MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by agentultra | 2025-08-29 17:13:20+00:00
“Feels primitive,” is holding up a lot of assumptions.

What feels primitive to me is how we approach programming in industry as a process of trial and error rather than one of rigour.

These are tools that automate copy-pasting from Stack Overflow and GitHub, running tools, and generating a ton of noise to sift through. They hallucinate code, documentation, and various other artifacts that are sometimes useful and are occasionally complete BS.

Some people find that they can make useful tools out of these things. Great.

A real programmer is still a human.

Update: nothing wrong with trial and error as a process. I use it a lot. But there are lots of places where we use this method that seem inappropriate and sometimes even dangerous. Yet it’s the most common tool we have and everything starts to look like a nail.
by armchairhacker | 2025-08-29 17:13:23+00:00
The interactive coding with global persistence reminds me of Smalltalk. It’s still around (see: Squeak and Pharo) but hasn’t gained popularity. I suspect a big reason is that it’s hard to make complex software without it becoming unorganized and brittle (though another factor may be lack of industry support partly caused by bad luck and timing).

Also, the author’s company and software (http://frontier.userland.com) seems to be focused on web development. Ironically, web development today has live reload and a scripting language (JavaScript), which has led to unorganized and brittle software partly because of its “scripting” (e.g. weak types, hacky OOP).

Despite the aforementioned flaws with scripting, I actually agree with the author that it should be promoted much more. I’d love to see something like Pharo or a modern version of UserLand software (with more features) become mainstream, because it would empower non-programmers and hopefully lead to more creative software (see: Adobe Flash).

However, I disagree with the article’s macOS and iOS framing. First-party lock-in means even if Apple develops a great scripting framework, unless they make it run on other platforms, it will be less popular than inferior solutions like React Native and Flutter (which already have live reload and scripting and target iOS). Instead, I think it should be a third-party framework, like React Native and Flutter, just with more interactivity and better macOS and iOS support (mainly increase reliability and feature parity with other platforms; the framework would probably have to simpler and targeted for smaller apps to do well both interactivity and cross-platform support).
by supriyo-biswas | 2025-08-29 17:13:47+00:00
Well there's open source stuff like https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis; one doesn't need a top-down mandated solution coming from a corporation.

In general Cloudflare has been pushing DRMization of the web for quite some time, and while I understand why they want to do it, I wish they didn't always show off as taking the moral high ground.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-29 17:14:09+00:00
> I remember nodding along and getting angry that the mid-20th century Supreme Court had fucked up the Constitution so badly.

As opposed to what is happening right now?

Do you think Trump is fixing the constitution somehow? He's all but wiping his ass with it.

> So, no, I don't care that Trump is dismantling an administrative state that shouldn't exist in the first place.

He's not just dismantling an administrative state. He's wrecking your countries' institutions left, right and center and those institutions are the glue that kept the country alive and together. It kept you healthy, educated and employed.

> Despotism is not when the President fires Department of Education bureaucrats. It's when the President tells you what you can and cannot build on your own land.

I don't think that matters much when your land is bought at firesale prices right out from under you because otherwise you won't be able to make ends meet. The manufactured crisis you are going through right now is redistributing wealth at a fantastic rate. And guess who is on the receiving side.

> But why bring my skin color into it?

Because unless you are living under a rock it should be painfully clear by now that you've voted massively against your own interests. Skin color is exactly the thing that this administration seems to be using as the distinguishing factor between the 'in' and the 'out' groups and that does not change because there are a couple of convenient exceptions. Or do you think giving White South Africans a speedrun through US immigration is an accident of chance?

Maybe you think that you too will be one of the exceptions but more and more people are finding out that they too voted against their own interests. This doesn't stop just with illegals, criminals, immigrants or homeless people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Donald_Trump

Have a look there and then look through that lens at the last six months. See a pattern?

It's racism as one major theme and probably misogynist overtones as another. The last thing Trump has respect for is the law (whether private, constitutional or criminal does not seem to matter much) unless it is as a tool to exact revenge.

That a lawyer would support the man whose own lawyer needed a lawyer and ended up convicted is already weird enough.
by Ekaros | 2025-08-29 17:14:13+00:00
Many private businesses "leave money on table". Private equity then acquires these and aim to extract maximum amount of value. Leaving money on table is probably general good. Like employees are reasonably paid, customers aren't charged maximum they can bear. Quality is not lowered as low as possible...

But ofc, if you pay for a company based on not leaving money on table calculation or bet on doing that later all those will change.

Then there are also the actually struggling and dying off companies. But I do not believe that is every one that is being acquired.
by inetknght | 2025-08-29 17:14:14+00:00
> What I would like it’s a way to notify my isp and say, block this traffic to my site.

I would love that, and make it automated.

A single message from your IP to your router: block this traffic. That router sends it upstream, and it also blocks it. Repeat ad nauseum until source changes ASN or (if the originator is on the same ASN) reaches the router from the originator, routing table space notwithstanding. Maybe it expires after some auto-expiry -- a day or month or however long your IP lease exists. Plus, of course, a way to query what blocks I've requested and a way to unblock.
by craftkiller | 2025-08-29 17:14:16+00:00
Quoting from the brief article you didn't read:

> Amtrak previously has said the new trains could potentially shave 20 minutes off the travel time between New York City and Washington, D.C., reducing the duration to around 2½ hours

> because of Amtrak’s old infrastructure, the new trains can only travel at top speed during certain portions of the journey [...] Infrastructure upgrades planned over the coming years will improve trainspeed and reliability, the railroad said.

> Each new train will hold 386 passengers, an increase of 27% compared with the current fleet.

Therefore: Faster trains carrying more people. Just not faster on day 1.
by codingdave | 2025-08-29 17:14:22+00:00
You are skipping a bunch of critical steps, like peer review, publishing your work, etc.

