MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lmm | 2025-08-21 07:14:13+00:00
I've had thoughts along this line for a while. I think Scala does better than this article gives credit for; case classes are a significant step in the right direction, particularly post-Scala 3 (or with Shapeless in Scala 2) where you have many tools available to treat them as records, and you can distinguish practically between case classes (values) and objects with identity even if in theory they're only syntax sugar. It also offers an Erlang-style actor system if you want one.

In my dream language I'd push this further; case classes should not offer any object identity APIs (essentially the whole of java.lang.Object) and not be allowed to contain non-value classes or mutable fields, and maybe objects should be a bit more decoupled from their state. But for now I wouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good.
by bkolobara | 2025-08-21 07:14:53+00:00
I have been working on the PR implementation for lubeno[1] and have been thinking a lot about the code review process.

A big issue is that every team has a slightly different workflow, with different rules and requirements. The way GitHub is structured is a result of how the GitHub team works. They built the best tool for themselves with their "just keep appending commits to a PR" workflow.

Either you need to have enough flexibility so that the tool can be adapted to everyone's existing workflow. Or you need to be opinionated about your workflow (GitHub) and force everyone to match it in some way. And in most cases this works very well, because people just want you to tell them the best way of doing things and not spend time figuring out what the best workflow would look like.

[1]: https://lubeno.dev
by namrog84 | 2025-08-21 07:16:16+00:00
I'm no ai expert so consider my opinion having little value besides casual user. But I really like this. It seems clever and easy for me to grasp some pros for this approach.

I could envision a bunch of use cases about this workikg well. Ive personally encounter scenadios where sometimes the ai gets hung up on irrelevant outdated fact. But could still look up if specifically needed.

I could see even an automated short summary of all history that is outdated being updated in the vector db from this too. So not all context is lost.

Keep up the great work!
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-08-21 07:16:58+00:00
> 99.99% of the code in that B2B SaaS for finding the cheapest industrial shipping option isn't novel.

That's like saying 99.99% of the food people eat consists of protein, carbohydrates, fats, and/or vegetables and therefore isn't novel. The implication being a McDonald's Big Mac and fries is the same as a spinach salad.

The only way someone could believe all food is the same as a Big Mac and fries is if this is all they ate and knew nothing else.

Hyperbole never ends well and neither does assuming novelty requires rarity or uniqueness, as distinct combinations of programmatic operations which deliver value in a problem domain is the very definition "new in an interesting way."

Just like how Thai noodles have proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and/or vegetables, yet are nothing like a Big Mac and fries.
by ojosilva | 2025-08-21 07:17:19+00:00
Beware that face detection may not be an issue under BIPA if it's not storing biometric markers [1], only a hash. As an engineer, and concerned citizen, I'd say that's a thin line as far as privacy protections go, but apparently the law disagrees and face detection tech suppliers are well-aware on how to monetize on the discrepancy [2]

In any case, the plaintiff will most likely be able to take the case to discovery.

[1] https://lewisbrisbois.com/newsroom/legal-alerts/2024-bipa-de...

[2] https://alcatraz.ai/blog/face-authentication-vs-face-recogni...
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-08-21 07:17:20+00:00
> It's very easy to completely disable iCloud.

My experience widely differs.

Apple will nag you all the time if you don’t have iCloud or just use the free tier and the free tier is very limited. You lose the only way to actually easily sync the phone when you disable it.

Most of the iPhone owners I know including me have caved and pay the additional tax every month.
by vallettea | 2025-08-21 07:17:30+00:00
alex vallette here (cofounder and ceo): shipping in the usa will resume in september. we had to suspend because of tarifs but now we have a warehouse on the east coast so things should be much more optimized as the tariffs will apply only on cost of goods ans not on the consumer price. subscribe to the newsletter to stay tune (we only send one mail every two weeks)
by motorest | 2025-08-21 07:20:02+00:00
> It always seems as if the code review is the only time when all stakeholders really gets involved and starts thinking about a change.

That is a problem with your organization, not with Git or any version control system. PRs are orthogonal to it.

