MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by victorbjorklund | 2025-08-01 07:55:45+00:00
Honestly not sure it is easier to learn coding today than before. In theory maybe but in reality 99% of people will use AI as a crutch - half or learning is when you have to struggle a bit with something. If all the answers are always in front of you it will be harder to learn. I know it would be hard for me to learn if I could just ask for the code all the time.
by bayindirh | 2025-08-01 07:56:21+00:00
As a person who writes a lot, "seems" is the important word here.

In IT circles, computers and tablets are the most coveted tools for note taking due to processing flexibility it provides, but while less visible, writing is there, evolving.

From personal experience, writing with pen and paper unlocks a different mode in brain. Personally, I can concentrate better, think deeper and clearer, hence I work with pen and paper a lot, incl. software/architecture/algorithm design, free-form thinking while working on other things. I keep "lab notebooks" for software I develop. I also keep a hand-written diary, which again feels and affects very differently when compared to writing to a text document on screen.

There's another sub-culture who writes for the sake of writing (people generally transcribe books by hand). I don't judge them, but that's not my taste.

Some writing inks are very cheap (Pelikan 4001 / Lamy Standard / Parker / Waterman comes to my mind), but some pigments and dyes are very expensive and inks are produced in limited quantities. Companies like Noodler's produce very interesting chemistries and try to keep their costs low to provide the most ink for the buck, but they also make some exotic inks. It's not uncommon to ask a producer why an ink is not produced anymore, and getting "they don't make the dyes anymore, we got their all stock they produced for the last couple of years" as an answer.

So, tl;dr: Writing has evolved, but it's not going anywhere soon. Some of us are writing a ton, with purpose and intent. And no, some inks are not cheap, but "standard issue" inks are optimized for cost and performance, and they are very good inks, indeed.

If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer.
by kelnos | 2025-08-01 07:56:28+00:00
> Are angry homeowners overthrowing governments and blocking homebuilding?

No, they're already in the government, have been for decades, and they're the ones responsible for anti-development policy.

> For example, re Texas, 9 out of 10 say housing prices are too high

Cute punchy polls like that make for nice sound bits, but don't tell the whole story. I'm sure if you followed that up with, "If the government were to enact new housing development property that would reduce the value of your home by 20% over the next 10 years, would you support it?", I guarantee you that 9 out of 10 (homeowners) would absolutely not.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-08-01 07:59:23+00:00
This really isn't all that much if you pause to consider it. For example. Lets take the larger possible number of 7500 plus 2,300 plus the 4,550 satellites noted up to 2021. That's a total of just under 15,000 satellites. Most of those are fairly small objects, at the most about the size of a typical mini-van, with most being quite a bit smaller than that.

Now, all of this is spread over a three-dimensional topography that's much larger than the total surface area of the Earth, and because their orbits are, as mentioned, three-dimensionally occupying various altitudes, the size of the total topography they move through is enormously larger than just one single surface area in square kilometers of a single hypothetical sphere X km above the Earth's surface. In the least case, even if all existing orbital satellites were stationed at the lowest possible orbital altitude, that's still quite a bit bigger than the 509 600 000 square km of the Earth's total surface. (too lazy to calculate the specific increment in this moment)

Across all of that, just 15,000 objects that are individually smaller than your average family sedan.

For comparison, the island of Manhattan has approximately 116,000 buildings crammed into it. If you spread those more or less equi-distantly from each other across the whole of the Earth's surface, water or air, there'd still be a tremendous amount of empty space between them. That's nearly 10 times as many objects individually much larger than any human satellite, across a much smaller surface area than what's occupied by our orbital satellites.

(Yes, I know we also have a shit-load of other inert junk zipping around up there at tens of thousands of KM per hour, but even if that stuff, most of which is very tiny, were included, we're still talking about an enormous amount of empty space between objects)
by bayindirh | 2025-08-01 07:59:29+00:00
The funny thing is, many entry level pens are much more reliable and dependable some of the higher end pens you pay thrice the price.

The secret sauce of Lamy and Faber Castell is, their lower and higher end pens use the same feeds and nibs, so the lower end pens are very dependable, too.

You can leave a simple Lamy Safari (one of my favorites) to your grandchildren, and they'll be happy with it, too.

The only thing is, a good gold nib is a very comfortable thing to use, if it's your cup of tea, but modern steel nibs are very enjoyable to use, too.

On the ink side, if you want to have a single ink to depend on, give Montblanc Royal Blue a go. My dad used to use only that ink, and when I used it for the first time, I told my dad how wonderful to write with that, and he answered "yeah, it is" with a grin.
by kelnos | 2025-08-01 07:59:51+00:00
What if your company transfers you to another place, and you need to move, and you can't pay off the remainder of principal on the home with the (now lower) proceeds you get from the sale? Or even if you can, but you don't have enough for a down payment on a house in the new area?

