MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by logicprog | 2025-08-17 18:47:58+00:00
This is a really good post. I'm a naturally controlling person, and I care about my craft a lot, so even in my recent dabbling (on a ~3000 LOC project) with agentic coding, one of the things I naturally did from the start was not just skim the diffs that the AI generated, but decide for myself what technologies should be used, describe the logic and architecture of the code I wanted in detail — to keep my mental model fresh and accurate — and read every single line of code as if it was someone else's, explicitly asking the AI to restructure anything that I didn't feel was the way I'd implemented it — thus ensuring that everything fit my mental model, and going in and manually adding features, and always doing all debugging myself as a natural way to get more familiar with the code.

One of the things I noticed is that I'm pretty sure I was still more productive with AI, but I still had full control over the codebase, precisely because I didn't let AI take over any part of the mental modelling part of the role, only treating it as, essentially, really really good refactoring, autocompletion, and keyboard macro tools that I interact with through an InterLISP-style REPL instead of a GUI. It feels like a lever to actually enable me to add more error handling, make more significant refactors for clarity to fit my mental model, and so on. So I still have a full mental model of where everything is, how it works, how it passes data back and forth, and the only technologies I'm not familiar with the use of in the codebase are things I've made the explicit choice not to learn because I don't want to (TKinter, lol).

Meanwhile, when I introduced my girlfriend (a data scientist) to the same agentic coding tool, her first instinct was to essentially vibe code — let it architect things however it wanted, not describe logic, not build the mental model and list of features explicitly herself, and skim the code (if that) and we quickly ended up in a cul de sac where the code was unfixable without a ton of work that would've eliminated all the productivity benefits.

So basically, it's like that study: if you use AI to replace thinking, you end up with cognitive debt and have to struggle to catch up which eventually washes out all the benefits and leaves you confused and adrift
by ben_w | 2025-08-17 18:48:09+00:00
> I would much rather live on a beach front property than where I live right now. I don't because the cost trade off is too high.

Yes, and?

My reference example was two aircraft carriers and 1:1 models of some fictional spacecraft larger than some islands, as personal private residences.

> To bring the real estate market into equilibrium with UBI you would have to turn rural Nebraska into a giant slab city like ghetto. Or every mid sized city would have a slab city ghetto an hour outside the city. It would be ultra cheap to live there but it would be a place everyone is trying to save up to move out of. It would create a completely new under class of people.

Incorrect.

Currently, about 83e6 hectares of this planet is currently a "built up area".

4827e6 ha, about 179 times the currently "built up" area, is cropland and grazing land. Such land can produce much more food than it already does, the limiting factor is the cost of labour to build e.g. irrigation and greenhouses (indeed, this would also allow production in what are currently salt flats and deserts, and enable aquaculture for a broad range of staples); as I am suggesting unbounded robot labour is already a requirement for UBI, this unlocks a great deal of land that is not currently available.

The only scenario in which I believe UBI works is one where robotic labour gives us our wealth. This scenario is one in which literally everyone can get their own personal 136.4 meters side length approximately square patch. That's not per family, that's per person. Put whatever you want on it — an orchard, a decorative garden, a hobbit hole, a castle, and five Olympic-sized swimming pools if you like, because you could fit all of them together at the same time on a patch that big.

The ratio (and consequently land per person), would be even bigger if I didn't disregard currently unusable land (such as mountains, deserts, glaciers, although of these three only glaciers would still be unusable in the scenario), and also if I didn't disregard land which is currently simply unused but still quite habitable e.g. forests (4000e6 ha) and scrub (1400e6 ha).

