly on an airplane designed with software that can't count the number of bs in blueberry.
by tempestn | 2025-08-12 02:39:07+00:00
I feel the same way. I landed on Evernote rather than org-mode, but it similarly provides all these features out of the box, while letting me largely customize my setup. (I basically do GTD with a notebook for each priority level.)

Was regretting it a bit in the 2020-2023 range when Evernote was going downhill, but it's improved a fair amount since the acquisition. Almost (but not quite) to the point where I'd recommend it to others again.

What I would recommend is spending the time to learn some system beyond just a text file. I've ultimately found it well worth it, to the extent that I couldn't imagine going back now. It is definitely an investment up front though.
by jarjoura | 2025-08-12 02:40:08+00:00
League has the same zero tolerance policy as union. Though union players seem way beefier and move way slower on the field, so an impact that knocks someone down looks far more dangerous than in league. League players seem fast enough to dodge most impacts. But yea, I think in almost every game I've watched, there's almost always someone getting a headknock that they pull out for an assessment.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-12 02:40:19+00:00
Canada is, on the whole, much more tolerant of socially justified restrictions like this than the US.

NS is a small province with limited resources. If a fire starts, it will become large fast, under current conditions. If that happens they will have to bring in resources from other provinces, if they aren’t already busy (they almost certainly are).

Park and land closures due to fire risk have existed for far longer than since March 2020. This isn’t normalization of authoritarianism. This is just what a more pro-socially oriented culture than the US looks like.
by jay_kyburz | 2025-08-12 02:40:33+00:00
I think perhaps you are discussing too many threads simultaneously. I'm fully onboard with Maccas and Artists creating something thus creating wealth.

Also, yes, transaction are exchanges. Nobody is arguing that. You pay rent and in exchange you may use the land (productively or not)

My argument is that people are forced to pay rent to people who didn't create anything, but because they hold a piece of paper that says they own it.

The argument is, did the person who owns the land "create" anything. My argument is no.
by eru | 2025-08-12 02:40:45+00:00
> [...] and I think it's underrated that the kinds of functions where TCO is applicable tend to be so simple that they are not really that inelegant when expressed imperatively.

I suspect you are only thinking of patterns that are basically equivalent to a loop. I might agree with that.

TCO really shines when you want to implement state machines. See eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43076088 for an example where using tail calls in Python's interpreter loop gives nice performance benefits. Similar also for LUA.

> [...] I'd concede that experienced FP programmers might be unlikely to accidentally break others' TCO.

Compiler (or linter) checkable annotations would help here. You are right that you want to make it possible for programmers to statically assert somehow that their function call is a tail call.

Btw this reminds me: recursion isn't just something you do in computation, but also in data structures (amongst other things). In eg Rust the members of your data structure are typically just laid out one after another, but when you have a recursive structure (and in certain other cases) you need to box it, otherwise you'd get an infinitely large data structure. Boxing is more or less equivalent to using indirection via a pointer.

However, unboxing isn't really like TCO. It's more like in-lining.
by ch4s3 | 2025-08-12 02:41:29+00:00
I don’t agree with Thompson, his start date is the place where fertility hit a local minimum, not the year where the rate really took off which was 1946. A lot of the technological innovations actually predated his arguable start date by 5-10 years and several happened well into the boom.

I think his explanation fits the thesis of his recent book, which I actually like, but it seem a bit off here.
by docmars | 2025-08-12 02:42:29+00:00
Yep, at the risk of repeating what you said: I think this is why so many project management / todo apps exist with their own flavor of the very basics. It's a reflection of those wishes that feel natural to us individually, and it just so happens many of these apps mesh well with our model of thinking and organizing.

This is also why it's so difficult to get teams on the same page about project management in their respective workplaces.
by nutribueno | 2025-08-12 02:43:21+00:00
> If you want to effect change my recommendation is to show up.

I have reservations about this line of thought.

For one, the people at the local city counsel have been showing up for a long time, all over the country in fact. If the actions they took have brought them here, of what use were the actions?