Even regardless of that, I don't love the idea that a change in housing policy could make people feel trapped in their current home, unable to move. Granted, current housing policy (e.g. California Prop 13) has that effect on some people already. And I bet it sucks. Now, I'm not sure the government should be bailing out people who can continue to pay their (now underwater) mortgage but would just like the option to sell it and move. But I think this requires a bit more thought than just wielding that axe and letting things fall where the are. I mean, hopefully we're not advocating for more of the DOGE method.
by stenos516 | 2025-08-01 07:59:58+00:00
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by a-french-anon | 2025-08-01 08:00:42+00:00
Better/less worse AND more accessible languages killed Perl. And I say that as someone who knows POSIX sh/awk/sed pretty well; which means using them in constant disgust of the ubiquitous UNIX braindamage.

It's not without reasons that the UNIX guys did Plan 9 afterwards, let me tell you.
by CalRobert | 2025-08-01 08:02:29+00:00
No, not really. My experience there was generally positive and I met lots of great people. That being said it’s fair to observe that different cultures have different traits. I have a friend here in the Netherlands from Roscommon and he gives out about Ireland -much- more than me, and when I mentioned we’d lived in Offaly he described it as “the beating heart of Irish begrudgery”, which checks out.

Anyway this conversation is a net negative to my day and I’m bowing out.
by divbzero | 2025-08-01 08:03:06+00:00
Two more to add to the list:

– The Voyager probes were launched in 1977 and reached interstellar space in the 2010s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program

– The oldest bonsai have been in training for centuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai
by brenainn | 2025-08-01 08:04:16+00:00
As someone that's bought their first house in the last few years, it's hard not to take offense.

A car or a TV are much smaller investments relative to a house. Over a decade of savings is tied up in my home. If the ass drops out of the market, myself, and others like me, who have broken into the market without assistance at the peak of housing prices will be virtually permanently financially set back. And to call buying a house around this time a mistake is crazy. I would be as much a speculator if I continued to rent and pay someone else's mortgage, hoping that prices dropped so I could get a good deal. It's a home and this attitude of treating homes as investments or mere purchases is why we're in this mess in the first place.
by ijidak | 2025-08-01 08:04:59+00:00
> I keep being asked if Chrome should be allowed to find devices on my network

God in heaven, how can I say yes once and for all!?!

Recently switched to macos and ios.

There are so many of these permissions I can't seem to permanently accept!

Is this a feature or a bug?

I want a button that says yes and don't ask me again. Or, no and don't ask me again.

It's like Apple doesn't trust the user.
by gwd | 2025-08-01 08:05:03+00:00
> Everyone I talked to at the time who worked with Perl knew it would not go away

But what about people who didn't work with Perl, or only used it as a side thing? I know I personally put off deepening my superficial knowledge of Perl 5 in the early 2000's, in anticipation of "Perl 6". The Osbourne Effect is a real thing.

EDIT Or, companies starting major new projects, and deciding what language to write it in? It's one thing to say, "Perl 5 will be supported for a long time, we don't need to migrate our existing projects off it." It's another thing to say, "We want to start a new project; should we start it in Perl 5, which will become 'legacy' in a year or two when Perl 6 comes out? Or should we write it in Python?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
by kelnos | 2025-08-01 08:05:15+00:00
> You don't just lose the house, you're in a much, much deeper hole.

Oof, I was about to question if this is correct or not, but it turns out that this is indeed true in most US states: if you default on your mortgage, and the bank can't resell your house for at least as much principal as you have left to pay, you still owe the difference, and they can get a court to garnish your wages, put a lien on any future home you may buy, get your accounts frozen.

Didn't realize this was a thing... I live in a non-recourse state (California) where the bank only gets the property on default and can't pursue you further.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-08-01 08:06:14+00:00
It's simplistic to say that the US car market is "regulated out of existence".

Consider how huge trucks that mow down children because they can't even be seen over the hood are unregulated, even incentivised. (1)

Wrong regulation, maybe. But not merely "too much regulation".

1)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36480122

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/americas-cars-trucks-ar...

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24139147/suvs-trucks-popu...
by bakuninsbart | 2025-08-01 08:06:35+00:00
There were many daggers making the Perl Community bleed:

1. Enterprise Development

Java et Al led to a generation of developers working further from the kernel and the shell. Professionalization of the field led to increased specialization, and most developers had less to do with deployment and management of running software.

Tools also got much better, requiring less glue and shifting the glue layer to configs or platform specific languages.

