MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-08-18 01:23:55+00:00
Are you implying people are intentionally making less than $217 a week after taxes to avoid student debt payments?

That seems like a losing strategy, like shooting yourself in the face to save your foot.

I mean, there's millions of people with student debt - there's bound to be a few edge cases, but that really isn't relevant.

Are you also implying that it's non-edge case to say, oh, I'll just not pay my student loans and then leave my country?

Why would that be any more an option than people doing that for credit card debt?

I mean, sure, there's some very small percentage in some table factored into the interest rate.

Everyone else is either paying or getting their wages garnished (unless something in the future changes).
by bluGill | 2025-08-18 01:24:15+00:00
My only problem with rst is that several useful the extentions are not updated. I have some great rst documentation, but part of that is I importing doxygen, dolphin, and other extentions that are useful but saddly not updated on the same schedule as the main tool. I end up many versions back just because it is all that is compatible.

still markdown just isn't powerful enough for anything non trivial.
by k310 | 2025-08-18 01:24:28+00:00
Coding is meant to solve problems. And AI doesn’t know Jack about humans, only the breadcrumbs they leave on the internet. (Opinion)

One idea is to pose problems at a high level and ask how one would solve them.

A reference is Strategies forCreative Problem Solving, by Fogler and LeBlanc

I recall an early day at work when I called the boss that I would be in late, running some numbers on the home computer (in Basic). They were tradeoffs using various ranges of variables. The alternative was the IBM 360, fat chance. He looked a bit angry when I sauntered in, but when I showed him the printout, he realized that I had done about a week’s worth of work. Basic is out the window now, but the point is to go from a problem to proposed solutions (TMTOWTDI) [0] and there may be more than one way. In fact, that might lead to a globally better solution than some local peak and certainly more instructive, as in proofs of Pythagoras’ Theorem.

Through successive narrowing down, one finally gets to what AI does “best”, boilerplate, and by isolating its output, one can actually test the result with a smaller range of inputs.

Okay, I am not, nor was I a professional coder. More a scripter and admin, tasked with solving problems in the quickest way. Perl did most of the heavy lifting. So, I am not griping on pro’s.

The main thing I liked about perl, and groovy and python, which I didn’t need to use, was the existence of tested libraries. So, with groovy, I could access all the java libraries. No doubt the same for others. I have no idea how to impress this on others, since I think it’s way more trustworthy than black-box code, but I do recommend it. To what extent AI is going to reinvent the wheel on every coding request from it’s giant parts bin, I don’t know.

I believe that the value is in translating problems and needs into potential solutions and finding or choosing a “best” one. Code blocks are a dime a dozen, or perhaps better put, 45+ cents a kilowatt. (In CA). It’s how you string them together that makes all the difference. A wheel for climbing stairs may be three-lobed or even legged [1].

A beginner is going to get no insight from black box output, IMO. More from documented examples and libraries. I learned a ton about perl from the rdb relational database by Hobbs, [2], reading through it and learning what was going on and how. It was open source, and has moved to github.

Of course, you might suggest something newer than all of the above, but start simple, of course.

I liked things like map() and such, as an alternative to looping, but that may be on the advanced side.

[0] There’s More Than One Way To Do It

https://perl.fandom.com/wiki/TIMTOWTDI

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/15/11/2071

[2] https://github.com/ironsmith58/RDB
by technick | 2025-08-18 01:26:14+00:00
Hiding your license plate will almost always be considered an offense, but is it one cops actively care about? Luckily in my state I vary rarely see cops on the road making my risk much lower. In the case of getting pulled over, its a $75 dollar fee in Colorado that I am happy to pay, it won't change my behavior.

You can also leave your cell phone at home. Disable anything broadcasting from your vehicle, like bluetooth, wifi, and onboard cell connectivity for telematics. Remove the RFID chips on your car rims (assuming you have a recent model vehicle). Remove TPM sensors from your wheels (A lot of them have part of your vehicle VIN in the packets). Tint your car windows... and remove anything that is unique, like stickers off your vehicle. Partially are completely block your license plate from being read by ALPR's.