And second, I would like to see some hard evidence that you have in fact effected/enacted change by showing up beyond just being more informed and participating in what can otherwise be (from personal experience) either a snooze-fest or an echo chamber.
by gottorf | 2025-08-12 02:43:49+00:00
The "30-year low in violent crime" still puts DC ahead of every state in homicide rate. If DC were a country, it would rank somewhere around the top 20 most murderous. Venezuela, a literal failed state, has a lower homicide rate. Russia, the dysfunctional kleptocracy that it is, is less than a third as murderous as DC.

Might not the people of DC deserve better? Is it possible that problems exist in real life outside of "media attention"?
by jaredwiener | 2025-08-12 02:44:01+00:00
There's a difference between what is technically feasible and what is allowed, legally or even morally.

Just because it is possible -- or even easy -- to essentially steal from newspapers/other media outlets, doesn't make it right, or legal. The people behind it put in labor, financial resources, and time to create a product that, like almost every other service, has terms attached -- and those usually come with some form of monetization. Maybe it is a paywall, maybe it is advertisements -- but it is there.

Using an adblocker, or finding some loophole around a paywall, etc, are all very easy to do technically, as any reader of this site knows. That said, the media outlet doesn't have to allow it. And when it is violated on an industrial scale, like Perplexity, then they can be understandably upset and take legal action. And that includes any AI (or other technology, for that matter) that is a wrapper around plagiarism.

Sites opted in to Google originally because it fed them traffic. They most likely did not opt in to an AI rewriter that takes their work and republishes it without any compensation.
by eru | 2025-08-12 02:44:36+00:00
You could imagine a language like eg Python with a for-each loop that creates a new variable for each run through the loop body.

Basically, just pretend the loop body is a lambda that you call for each run through the loop.

It might make sense to think of the common loops as a special kind of combinator (like 'map' and 'filter', 'reduce' etc.) And just like you shouldn't write everything in terms of 'reduce', even though you perhaps could, you shouldn't write everything in terms of the common loops either.

Make up new combinators, when you need them.

For comparison, in Haskell we seldom use 'naked' recursion directly: we typically define a combinator and then use it.

That often makes sense, even if you only use the combinator once.
by qgin | 2025-08-12 02:44:48+00:00
No proof, it’s just incredibly convenient. Just like when Kristi Noam just happened to get her purse stolen by someone who was in the country illegally right when the ICE raids were about to start. In this case, the well-known DOGE intern just happens to get carjacked in the city limits of DC right when Trump’s new DC Attorney General is being installed and the National Guard is ready to go.

No proof, but wow do they just happen to get exactly the event they need for the PR.
by stetrain | 2025-08-12 02:45:13+00:00
Early XP had a pretty rough time with security especially before the service packs.

Many of my Windows memories from those days were of running Spybot Search and Destroy for friends and family.

Vista was much better in that regard but had issues in performance of the UI (chasing compositing interfaces that Mac and Linux had for years before) and the annoyance of UAC. Both were good ideas but required buy-in from hardware and software vendors that was slow to arrive.
by ajross | 2025-08-12 02:46:44+00:00
> [...] raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.

Counter-argument: things have not been bad. In DC or elsewhere. It's a meme. In fact DC crime statistics, like national ones, have been trending steadily downward for decades. They burp with immediate inputs, like spiking over the pandemic when formerly-employed folks found time to get in more trouble, but... they aren't bad.

DC is safe, historically. Chicago is safe. Seattle is safe. Portland is safe. NYC is extremely safe. All these places partisan media likes to paint as urban hellscapes are in fact historically safe cities in which to live and do business.

The answer to "why things have been so bad for so long" is inside your television, basically. It's not on the streets of DC.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-08-12 02:46:57+00:00
Nitpick I know but race cars in well run series actually have quite good safety - just not in the same way because the environment and expectations are different. You don't need/want a reversing camera or parking beeps and boops...

I think part of MS issue is that they keep bundling and pushing "crap useful to some minority" (as well as unwanted ads and features too) by default into ostensibly "your" system and making it hard to focus on what you want it for.

If you want it to focus on gaming performance... well it's more about arcane tweaks rather than having a turn off the shit button.