In the absence of future tech, we get what we saw in the UK with "council housing", but even this is still not as you say. While it gets us cheap mediocre tower blocks, it also gets us semi-detached houses with their own gardens, and even the most mediocre of the widely disliked Brutalist architecture era of the UK this policy didn't create a new underclass, it provided homes for the existing underclass. Finally, even at the low end they largely (but not universally) were an improvement on what came before them, and this era came to an end with a government policy to sell those exact same homes cheaply to their existing occupants.
by spankalee | 2025-08-17 18:48:13+00:00
It is absolutely true that it is unsafe to trust TypeScript types. I've chatted briefly with Oliver on socials before and he knows this. So I am a bit confused by this issue: https://github.com/CanadaHonk/porffor/issues/234 which says "presume the types are good and have been validated by the user before compiling". This is just not a thing that's possible. Types are often wrong in subtle ways. Casts throw everything out the window.

Dart had very similar issues and constraints and they couldn't do a proper AOT compiler that considered types until they made the type system sound. TypeScript can never do that and maintain compatibility with JS.

Isolates are already available as workers. The key thing is that you can't have shared memory, other wise you can get cross-Isolate references and have all the synchronization problems of threads.

And ECMAScript is simply just specified as a single-threaded language. You break it with shared-memory threads.

In JS, this always logs '4'. With threads that's not always the case.

let x = 4; console.log(x);
by immibis | 2025-08-17 18:48:16+00:00
GOG will sell you Linux versions of games. In fact it doesn't care - once you own it you can download all of the game files for all the platforms it was released for. However, it only sells you what actually exists. It doesn't take the Windows version and run it in a Windows emulation layer like Steam has. If you want to run the Windows version emulated on Linux, you're on your own.
by a3w | 2025-08-17 18:48:17+00:00
Finances and Contracts are for me the same folders.

Also, spaces in folders will absolutely break my legacy scripts on `~` at a future time when I re-run them.

Demo is not that convincing. Also, I need multilanguage support, and am not clear if OCR for PDFs before running is done by this. (Which again, needs beforehand knowledge of which language the document might be in?)

But, cheap, and pay once and offline. Will keep an eye on it.
by immibis | 2025-08-17 18:48:25+00:00
Got it! I’ll explain them simply using only the 1,000 most common English words (like in the style of “Simple English” or the “Up-Goer Five” idea).

---

Water: The clear stuff that falls from the sky as rain. We drink it, wash with it, and it is in rivers, lakes, and the big blue parts of the world. It has no color, no taste, and no smell. Without it, people, animals, and plants cannot live.

Motorcycle: A road car that has two wheels instead of four. You sit on it, hold the handles, and move fast. It is smaller than a car and can go between other cars. You need to wear a hard head cover to stay safe.

Comedian: A person whose job is to make other people laugh by telling funny stories, jokes, or acting in a silly way. They often talk to groups of people and try to make them happy by being funny.
by em-bee | 2025-08-17 18:48:31+00:00
Germany has banned slogans in favour of Palestinian freedom.

do you have any references?

and what do you mean by "government-sanctioned"? reality is that any kind of large public demonstration requires registration and is subject to permission. the question is whether permission is granted to all groups equally, or whether certain groups are getting limited. if that is what you mean then we would have to look at actual statistics. demonstrations in favor of palestina certainly did happen.
by immibis | 2025-08-17 18:48:37+00:00
Apparently this depends on where you live. It's pretty well known that in Germany, if you're found torrenting, you will at first receive an angry email from your ISP demanding you pay them €100-€1000. If you ignore this email, they will take you to court, and the judge will order you to pay the same fine plus their legal fees and the court fees. If you don't go to court, this will be directly debited from your bank account. If you don't have the money in your bank account, it will be garnished from your wages. This will happen, 100% of the time. Not even "someone hacked my wifi" is an excuse (even when true), because even if that was true, you would still be liable because it's your fault for not securing your wifi better.

Meanwhile in some other countries - even EU ones - nobody gives a shit and people can receive 10 copyright infringement notices a day and throw them all in the metaphorical trash.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-17 18:48:42+00:00
That’s because you didn’t check.

McDonald’s, famously, adapts their menu to the location. Here’s a bulgogi burger they only sell in Korea: https://www.mcdonalds.co.kr/eng/menu/detail.do

Here’s another menu item exclusive to Korea https://www.mcdonalds.co.kr/eng/menu/detail.do

It is one of many local menu items available exclusively in Korea. What is absurd is that you make false assertions that can be checked faster than you can write your comment.