Later on, DevOps came for the SysAdmins, and there's just much less space for Perl in the cloud.

2. The rise of Python

I would put this down mostly to universities. Perl is very expressive by design, in Python there's supposedly only "one right way to do it". Imagine you're a TA grading a hundred code submissions; in Python, everyone probably die it in one of three ways, in Perl the possibilities are endless. Perl is a language for writing, not reading.

3. Cybersecurity became a thing

Again, this goes back to readability and testability. Requirements for security started becoming a thing, and Perl was not designed with that in mind.

4. The Web was lost to Rails, PHP, then SPAs

I'm less clear on the why of that, but Perl just wasn't able to compete against newer web technologies.
by dlcarrier | 2025-08-01 08:06:49+00:00
Yes, developers are incentivized to build whatever units are most profitable, but the price per square foot is much higher for small units than for large units, so without regulations prohibiting high-density projects, you'll end up with far more units for a given amount of resources. Instead of building 20 units of 2,000 sq ft, if allowed a developer could instead build 40 units of 1,000 sq ft, for a similar cost, and sell them for less per unit but more per square foot. Without using any more land, foundation, or roofing, and only needing extra fixtures and interior walls, it would reduce the labor and materials needed per unit, while increasing the income.
by bayindirh | 2025-08-01 08:07:13+00:00
Some fancier inks also comes in cartridges though. Most of Diamine's collection, Kaweco, Montblanc, Graf von Faber Castell and Waterman comes in international standard cartridges too.

Yeah, Waterman is not that "fancy", but being able to carry 8 long cartridges of Serenity/Florida blue with a dependable pen is hard to beat if you are on the go.
by tpxl | 2025-08-01 08:07:19+00:00
> Losing a car or a TV is not going to make someone homeless.

Your house losing 100k$ in value isn't going to make you homeless either (quite the opposite actually). If you buy a house and it depreciates, so what?

Not to mention if everyone's house depreciates, your new house is cheaper to buy. You lose _nothing_, except imaginary dollar values.

> Calling people like that speculators shows a severe lack of understanding and empathy.

I don't know what you call preventing young people from buying, or even renting, at affordable prices so 'people like that' don't have a possibility of losing some money, but you sure as fuck don't call it empathy either.
by grafmax | 2025-08-01 08:07:21+00:00
> Klein and Thompson's political project is a plan to organize the Democrats.

“Abundance” appeals to the financial backers of the Democratic Party because deregulation doesn’t threaten them. But our problems are much graver that what YIMBYism can address: authoritarianism, climate change, austerity, warmongering toward China.

It’s because the wealthy block left-wing populism that so many people have turned to right-wing populism. Which is only making our problems worse.

At this rate, it’s only a matter of time before society cracks. There’s a good chance it doesn’t end well for the financial backers of “abundance.”
by kelnos | 2025-08-01 08:07:34+00:00
Easy: make it illegal to require PMI in that case. Some loans will require PMI at signing (IIRC, often this will be when you put down less than 20%; you're required to carry PMI until you've paid off enough to get your principal below 80% of the purchase price), but we can certainly make clauses unenforceable that require it later under whatever conditions.
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-08-01 08:08:35+00:00
Western Democracies usually (always?) have planning laws that allow for democratic (ie for the benefit of the people) building plans. In short, we don't have to allow developers to choose.

We could equally levy pressure to improve quality.

In UK, house price inflation has well outstripped material and wage inflation, we should be getting exceptional housing that fits the need of the demos.
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-08-01 08:09:28+00:00
> If the proponents are right, an infinite amount. The information will never "raise a flag" since looking at it would require the flag to already have been raised (in the form of a warrant).

From the main critical opponent Justitia which consists of law professionals:

https://justitia-int.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Justitia...

"Samtidig lægger lovforslaget op til, at PET vil kunne træne maskinlæringsmodeller til at genkende mønstre i disse data. En sådan udvikling øger overvågningstrykket markant"

Translation: "At the same time, the bill proposes that PET will be able to train machine learning models to recognize patterns in this data. Such a development significantly increases surveillance pressure"

> I think psychiatrists are already required to report you if they believe you're a danger to others.

That is not my point. A psychiatrist will not report you just if they think you are schizophrenic or a psychopath. However, how will a machine learning model categorize you if it knows this information AND all your social media posts AND any other things that may be attributed to you, such as your browsing history showing that you are interested in how to make TATP? Add to this that there is no way to ensure data quality and that collected data in the database may be incorrectly attributed to you, e.g. other people posting incriminating stuff on your social media profile.

> This concern I sympathise with more, but I also have to imagine that this information bank could make it easier to investigate and convict this sort of misuse of power.