Maybe the coming Win10 EoL will see a few % points jump to Bazzite or some other linux gaming-focussed distro.
by eru | 2025-08-12 02:47:00+00:00
No. There's no mutation happening.

Of course, a compiler might do whatever shenanigans it has to do. But that's an implementation detail and doesn't change how the language works.

(And let's not pretend that CPUs execute something that resembles an imperative language like C under the hood. That might have been true during the PDP11 or a VAX days. These days with out-of-order execution, pipelining etc what's actually happening doesn't really resemble one-after-another imperative code much.)
by wk_end | 2025-08-12 02:47:15+00:00
I very strongly do suspect that the author(s?) isn't a native English speaker; based on the particular grammatical errors, like slip-ups around the definite article, "Russian hacker" was an educated guess and not pulled out of an RNG. The issues with the writing go beyond spelling and grammar, though - things like maintaining a consistent voice (i.e. not switching between "I" and "we") are fumbled.

I think that's somewhat beside the point, or perhaps reinforces my point: as someone who's known many journalists in my time, professional journalists understand the importance of good writing, and thus inevitably come to understand the importance of good editing. I can go onto foreign news sites based in just about any country in the world - Al Jazeera, YNet, RFI, NHK, RT, Reuters, The Pyongyang Times - and find English articles written by non-native English speakers that aren't sloppy in the way this is, because they're professional outfits that ensure through rigorous editing that the quality of their writing matches the seriousness with which they pursue journalism. Any journalist worth their salt with a big scoop would want to ensure the way it was communicated in words came across as legitimate.

Hell, this isn't even just a journalism thing. I can log onto JSTOR and read papers in English written by scholars all over the world who aren't native English speakers and who aren't even supposed to be professional writers, and the quality of the writing will still be better 95 times out of 100. It's about professionalism, and like I said in my other comment, they're just obviously not professionals in any sense of the word. It's amateur.
by leptons | 2025-08-12 02:47:38+00:00
"Chrome dominance" isn't my concern, and it isn't the problem with Apple.

The problem is Apple is intentionally hobbling their web browser and forcing every other browser maker to use it, which prevents web applications that use any kind of hardware API from functioning on iOS - the only alternative being making a native app for iOS where Apple can charge a significant amount for any purchases made through the native app. Web applications threaten Apple's greed, so they forbid any other browser maker from using anything but Safari on their platform.

Microsoft got sued in an antitrust and lost just because they bundled IE with Windows - not for forbidding any other browser on the platform like Apple has been doing, which is way worse IMHO. And that's one of many reasons the DOJ is suing Apple for abusive business practices.
by patrickscoleman | 2025-08-12 02:47:58+00:00
Came here to say this, thanks.

Only thing to add is that I like the "inbox" feature in Todoist (plus a single catchall project). I get overeager during the day and add a bunch of stuff. The inbox makes it easy for me to mostly just remove things I won't actually do but then file away the stuff I might for later.

I've put weekly chores into a single recurring task and do them on Sundays or kick back another day or two (or just skip) if I'm busy.
by archargelod | 2025-08-12 02:48:12+00:00
I came to the same conclusion - nothing beats a simple text file.

But I've also built a simple chooser program for multiple todo files and notes. A very simple cli program that does basic fuzzy search over file names.

For example, I can type `mem mov` to open a `movies.note` file in notes directory. If I use a full name with `.note` extension and it doesn't exist - it will create a new note with that name and open it in editor immediately. It makes it easy to create new notes on the fly and open them in a few keystrokes.

For editing I use neovim with auto-save enabled, so I can keep editor open all the time without forgetting to save.
by softwaredoug | 2025-08-12 02:48:17+00:00
In practice - so far - the facts on the ground don’t seem to look like a takeover. More like “more resources for local cops from feds”.

Which I’m not saying is good, but we should separate the bluster from the reality.

From this article

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/11/trump-dc-...

On national guard, 200 people at a time focused on administrative work:

> U.S. Army spokesman Col. Dave Butler said that most National Guard troops live locally and that the idea is to deploy them in shifts of 200 soldiers each to provide a round-the-clock presence.