If you drop by a PR without being aware of the ticket that made the PR happen and the whole discussion and decision process that led to the creation of said tickets, you are out of the loop.

Your complain is like a book publisher complaining that the printing process is flawed because seeing the printed book coming out of the production line is the only time when all stakeholders really get involved. Only if you work in a dysfunctional company.
by masa_norry | 2025-08-21 07:20:17+00:00
Hey HN,

I wanted to practice English/Japanese more, but every time I tried a language exchange app I fell into the same loop:

1. Ghosting before we ever met 2. Endless "hi" messages that never go anywhere 3. Time zone confusion making it impossible to meet

As an experiment, I started just sharing my google calendar directly with my language partners. It worked well and we actually met without much texting.

That's why I made it. This app is free-time sharing app for language partners who actually want to meet.

Would love to hear your thoughts or feedback.
by theshrike79 | 2025-08-21 07:20:24+00:00
The point in these models isn't to have all the knowledge in the world available.

It's to understand enough of language to figure out which tools to call.

"What's my agenda for today" -> get more context

cal = getCalendar() getWeather(user.location()) getTraffic(user.location(), cal[0].location)

etc.

Then grab the return values from those and output:

"You've got a 9am meeting in Foobar, the traffic is normal and it looks like it's going to rain after the meeting."

Not rocket science and not something you'd want to feed to a VC-powered energy-hogging LLM when you can literally run it in your pocket.
by DantesKite | 2025-08-21 07:22:21+00:00
Highly recommend MovieLens if you have eclectic or niche movie tastes. It can be a bit of a nerd-snipe though. One of my favorites activities is rating movies and watching the recommended ratings (what rating it thinks I'll give a movie) update overnight.

It's at the very least, better than average chance at predicting which movies you will like.
by atoav | 2025-08-21 07:22:47+00:00
That isn't an accurate summary of what the article says. The part you mentioned is telling about early manegerial sciences trying to fix workplace issues that arose during industrialization. The article itself doesn't offer any stance towards whether that was a good or a bad thing, which it would need to do if it "complains", as you said.

The article is mainly a nuanced perspective on DBT (Dialectic Behavioral Theory) and it focuses on the conundrum of patients finding themselves between finding value in their identity as an victim, the consequenxes it has for them and the condition which contributed to that trauma that remain unaddressed if they do just that:

> People often share a manifesto called the “Emotional Distress Bill of Rights” (subtitled “#RightToBeSuffering”). “I should not be held so personally responsible to take actions to be better,” it says. “Others (and systems) should be held far more accountable for better treatment of me.”

Imagine you live in an ancient society where cannibalism exist. If cannibals tried to eat you and you have a trauma of surviving that, you could go at the problem in two ways: (1) Blame a society that allows cannibalism to exist and try to reshape said society or (2) Focus on yourself and figure out how to move on from the trauma, how to deal with the consequences of said trauma and so on.

Doing the latter without changing the circumstances that lead you becoming victimized can feel like you become complicit in perpetuating the problem (in our example cannibalism).

This, other than the retelling of the origin story of that form of therapy, is probably the main point this article makes.
by thinkingemote | 2025-08-21 07:23:29+00:00
https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/taxis-and-minicabs/taxi-fares/tarif...

Taxis charge by distance or by time whichever is reached first.

It might be that the distance is more of a factor than time or the other way around, or it could be that the rules just say that shortest is best as that's usually the quickest (in the days before traffic).
by TZubiri | 2025-08-21 07:23:48+00:00
I remember that LiteCoin briefly had this idea, to be easy on consumer hardware but hard on GPUs. The ASICs didn't take long to obliterate the idea though.

Maybe there's going to be some form of pay per browse system? even if it's some negligible cost on the order of 1$ per month (and packaged with other costs), I think economies of scale would allow servers to perform a lifetime of S24 captchas in a couple of seconds.
by wink | 2025-08-21 07:24:56+00:00
This actually took a while to grasp the concept of. Where I'm living (so far from the coast that it might as well be landlocked) it took a while of eyeballing on a map, but I did find one angle where it's not kinda common sense where I would land. I suppose this is a lot more fun if you live near the coast and the answer is not completely obvious to anyone who knows the neighboring countries.
by demaga | 2025-08-21 07:26:05+00:00
I couldn't find anything about this 24% figure.