Do all of those and you're not as trackable as you are not doing them today.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-18 01:27:23+00:00
We go the road of the UK. At some point the billionaires finish their ransacking and all flee the US. GDP plummets, we hit a depression. We recover but pretty much lose the de facto superpower status.

Things keep creeping on but the struggle is real. And then we go the Germany route (again). We have the second coming of Donald Trump voted in promising to bring prosperity, but this one isn't just satisified with stroking his ego. So we initiate WWIII.

Depending on how that escalates or not is well beyond my abilities to guess. We could end up with a mass extinction that ends this era of civilization, we could be taken over by the rest of the world and have land diverted to various parts of the EU and Asia.
Show HN: I invented a new type of crossword with partially obscured clues
by laffcollie | 2025-08-18 01:27:56+00:00
Hi HN! Solo dev here.

The mechanic: If the answer is BREAK, I remove all B,R,E,A,K letters from the clue "Rest period" → "□□st p□□iod"... creates a cool back-and-forth dynamic between clue and answer. The answers words go on to create a phrase referred to by the cryptic title of each puzzle.

Built this in 4 weeks with React/TypeScript. Launched 3 days ago, now have 36 players across 15 countries.

Today I added a cricket-themed puzzle targeting India (every word has double meaning - cricket AND romance).

Technical details: - 4300-line React component (yes, needs refactoring) - Zero-downtime blue-green deployments - PWA with offline support - localStorage for game state

Biggest challenge: The mechanic isn't immediately intuitive. Working on a video tutorial.

Would love feedback on the concept and UX. Just deployed a major improvement showing answer patterns below clues based on Reddit feedback.

Free, no ads, just wanted to see if this idea resonates.
by bsder | 2025-08-18 01:28:16+00:00
> In business, it is said that one ought to focus on core competencies and let other companies handle the rest.

In contrast, "Maximally efficient is minimally robust."

Something that business intelligentsia propagates should be given extra scrutiny. Why should you assume that statement about core competencies is correct, a priori? We have lots of evidence that statement isn't true in general. And we have mountains of evidence that such statements tend to be more incorrect the longer a time horizon you account for.

Vertically integrated businesses aren't rare. Everybody loves being a fabless chip company--until an earthquake or a pandemic hits. Designing chips was not a core competency for Apple--until it was and suddenly you have the M1. GE outsourced water heater manufacturing and lost their core competency to design them. etc.
by Aeolun | 2025-08-18 01:28:51+00:00
I think there’s only a very small subset of fiction that uses the prose to that extent. Much like code really. If you are writing original algorithms you cannot use the LLM. If you are just remixing existing ones, it becomes a lot more useful.

Also, I guess I missed the brunt of your question, though the answer is similar. Most voice works for most characters. There’s only so many ways to say something, but occassionally you have to adjust the sentence or re-prompt the whole thing (the LLM has a tendency to see the best in characters).
by Jensson | 2025-08-18 01:29:01+00:00
> A very simple example for height[1]: The Japanese grew 10 cm taller from mid-20th century to early 2000s. Originally people thought that the shortness of the Japanese was related to their genetics, but this rapid growth (which also correlates with their improved economy) suggests that the group difference between Japanese and other groups was not related to the genetic component of height variance.

Every group grew taller as they got richer, but Japanese people are still short even today when they are rich. So existence of other factors doesn't rule out the genetic factor.
by dgunay | 2025-08-18 01:29:01+00:00
Here's my personal workflow. I've built a relatively small (<5k LoC Go) CLI to facilitate it. Mostly vibe coded in a dogfooded fashion.

When I want to start an agent, I run a small command that takes in a prompt (and some optional flags but mostly the defaults are what I want). It does this: 1. Check out a worktree from a repo (defaults to my bread and butter repo with completions for the most active ~5 repos in my org) 2. Craft a command to launch an agent (supports codex, opencode, and gemini-cli because my company only gives us OpenAI keys). 3. Launch the command in a tmux session. 4. Exit 0.