Do you genuinely think that Hyundai does not adapt the car to the market (did they accidentally put the steering wheel on the right, and just happen to send those cars to the UK?)? Every car company HAS to do this, if only because different markets have contradictory rules. E.g. Lights that are legal in North America do not meet the standards of other countries. The car HAS to be adapted to the market.
by skybrian | 2025-08-17 18:49:01+00:00
More padding seems like an improvement if you're trying to make a connection and don't want to miss it. This is true even though it will also result in more waiting for the next flight on average. Efficiency is at odds with reliability.

If you're not making a connection, I don't see any downside to arriving earlier than expected. You have a bit more time to do what you please.
by wswope | 2025-08-17 18:49:04+00:00
You write INSERT and SELECT statements for the object types you want to persist.

What is your concern re: random types popping up? SQLite springs to mind as a prime offender due to not enforcing column types OOTB, but most dialects have rather strong typing.

If we’re talking about mapping UUIDs and datetimes from their DB representations to types defined by the language stdlib, that’s usually the responsibility of the DB driver, no?
by logicprog | 2025-08-17 18:49:43+00:00
There's plenty of cheap furniture that was designed only in CAD or something that is flimsy, doesn't fit human proportions well, and looks ugly in real life, because it was quicker to just throw it together on the computer, CNC it out, and mail the parts to people for them to build themselves than to actually carefully test it and work out the kinks. That's basically what half of IKEA is. So I think this is a decent analogy.
by b112 | 2025-08-17 18:50:10+00:00
Apparently so, re: teeming.

But the problem isn't just wood, it's also long term dirt accumulation. And this study is absolutely not validation of your point, stating "Despite the many investigations on the topic, the antibacterial activity of wood is far from fully understood", while also saying different species, and hard vs softwood all have different tested effectiveness.

This is also about dry wood, yet I've seen countless people put their knifes away wet/damp. Some of these blocks rarely have time to dry.

I've also seen mould growing on soap, damp debris, and these are things which end up in the block's slots... never washed or cleaned.

I'm not saying don't use them, I'm saying it's silly to wash frying pans with soap, or vegetables only use knives with soap. Not needed.
by fortran77 | 2025-08-17 18:50:33+00:00
I've read the book. I says that aspects of IQ can be heritable, but doesn't ever say "genetics are the main predictor of IQ".

Quoting direcly from the book: "It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with IQ differences” and the book states that "the exact contribution of genes versus environment is unknown."
by jedberg | 2025-08-17 18:50:51+00:00
> Caveat: PostgreSQL is fully transactional by default; ClickHouse isn’t. Results compare each engine’s native execution model, not identical transaction guarantees.

I appreciate that they call this out. This means that if you're using Postgres primarily for storing data where it's ok if you lose a few (like time series data) then Clickhouse is the clear and obvious choice.

But if the transactionality is key for you (like a financial application or the data for an application) then Postgres still makes more sense.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-17 18:51:24+00:00
100% of population has all the tools needed + ChatGPT for free to write a novel. Only 0.0001% are even able to complete even a short story - they often can't hold a complete and consistent plot in their head.

"AI allows those excluded from the guild" is total BS.

Gut figures, ~85% of creativity comes from skill itself. ~10% or so comes from prior arts. And it's all multiplied by willingness[0, 1] which >99.9999% of population has << 0.0001 as the value. Tools just don't change that, it just weighs down on the creativity part.
by sdairs | 2025-08-17 18:51:55+00:00
One of the post authors here; I just want to stress that the goal of the post was not at all to be "haha we're better than postgres" - we explicitly call out the caveats behind the results.

Prior to July 2025 (ClickHouse v25.7), ClickHouse did not support UPDATE statements. At all. Like most columnar, analytics databases. We spent a lot of effort designing and implementing a way to support high-performance, SQL-standard UPDATE statements. This test was pretty much just trying to see how good of a job we had done, by comparing ourselves to the gold standard, Postgres. (If you're curious, we also wrote about how we built the UPDATE support in depth https://clickhouse.com/blog/updates-in-clickhouse-2-sql-styl...)