There was a PISA report from 2022 though, that showed 19% of Danish 15-year-olds are below 'Level 2 reading'. But this bar is considerably higher than 'understand a simple text'.

> Some 81% of students in Denmark attained Level 2 or higher in reading (OECD average: 74%). At a minimum, these students can identify the main idea in a text of moderate length, find information based on explicit, though sometimes complex criteria, and can reflect on the purpose and form of texts when explicitly directed to do so. The share of 15-year-old students who attained minimum levels of proficiency in reading (Level 2 or higher) varied from 89% in Singapore to 8% in Cambodia.

So yeah, I doubt that claim. Journalism at its best, as always
by pirocks | 2025-08-21 07:26:33+00:00
My sibling comment has a lot of good info, but to answer your question for ddr5, SK Hynix makes the ram capable of the highest frequencies/best timings, Samsung is second and micron is third. At least this was true when ddr5 initially came out, these things could change. Its also worth mentioning that manufactures can have different grades/product lines so there is variation within a manufacturer to. My perception is that Micron and Samsung are cheaper than SK Hynix, though idk what wholesale prices actually look like.
by zer0zzz | 2025-08-21 07:26:50+00:00
I can empathize. I have some similar rules:

- if an app won’t sign up without a phone number I don’t use it anymore

- if a product is single purpose, and isn’t a phone or some jogging tracker or a set top box I don’t buy it

- if a product requires me to sign into a service for it to do anything, I don’t buy it
Ask HN: How is your company dealing with the proliferation of AI tools?
by bradhe | 2025-08-21 07:26:52+00:00
Engineers today need subscriptions to 2 or 3 different tools to do their job. How do does your company manage this? Do they give them as a benefit, are you on your own to pay for them? Is there some kind of limit? Just thought it’d be an interesting discussion as I weigh what to do with my company ;)
by jones89176 | 2025-08-21 07:26:58+00:00
my family takes care of a large-ish forest, so I have to help since my early teens. Let me tell you: think twice, it's f*ckin dangerous. Chainsaws, winches, heavy trees falling and breaking in unpredictable ways. I had a couple of close calls myself. Recently a guy from a neighbor village was squashed to death by a root plate that tilted.

I often think about quitting tech myself, but becoming a full-time lumberjack is certainly not an alternative for me.
by donavanm | 2025-08-21 07:27:03+00:00
The original private endpoints implementation required meaningful work from the service teams (ec2 networking, s3, & ddb). It also changed how the "front end" API servers handled requests and how their infrastructure was deployed (at the time?). The newer LB/ENI style privatelink abstracts away _most_ of that "per service" implementation effort at the cost of more per-request/connection work fromthe virtual network. Hence why theres more support from other services, and it includes a cost.
by 3036e4 | 2025-08-21 07:27:16+00:00
I was an undergraduate (computer) engineer student, but like many of my friends at that time (dot-com boom) I did not graduate since it was too tempting to get a job and get well paid instead.

However many, probably half, that I work with, and most that I worked with overall for the last 25+ years (since after I dropped out) have an engineering degree. Especially the younger ones, since this century it has been more focus on getting a degree and fewer seems to drop out early to get a job like many of us did in my days.

So when American employers insist on giving me titles like "software engineer" I cringe. It's embarrassing really, since I am surrounded by so many that have a real engineering degree, and I don't. It's like if I dropped out of medical school and then people started calling me "doctor" even if I wasn't one, legally. It would be amazing if we could find a better word so that non-engineers like me are not confused with the legally real engineers.
by moomoo11 | 2025-08-21 07:27:25+00:00
Don’t you think it’s selfish when a small minority of people hold on to some fading ideals in a world where people are genuinely better off with more efficiency?

Like imagine being in the era when electricity was becoming more prevalent and I’m sure some people were complaining about some ideal then as well.