There are some light integrations with Jira, GitHub, etc but they're accomplished by shelling out to other tools.

If I want to manage sessions, I've got tmux + fzf + other unixy tools old & new to manage them.

If I want to manage sessions remotely, there is vibetunnel. It would be cool to have a slicker AFK experience, but it works.

My silly little piece of vibe coded slop and duct tape, for my use case, is largely competitive with most of the offerings on the market, outside of the ones that do cloud-based environments. Some of these projects are VC funded teams of people working full time, I'm assuming. What a time to be alive.

I'm also amazed at how readily projects like this just embrace Claude Code lock-in. Is there really anything specific about it that other agent harnesses don't support? I haven't used it yet, but so far it just seems like it benefits in mindshare alone from being the default/first mover, not because it supports any particular feature the others do not. TBF I do hear that it is quite good.

Quality & polish is a compelling reason to _use_ something, but it's not a compelling reason to build walls IMO, especially in a space like this where context engineering techniques, prompts, etc are in no way secret sauce and can be readily copied.
by therealpygon | 2025-08-18 01:29:24+00:00
Pi is a placeholder that attempts to describe something indescribable; and yet, it is the best way we can describe something infinite in a finite way. You are definitely correct that our number system could be anything else because it is arbitrary. In a base-pi number system, the ratio would be 1, not 10.

The Planck scale is not a limit on the universe, it is where the mathematics we use to describe the universe break down. Again, it is infinite complexity attempting to be described with a finite system. Math does not prevent a smaller time segment from existing in the universe…

As for the unknown, sorry my friend but this also is incorrect. There is a significant amount about the universe that is still unknown, including whether singularities even exist.

Regarding GPT, that may have been the intention, but it doesn’t necessarily look like that in effect. If that were the case, I wouldn’t be able to tell you it was. I’m not one of those silly GPT haters. I don’t have a problem with the use of GPT, it was simply the humor in the juxtaposition of the claim that humans are infinitely more creative than LLMs, while using LLMs to aid in creative writing for a short format blog post. Nothing more.
by classichasclass | 2025-08-18 01:29:50+00:00
I don't know the internals of BBC BASIC, but many Microsoft-derived BASICs do keep track of the current location in the program text with self-modifying code; the routine is copied to a reserved portion of zero page on 6502 machines for speed. On the C64 this routine lives at $0073 and the pointer is at $007a. Because it's in RAM, this makes it a popular location for wedging in additional behaviour or commands (hence the term "wedge" for such extensions). On some systems like the PET, this was the only way to accomplish it.
by duxup | 2025-08-18 01:30:57+00:00
>Lots of our spending was driven by trying to keep up with our friends—not just the real ones, but also the parasocial ones we follow online. Social-media influencers seem to be just like us, only one step and hundreds of thousands of dollars ahead. “The essence of influencer culture is a kind of low-grade gaslighting about what is possible and what is attainable,”

I wonder about this aspect. I get a lot of ads that seem to feature influencers or people looking like infuencers who seem to be pushing the most run of the mill goods, a nondescript hoodie or such.

These folks seem to be selling a lifestyle or identity folks aspire to ... by apparently buying a bizarrely expensive plain hoodie.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-18 01:31:09+00:00
> guess it heralded the end of white collar jobs.

There is still studies that show that graduating in 2007-2009 permantly stunted your career earnings. Those gradutes were very much screwed, statistically speaking.

Also there wasn't a narrative in 2008 about trying to automate your white collar work away. The powers that be do now want the white collar jobs to come back. It may not succeed, but it's going to create a sub-generation of people who completely lost faith in the country the reside in. That sort of population is dangerous, to say the least.

>If you actually believe this, it makes you one of the rare few who likely could actually be replaced with an LLM.