The people misusing the power will also be the people who know exactly what to do to not end up putting a trail of evidence in the database.
by miki123211 | 2025-08-01 08:09:57+00:00
I really wish it was easier to do high-quality audio calls these days.

It's technically feasible, apps that can do this have existed for years[1,2,3], but they're either non-free or kludgy and unintuitive as hell.

At this point, It's definitely a UX problem, not a "we don't have the tech to do this" problem.

Analog phones in the 80s sounded better than almost anything a typical consumer is likely to interact with these days[4]. Now, it's all crappy 16kHZ Bluetooth headsets, bad noise / echo cancellation everywhere, and all that encoded with some low-quality opus.

nobody seems to care about this very much. We now have devices that can go up to a few hundred mb/s over WiFi, yet Bluetooth hasn't changed much since 20 years ago, and the audio quality is basically what it was back then.

[1] https://bearware.dk [2] https://support.zoom.com/hc/en/article?id=zm_kb&sysparm_arti... [3] https://cleanfeed.net/ [4] https://evan-doorbell.com/wp-content/uploads/Overview-rough....
Ask HN: Any awesome-list (shit-AI) or similar for negative fallout from LLMs?
by leksak | 2025-08-01 08:10:07+00:00
Looking for a collection of links to things going awry or wrong due to use of LLMs (or AI in general but mostly LLMs). A "shit-ai" list.

Stuff like: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/07/chatgpt-ai-self-mutilation-satanism/683649/

https://futurism.com/man-killed-police-chatgpt

https://futurism.com/commitment-jail-chatgpt-psychosis

Anyone have any tips? Or items that deserve to go on such a list?
by WJW | 2025-08-01 08:10:25+00:00
Sure, the same amount of stone could be used to construct several smaller churches. The US congress could also just rent a conference room at a nearby hotel if they chose. The Eiffel tower could supply iron for several kilometres of rail track, or maybe a small boat.

But building something extravagantly big has a signaling value all of its own: "see the glory of <whatever it is we constructed this for> and how much resources they command". You don't build a cathedral because it's more practical than a normal church for holding services and stuff, you build a cathedral to express the power of your religion and impress it on others.
by ffsm8 | 2025-08-01 08:10:55+00:00
I do, it creates perverse incentives and dehumanizes people.

Imagine yourself catering someone and then having them talk about how great that is and wanting to pay you for that. Not in abstract but actually, in practice. It nails down the servant role, frankly. It feels abhorrent to me, even if you get numb to it over time.

From my perspective, tipping is a socially acceptable way to establish classes. Which itself is a terrible practice and the people catering you aren't your servants.

I used "catering" in this comment as a placeholder for any job that receives tips.
by kelnos | 2025-08-01 08:12:24+00:00
> But ultimately "he who should have known" is the person asking for money to buy XYZ thing. A person should be responsible for their actions.

I agree with this in principle, but the real world is messy, and many (most? all?) people end up having to make decisions in their lives where they maybe should know, but don't know everything they should. Perfect information is rarely a thing, and even if you have it, you need a certain level of education to exploit it that we can't expect anywhere near everyone to have.

I don't give even the smallest shit for lenders. I care about people. I care about people having housing security, food security, and a little extra so they don't have to live paycheck to paycheck. No, I don't think we should just be printing money and firing it off in a t-shirt cannon at people for the hell of it. But I think we need to be compassionate, and understand that a huge, unexpected change in housing policy that tanked their home value is not something they "should have known" might happen.

I feel like many of us here forget (or were, oof, too young for) the 2007/08 financial crisis. We bailed out a lot of banks, and left a lot of regular folks holding the bag. I don't want to see that happen ever again. And yes, I get that housing policy changes that create lots of new housing is different. But the outcome could be very similar.
by blu3h4t | 2025-08-01 08:12:30+00:00
The first thing I think of when thinking of Perl is anything but humble, not because Perl monks aren’t humble, they certainly are, they even inspired rubys we are humble cause hi is humble I suppose :D but like I said elsewhere Perl is like nineties music its simply the best, so in my eyes Perl programmers are (unix) greybeards and the most expert you can imagine, so don’t think they could be as humble cause the level of the competency could allow quite some hubris. :D Anyway this is the analogy I see with programming languages and Linux distros, Slackware was created for lisp and its KISS principle later manifested in clojure. Early Debian was released with same Perl versions as the learning Perl book. And both have heavy emphasis on reproducibility and testing. And redhats and ibms other business is Java and redhats ceo even went to work on unity a mono fork or something. So you Perl came from Unix but it shaped Linux and by extension floss world pretty much. It’s like an elder who knows all the answers but nobody asks. Edit: ah and yes Larry was right about timtoady indeed, it can be Perl or Python or whatever :D