That said I do agree that self checkouts should not be using methods beyond what’s reasonably necessary.
by rapnie | 2025-08-21 07:27:49+00:00
Same. And indeed a losing battle. Society is being dehumanized, and humans embrace this trend. Maybe it is because it is a means to face away of all the big challenges humanity faces. Being social in complex society requires skill and effort, causes stress. Facing life challenges, and the doom and gloom. The easy way is to flee that, to extract oneself, and technology is bliss here.
by wolvesechoes | 2025-08-21 07:27:54+00:00
Personally I don't need to talk with "traditional" engineers to have an opinion there, as I am mechanical engineer that currently deals mostly with software, but still in the context of "traditional" engineering (models and simulation, controls design).

Definitely making software can be engineering, most of the time it is not, not because of the nature of software, but the characteristics of the industry and culture that surrounds it, and argument in this article is not convincing (15 not very random engineers is not that much to support the argument from "family resemblance").
by goyagoji | 2025-08-21 07:27:55+00:00
> Or in the case of my OnePlus, their updates added so much of their own shit to a once pure OS

Same situation on preinstalled laptops and Android. You are complaining about Google in relation to Microsoft.

Android One was a correction to how their system should work and it wouldn't help their goals to sell $100 phones that are secure, all an older adult would typically want, not particularly engaging for marketers, competing with their flagship phones for people who will pay and accept any quality in pointless toys.

Even their own A series has been a problem for them since it covers what any reasonable person would want (in a flagship eliminating way). So let's restrict the charging bellow the lowest industry standards, etc.
by alexmrv | 2025-08-21 07:28:19+00:00
Super simplistic example, but say i mention my Daughter, who is 9.

Then mention she is 10,

a few years later she is 12 but now i call her by her name.

I have struggled to get any of the RAG approaches to handle this effectively. It is also 3 entries, but 2 of them are no longer useful, they are nothing but noise in the system.
by gambiting | 2025-08-21 07:28:54+00:00
>>I see people fussing with unlocking their phones to pay for lunch and I am totally bewildered.

How are people "fussing with unlocking their phones" to pay though? It literally couldn't be any easier - I pull it out, touch the screen on the fingerprint sensor to unlock it and tap on the terminal, done. It's about 200x easier than pulling the card out of my wallet, and the card can only be used for contactless up to a certain amount, and half the time it randomly asks me for my pin anyway so the whole benefit of contactless is lost. Paying with your phone is a massive improvement to convenience.

>> When my laptop gives me the first sign of trouble I just buy a new one.

I mean I hope you recognize the incredible priviledge behind that statement - for a lot of people tinkering with their laptop isn't about being a hobby IT person, it's about the fact that a new laptop costs half their salary so it's quite literally not an option.

>> life is too short to spend my Saturday morning messing with HomeAssistant.

Sure but you make it sound like it's a chore - most people(I'd guess) set up HA because it provides value in their lives, that other, more simpler devices cannot provide. So at the cost of X number of hours once a year you get a device that consolidates all of your home automation and data. If you could buy a premade device that did it without fuss - I'm sure a lot of people would.
by username332211 | 2025-08-21 07:29:14+00:00
All this is true, but also somewhat irrelevant. In reality the amount of actual hash work is completely negligible.

For usability reasons Anubus only requires that you to go trough a the proof of work flow only once in a given period. (I think the default is once per week.) That's just very little work.

Detecting you need to occasionally send a request trough a headless browser far more of a hassle than the PoW. If you prefer LLMs rather than normal internet search, it'll probably consume far more compute as well.
by xg15 | 2025-08-21 07:29:26+00:00
I wrote a toy program once, in which an agent should navigate on its own through a 2D platformer environment. Jump over obstacles/holes, climb stairs, etc.

The idea was that the agent would first receive a goal like "go to tile (15, 28)", then use Dijkstra's algorithm to create a "movement plan" - like "move 2 tiles to the right, trigger a jump, move 3 tiles to the left while in the air", etc - and then execute that plan.