We have some updates to the post in progress; we originally deliberately used cold runs for both ClickHouse & Postgres, because we wanted to look at the "raw" update speed of the engine, vs. the variability of cache hits. But TL;DR when you run a more "real world" test where caches are warm and Postgres is getting very high cache-hit ratio, its point updates are consistently ~2ms, while ClickHouse is somewhere ~6ms (bulk updates are still many multiples faster in ClickHouse even with the cache in play).
by rafterydj | 2025-08-17 18:51:57+00:00
Counterpoint: a cabinet has always been a cabinet and nobody expects it to be anything but a cabinet. Rarely are software projects as repeatable and alike to each other as cabinets are.

Software is codified rules and complexity, which is entirely aribtrary, and builds off of itself in an infinite number of ways. That makes it much more difficult to turn into factory output cabinetry.

I think more people should read "No Silver Bullet" because I hear this argument a lot and I'm not sure it holds. There _are_ niches in software that are artisanal craft, that have been majorly replaced (like custom website designers and stock WordPress templates), but the vast majority of the industry relies on cases where turning software into templates isn't possible, or isn't as efficient, or conflicts with business logic.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-17 18:52:41+00:00
The U.S. Department of Education can garnish up to 15% of your disposable pay (your net wages after legally required deductions like taxes). However, they must leave you with at least 30 times the federal minimum wage, which is currently $7.25 per hour, or $217.50 per week.

So, 15% for the rest of your life or until you can leave the country and are beyond their reach (if an option) if you cannot afford to pay them off. The reality for many is they will never have enough income potential to pay off this debt, so the best course of action is to bail on it to optimize for quality of life if you’ll never be able to pay it back. The developed world is hungry for young, educated talent.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/25/they-fled-the-country-to-esc...
by adamgordonbell | 2025-08-17 18:53:22+00:00
Also this:

> The best reason to take multiple life extension supplements is to hedge our bets, because we really don’t know which of them are effective in humans.

And earlier:

> Personally, I take large doses of rapamycin 2 days a week, 8 weeks per year. For personalized recommendations, you can consult your favorite life extension doc.
by chc4 | 2025-08-17 18:53:24+00:00
If you have a secure and attested boot chain, then anti-cheats can also start depending on things like DMA protection[1] to be enabled or other CPU features to protect against rogue hardware doing DMA attacks. At the professional level tournaments are already whitelisting what hardware is allowed for competitor machines - I doubt that they'll start doing that for the average joe gamer lobbies anytime soon, but they do have the option to start blocking people who have anomalous PCIe DMA mappings etc. and steadily raise the bar.

1: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/hardware-...
by commandar | 2025-08-17 18:54:14+00:00
On the one hand, it's good that we're seeing a lot of exploration in this space.

On the other, the trend seems to be everyone developing a million disparate tools that largely replicate the same functionality with the primary variation being greater-or-lesser lock-in to a particular set of services.

This is about the third tool this week I've taken a quick look at and thought "I don't see what this offers me that I don't already have with Roo, except only using Claude."

We're going to have to hit a collapse and consolidation cycle eventually, here. There's absolutely room for multiple options to thrive, but most of what I've seen lately has been "reimplement more or less the same thing in a slightly different wrapper."
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-08-17 18:55:28+00:00
What are you going to do about it? The farting, for example. You gonna stick a cork up their butthole? No; you're just going to sit their in your seat and feel upset. Doesn't really matter if you have some imaginary right or not. You're just stewing in your own mental hell.

The dog shit maybe you'll do something about, and maybe you'll call the cops over the slap, but I don't see how you're going to stop the farting. Maybe ask for another seat, or trade with someone. Or bring a mask on board. Or, barring that, maybe try to use your mind to diffuse the uncomfortable feeling. But otherwise you are just sitting in your own discomfort, feeling miserable. That's the point i'm making. You don't have to be miserable.
by JimmyBuckets | 2025-08-17 18:55:31+00:00
I think it is unfortunate that you should pick examples of poor behaviour in our species and use it to justify your opinions. Pure, selfless love does exist. The fact people fail to live up to it at all times is an existentialist question. But the failure does not support what you are saying.