What's your interpretation then? LLM crashes and burns and Google just goes back to using humans again? Everything lives happily ever after?
by Jensson | 2025-08-18 01:32:16+00:00
Ok, so saying race doesn't exist is like saying chairs doesn't exist, since you can't really say what is a chair, what is a shelf and what is a table, correct? Technically you could say that a chair is a table or a shelf, but people still like to call them chairs, you know the difference when you see it.

Races is like that, scientists can't define it but its still a useful concept like a chair. Scientists can't exactly define what a chair is either, but its still a very useful concept and we can discuss chairs and everyone understand what we mean.
by omneity | 2025-08-18 01:32:20+00:00
Strongly seconding Roo Code. I am using it in VSCodium and it's the perfect partner for a fully local coding workflow (nearly 100% open-source too so no vendor is going to pry it from my hand, "ever").

Qwen Coder 30B is my main driver in this configuration and in my experience is quite capable. It runs at 80 tok/s on my M3 Max and I'm able to use it for about 30-50% of my coding tasks, the most menial ones. I am exploring ways to RL its approach to coding so it fits my style a bit more and it's a very exciting prospect whenever I manage to figure it out.

The missing link is autocomplete since Roo only solves the agent part. Continue.dev does a decent job at that but you really want to pair it with a high performance, large context model (so it fits multiple code sections + your recent changes + context about the repo and gives fast suggestions) and that doesn't seem feasible or enjoyable yet in a fully local setup.
by fuzztester | 2025-08-18 01:32:39+00:00
>You might be missing the joke:

really? :)

speaking of jokes, it may be you who is the joker.

to paraphrase that joke about consultants ("a consultant is a person who knows more and more about less and less, until eventually he knows everything about nothing"):

you may be the kind of person who knows the theory of everything, but the practice of nothing.

and you might be missing the rather obvious fact that I don't give a fuck about whether I miss the joke or not. I was just putting out my own comment. you see, I may be one of the few people here, who happen to have that seemingly somewhat vanishing ability of being able to think for myself, and not just echo the opinion of the hive mind, and not kowtow to arbitrary user-wannabe-moderator defined conventions, whether of hn or other places, like you seem to be doing, in your comment above. I don't have to care whether it has relevance to the context or not, particularly not when some random person like you thinks so.

and ...

as is often said on hn, the plural of anecdote is not data. that is what your comment is, just an anecdote - to me, anyway.

so do not stupidly try to impose your way of thinking upon me, which is exactly what you tried to do in your comment above.

and ...

"different strokes for different folks" - sound familiar?

and because of all the above, and much more, which everyone sensible person knows, as amy hoy has famously said - fuck hn. fuck some of the people on it anyway, because they need it, because of that asshole behavior.

qed.

which is latin for - what had to be demonstrated.
by mardifoufs | 2025-08-18 01:33:04+00:00
I guess that makes sense when you are part of the power wielding majority. but as someone who isn't, it's absolutely better for private corporations to have my data than governments. Sure, private corporations will end up giving said data to the government if required, but it's at least a step removed. And Facebook can't put me into MetaJail using MetaPrivatePolice (yet), whereas the government absolutely can.
by laffcollie | 2025-08-18 01:33:04+00:00
Quick update from monitoring today's launch metrics:

- Just saw our first player from Mumbai! Cricket puzzle might be working - The new "answer pattern" feature (showing L□□□ below clues) increased average session time by 3 minutes - Fascinating pattern: Players use an average of 8.1 hints but still complete puzzles (ultra-forgiving design working as intended)

For the curious about the tech debt: The 4300-line component started at 500 lines. Every bug fix and feature added complexity. Classic "ship first, refactor later" situation. But hey, it works!

The obscuring algorithm is actually simple: 1. Take answer letters as a Set 2. Scan clue text, replace any letter in the Set with □ 3. Remove spaces for initial presentation 4. Progressive hints restore spaces, then reveal letters

The hardest part isn't the code - it's puzzle construction. Need to ensure enough letters overlap between clue and answer, otherwise you get unsolvable puzzles.