My main takeaway was that even in this small toy world, with clearly defined goals, very simple, deterministic "physics", complete information and an "executor" that is 100% reliable and never gets tired or distracted, it didn't work.

The simplified assumptions about the "physics" in the plan-making stage didn't match how the environment actually behaved, and the agent ended up in a different place than planned after a small number of steps.

What worked was to only execute the first few steps of the plan, then throw the rest away and make a new plan from the new location, then repeat, etc etc.

If this stuff didn't even work in a toy world, with a computer, I can't imagine that making detailed steps for a 5 year period in the real world would work, with the planner having even less knowledge about the world to base their plan on.
by moomoo11 | 2025-08-21 07:29:39+00:00
Why would I want to wait in line for 5 minutes, when I could be on my way?

Life goes by fast. I’d rather spend those small minutes lost with my loved ones or back to doing things I enjoy more. Over my lifetime that’s a lot of time.

I only shop in person at Whole Foods because it’s two blocks away. Every Tuesday they have some nice discounts and it’s fun to walk the aisles. Otherwise I just deliver groceries from Costco every 2 weeks or my Amazon prime subscriptions.

Why continue purposefully at a disadvantage? Makes no sense.
by Cordiali | 2025-08-21 07:30:57+00:00
Well... I'm not sure which bog body it was, there were a few!

It might've been the 'Haraldskær Woman', I found an article [1] about her which roughly matches my recollections, and is from around the same time I would've seen the documentary. Although she might've only travelled as far as central Germany.

[1]: https://journals.openedition.org/archeosciences/4407
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-21 07:31:10+00:00
Agreed but if you're trapped in a war zone, time is one thing you have. And equipment for FT8 is simple to build yourself. It's also very difficult to trace. And you can take up some fields used for other stuff and convert them to data (like the sender). This would be illegal on amateur bands since it's required to identify oneself but again in a war situation this is less relevant since any covert communication will probably be forbidden anyway.

You do need a time source though. GPS is generally used for that but it doesn't need to be extremely accurate with FT-8 like with some other protocols.

I would imagine using it for a regular "I'm ok" message for the home front in such a situation using pre-arranged contents.
by JimDabell | 2025-08-21 07:31:18+00:00
> Anubis is a better experience than all those pesky CAPTCHAs (I am bored of trying to recognize bikes, pedestrian crossings, buses, hydrants).

Most CAPTCHAs are invisible these days, and Anubis is worse than them. Also, CAPTCHAs are not normally deployed just for visiting a site, they are mostly used when you want to submit something.
by bigiain | 2025-08-21 07:32:08+00:00
I kinda hate the idea of all that.

But I can see it "working". At least for the values of "working" that would be "good enough" for a large portion of the production code I've written or overseen in my 30+ year career.

Some code pretty much outlasts all expectations because it just works. I had a Perl script I wrote in around 1995-1998 that ran from cron and sent email to my personal account. I quit that job, but the server running it got migrated to virtual machines and didn't stop sending me email until about 2017 - at least three sales or corporate takeovers later (It was _probably_ running on CentOS4 when I last touched it in around 2005, I'd love to know if it was just turned into a VM and running as part of critical infrastructure on CentOS4 12 years later).

But most code only lasts as long as the idea or the money or the people behind the idea last - all the website and differently skinned CRUD apps I built or managed rarely lasted 5 years without being either shut down or rewritten from the ground up by new developers or leadership in whatever the Resume Driven Development language or framework was at the time - toss out the Perl and rewrite it in Python, toss out the Python and rewrite it in Ruby On Rails, then decide we need Enterprise Java to post about on LinkedIn, then rewrite that in Nodejs, now toss out the Node and use Go or Rust. I'm reasonably sure this year's or perhaps next years LLM coding tools can do a better job of those rewrites than the people who actually did them...
by leokennis | 2025-08-21 07:32:25+00:00
Regarding the second point, while I gladly agree the current iOS Photos app is a mess, doesn't it make sense to have photos in multiple albums? If I went on holiday to Brazil and made a nice photo of my son there, I'd like that photo to be in both the "Brazil holiday" and "Beautiful photos of my children" albums, not just in one folder.