How we raise our children, the values we enshrine in our culture and the skills we prioritize are levers through which we can move substantially closer to a practical love-derived morality.

Saying that we haven't achieved something cannot be used as evidence of its impossibility, as much as we would like to.

I agree that in stressful moments people can fail to live up to an ideal. And in those cases it is useful to rely on rubrics. But the article in question is about the origin of morals. And thus I say again, the origin of morality, whether intuited, codified or otherwise, is love.

The main point is that love isn't an emotion. When love is present it can be felt in the body, but it also modifies thought.
by com | 2025-08-17 18:56:02+00:00
Given the way the world feels now, I’d really love to return to a kindergarten where every day is growth, discovery and fun without existential dread.

My vote is for the Culture where the hedonism is balanced by good deeds - such as a hand discretely extended - for those crawling out of the mud looking at the stars which the culture leaves as close to untouched and untrammelled as they can.
by xtracto | 2025-08-17 18:56:13+00:00
It's amazing how little understanding some people with "a gift" for certain skills have.

I play guitar, it's easy and I enjoy it a lot. I've taught plsome friends to play it, and some of them just... don't have it in them.

Similarly,.I've always liked drawing/painting and 3d modeling. But for some reason, that part of my brain is Just not there. I just can't do visualization. I've even tried award winning books (drawing with the right side of the brain) without success.

Way back in the day I tried 3D modeling with AW maya, 3d studio max and then Blender. I WANT to convert a sphere into a nice warrior, I died to make 3d games: I had the C/C++ part covered, as well as the opengl one. But I couldn't model a trash can,.after following all tutorials and.books.

This technology solves that for us who don't have that gift. I understand that for people that can "draw the rest of the fking owl" it won't look as much, but darn, it opens a world for me.
by ltsbfair | 2025-08-17 18:56:41+00:00
The money allocated to USAID is more accounted for than other departments of the US Government. Probably DoD.

Trump cancelled funding to USAID PREDICT, and then they were understaffed and then the COVID hoax occurred and I think we'd prefer to just hide that under the rug.

FWICS trans-better-than-gay Trump couldn't handle the gay director of USAID.

USAID was providing humanitarian aid to Gaza while Kushner-Trump-Likud was providing military aid to support the killing without due process in other peoples' lands. It looks like they resolved paying for both lawless killing and aid by cancelling the aid program to graft themselves to more debt and a lower approval rating.

Which international currencies are up since January, along with defense ETFs?
by RugnirViking | 2025-08-17 18:56:49+00:00
It's literally an arms race. If nobody put effort into marketing; quality would bubble to the top. If everyone spends some amount of time optimising their seo, tweaking for the algorithm, etc, then in essence, nobody has (and thus, in theory, quality would bubble to the top). The situation we actually have is worse than both of these; bad actors spend the most on marketing, with the more marketing and the more effective marketing being for the worst products.
by terhechte | 2025-08-17 18:56:51+00:00
I tried it some weeks ago, but I went back to the CLI. Honestly, I've been a GUI app for most of my life, preferring proper GUI tools to Terminal tools, including running the GUI versions of VIM and Emacs (during my brief emacs stint). However, over the past 2 weeks I've slowly transitioned to a full cli development setup with wezterm, neovim, lazygit, fzf, fish & Claude Code. I enjoy working like this so much.
by cthlee | 2025-08-17 18:57:42+00:00
Most of these 3d asset generation tools oversimplify things down to stacking primitives and call it modeling, which skips fundamentals like extrusion, subdivision, and proper topology. If they wanted to make a tool actually worthwhile, what do you think the core features should be? Like it would be great if it enforces clean topology, streamline subdivision workflows, but given your xp I'm curious what you’d consider essential.