If anyone wants to try: Puzzle #10012 (cricket themed) has helper words at 25%, making it easier. Previous puzzles were brutal with only 10% helpers.
by dismalaf | 2025-08-18 01:33:28+00:00
Nim is nice but I can't really find a use for it. Maybe it's because I started out on dynamic languages (Ruby and R) where I got used to writing in a dynamic language and then rewriting bottlenecks in C++.

Nim is in the awkward middle area where it's got a GC so it'll never replace C/C++ but it also isn't as productive as something like Ruby.
by jsight | 2025-08-18 01:33:54+00:00
I'm starting to learn that AI progress is just really hard to talk about.

On the one hand, I completely agree with you. I've even said before, here on Hacker News, that AI is underhyped compared to the real world impact that it will have.

On the other, I run into people in person that seem to think dabbing a little cursor on a project will suddenly turn everyone into 100x engineers. It just doesn't work that way at all, but good luck dealing with the hypemeisters.
by locopati | 2025-08-18 01:34:08+00:00
a portion of the US public voted for Republicans... US citizens as a whole did not want this, just a slim majority of voters, many of whom are suffering the consequences of their poor choices

not sure what you mean by "this kind of talk"... you'll get no argument from me that the Dems are either not up to the fight or all in as a false foil
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-18 01:34:14+00:00
> All those gas plants and batteries sitting around idle soon start dominating the cost structure because the price of their produced watts starts to go exponential.

When they're barely used, price per watt stops mattering. It's just a fixed cost.

If the fixed cost of an idle gas plant dominates, that's a good thing. An idle gas plant doesn't cost that much, so if the final power price is that plus 50% I'm pretty happy.

If batteries are expensive for long rare gaps then don't use batteries for those gaps. Easy.
by pushkar_aditya | 2025-08-18 01:34:20+00:00
In context of UI code generation, there are only so many ways a UI can be built. For example, everyone knows that unnecessary re renders are bad, and that in React it’s best to minimize the use of useEffect and useState whenever possible. Even today, LLMs can already generate fairly optimized UI code. And if you want an even more optimized version, you can simply add instructions in the prompt, asking it to avoid useEffect, useCallback, or useMemo and so on.... unless absolutely necessary. But of course, this kind of implementation usually comes from someone with development experience.

Now, think about a new developer who has just started coding. Let’s say they build a side project called Top Million Developers, where the app fetches data from an API and renders a Table with simple pagination on client side. They launch it on Twitter, it goes viral, and suddenly they are getting thousands of page views. Very quickly, they wll notice their site is slow or even unusable because they didn’t know that rendering a large table in React is not that straightforward. They should have used virtualization to handle it efficiently.

In today’s world, though, the same developer doesn’t need to figure this out manually. Instead, they could simply ask an LLM to generate the code, and it would most likely return an optimized version with proper virtualization and pagination built in.

That is what I mean when I say LLMs can already output optimized code not perfect but quite a optimized code by default in context if UI.
by dgunay | 2025-08-18 01:34:27+00:00
Claude may be arguably the best model, but why decide unilaterally for your users that they _have_ to use it?

If there's no particular feature that only Claude offers, this is just needless vendor lock-in. And what happens if another lab releases a model that suddenly trounces Claude at coding? Your users will leave for an app that supports the new hotness, and you won't be able to keep them because of a short-sighted architecture that cannot swap model providers.
by al_borland | 2025-08-18 01:35:00+00:00
The advertisements convince them it is something they value. Most of what people buy becomes clutter and trash almost instantly.

A lot of this stuff is being purchased with debt. People aren’t happy about their debt, their inability to buy a house, or all the clutter that consumes their home. Yet, in the moment, they are led to believe that a Labubu is what they really desire. It’s not.
by killjoywashere | 2025-08-18 01:35:23+00:00
This. As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about national security problems, it's hard to convey how badly the 1980s MBA education failed us as a country. "Greed is good." Sure, Gordon. For who? Who's greed is good for who? How about the people of the country labor for the long term wealth of the nation? How about we all work for the long term wealth of the planet?