> The troops for now will be focused on providing logistical and administrative support to free up D.C. police officers, similar to their support role at the southern U.S. border.

And they basically don’t want to actually run the police dept:

> Trump named Terry Cole, the head of the DEA, as interim commissioner of the D.C. police. Cole told Police Chief Pamela A. Smith on Monday evening that the federal team is hoping for the Metropolitan Police Department to lead the effort,

> Cole described Trump’s takeover of the department as more of a collaboration, and he stressed that officials would meet and work together to figure out where to deploy resources, the official said.

Basically they’re putting bodies out there so DC can put more local cops in the streets. And they really don’t know how to run anything when it comes to policing DC. How would they? They need the local cops to actually understand the issues.

Not saying any of this is good. But wanted to add this context.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-08-12 02:48:27+00:00
IANAL, but international law precedent has allowed countries to prosecute web services for providing services to a country where that service is illegal. A French NGO successfully sued Yahoo! for selling Nazi memorabilia, a crime in France, despite Yahoo! being a US company [0], and this was upheld by US courts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LICRA_v._Yahoo!
by anonym29 | 2025-08-12 02:48:53+00:00
Not the person you're asking, but I'm of the impression that colloquially, the verb "sex" includes more than strictly the traditional historical definition. I'll refrain from getting into specific details here, but I think the answer to this question is that many people use words in a manner that diverges from literal definitions.

There's a concept in linguistics that language is constantly evolving. As someone on the spectrum myself, with a tendency towards systemizing the world around me, I understand how frustrating this can feel. A particularly excruciating example is the transition of the intended meaning of "literally" to increasingly mean "figuratively", particularly in social contexts. Makes me want to tear the skin off my face, lol.

While this isn't strictly relegated to social concepts, I understand how frustrating it can be to struggle to navigate this phenomenon in social contexts and be misinterpreted as a bad faith actor.

At the end of the day, I try to deal with it by accepting that not everyone else experiences the world the way I do, and that it's as unfair for me to expect everyone else to modify the way they perceive, process, and utilize information (including language) to accommodate my idiosyncrasies.
by eloisius | 2025-08-12 02:49:24+00:00
12-year-old me wasn’t putting my tech skills to good use enough to pay $5 every time I sat down at the computer. I was making things though, and the internet was full of tutorials, chat rooms, and other people you could learn from. I think it would be sad if the same curious kid today was told “just pay $5 and ask Claude” when pestering someone in IRC about how to write a guestbook in Perl.
by eru | 2025-08-12 02:50:05+00:00
I prefer recursion over loops. But even more I prefer abstracting away the recursion into combinators.

One of my favourite combinators is matrix multiplication. You define what 'addition' and 'multiplication' mean in your case, and all of a sudden you get an algorithm that computes shortest paths in a graph or does regex matching. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9751987

But for more bread and butter cases, there's 'map' over various data structures, and 'reduce' and traversals of trees etc.
by rayiner | 2025-08-12 02:50:23+00:00
> Is it though? Not passing judgement either way, but the most common economic rationale for immigration generally seems to be that it's a source of cheap labor.

If you have cheap labor who draw more in public services than they pay in taxes, then you're using tax dollars to effectively subsidize private profits. Maybe that's the unstated rationale, but few proponents of immigration would say that out loud.
by andsoitis | 2025-08-12 02:51:59+00:00
> So how does that compare in economic impact to spending it? I can help with that: it doesn't. If I buy stock, it doesn't create demand for... Anything.

1) Many of the super wealthy have the shares because they created the company and get awarded stock each year as compensation. Of the 10 richest people on the planet (in order: Musk, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Page, Huang, Brin, Balmer, Arnault & Family) 8 or 9 of them were the primary founder or co-founder.

2) Even if they didn't, then it is worth knowing that trading shares benefits the economy in several interconnected ways; some direct, some more subtle: Efficient Capital Allocation, Liquidity and Confidence, Price discovery, Risk transfer, Wealth effects, Global capital flow. Or in short: Trading shares doesn’t just “move money around” — it helps connect savers with businesses, keeps capital moving toward productive uses, and makes the whole investment process safer and more flexible.