Ask yourself what sounds more plausible to your audience - that one individual, on their own, invented something that surpasses the entire professional and academic communities? Or that the same individual is having delusions of grandeur?

Now add in the fact that this person does not produce any demos, says that it would take months to integrate into something to show, and their "time is running low", so they are asking for people to "secure contracts" with them, without even being willing to show their work. Do such statements increase or decrease the believability of their claims?

I truly cannot say what you do or do not have. But I can say that it is unlikely anyone will pay attention to this unless you actually show your work.
by toast0 | 2025-08-29 17:14:23+00:00
We do have cheap easy high speed travel across the country. It's just not rail.

In the US, rail is for freight. In the US, cross country distances are too large for terrestrial transport to be high speed. A flight network allows for much better speed, without needing to have continuous infrastructure.

Rail in general requires pretty specific alignment and limits on turns and slope; high speed rail has even tighter tolerances. It's very expensive to build that, especially through rocky terrain, and through existing development.

Flight networks are much more flexible. If you have room for an airport, and demand, you can get direct flights to/from anywhere. Roads are good too; because of their utility, they have a large network which tends to offer better routing than rail, and piecemeal upgades work for roads; switching routes is much easier for cars than trains, and roads can be quite rough but still usable at low speeds.
by tgtweak | 2025-08-29 17:14:25+00:00
This is precisely what /dev/shm is for... And it can be used explicitly without any gotchas. If someone really wanted tmp to be in memory (to reduce SSD endurance writes or speed it up nominally) they can edit their mounts.

This feels like a very unnecessary change and nothing in that article made a convincing argument for the contrary.
by crooked-v | 2025-08-29 17:14:46+00:00
I've been at a past company where we (well, mostly I) set up a take-home that would take a mid-level web dev familiar with the material maybe 15-30 minutes to knock out, basically just to test if candidates could produce responsive CSS layouts and knew how to make a proper web form work. It was wild how many we got back that still didn't account for basic (explicitly outlined) use cases like 'works on a phone screen'.
by coffeecoders | 2025-08-29 17:14:56+00:00
Nice!

What I want is a /random endpoint that randomly shuffles through posts from the following "unofficial" endpoints:

https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew

https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

https://news.ycombinator.com/best

https://news.ycombinator.com/asknew

https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

https://news.ycombinator.com/active

https://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments

https://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories

https://news.ycombinator.com/newest
by siliconc0w | 2025-08-29 17:14:59+00:00
I started a greenfield project the other day and was excited to see how far AI has gotten for a real internal business use-case - not just a toy project. It was great at setting up the scaffolding and helping with some of the tests but overall it might have been a drain on productivity.. I had to repeatedly correct it and explicitly tell it how to do things (or hunt down examples in the codebase) or it would make up APIs or generate not particularly idiomatic code for our codebase (was writing golang fwiw).

There is really a balance between spoon-feeding it the answers vs just abandoning it - the spikiness is really apparent where it can totally nail some things but then utterly fail what should be pretty simple (i.e there was a point where I wanted to refactor two similar functions into a shared library and it just couldn't do it)
by gspencley | 2025-08-29 17:15:07+00:00
Our CEO was boasting about new speech to text technology recently. They said something that I found extremely objectionable:

"I can speak a lot faster than I can type."

The fact that I found it objectionable doesn't mean that he said something untrue. For him and most others, it probably is true.

But for me, a keyboard warrior by trade for 30 years who has high functioning autism and crowded teeth and actually doesn't like talking, I can type WAY faster than I can speak aloud.

In spoken conversation, I am usually a man of few words. But sit me in front of a text prompt and I will TL;DR the fuck of you with a 5 page essay on a topic you probably don't really care about.

My point is that everyone has their own preferred method of communication, and most people like talking just to hear the sound of their own voices. A lot of people say they prefer interacting with a human at restaurants - I avoid going to restaurants because I don't like interacting with people and will DoorDash to my home instead. To asocial introverted keyboard warriors, it's sometimes difficult for us to relate to the baseline human experience.
by Analemma_ | 2025-08-29 17:15:12+00:00
How does an agent help my website not get crushed by traffic load, and how is this proposal any different from the gatekeeping problem to the open web, except even less transparent and accountable because now access is gated by logic inside an impenetrable web of NN weights?

This seems like slogan-based planning with no actual thought put into it.
by Sesse__ | 2025-08-29 17:15:18+00:00
It is difficult to call Intel's E-core server chips a “clone” of Zen 5c. Sierra Forest was announced before Zen 4c, and they're actually designed-for-area cores instead of just resynthesizing the same chip with a different library (which is the thing you do if you suddenly need a small core, but don't have time to make a proper one) and less cache, like Zen 5c is.

If it's a clone if anything, it's of Arm's “little” strategy.
by next_xibalba | 2025-08-29 17:15:39+00:00
I would think unlimited liability would only work to increase prices as it would mean providers would become more laden with lawyers, even more bureaucratized and slow (spend most of your time documenting everything so we don't lose lawsuits), etc.

Those already seems like drivers of cost in hospitals. I have several family members who work in healthcare who are just miserable because so much of their time is consumed by things that are not helping and healing patients (documentation, etc.)
by dfxm12 | 2025-08-29 17:16:12+00:00
Most people don't want trains.

Care to flesh this out?

I can only find data that contradicts this:

https://railpassengers.org/happening-now/news/releases/new-p...

https://media.amtrak.com/2023/08/data-finds-overwhelming-sup...

Most places where people want trains have them (high density places).

This doesn't address OP's comments. To remind you, they mentioned "cheap, easy, high speed travel across the country". I would grant Amtrak is easy. It's not the other things though...
by esseph | 2025-08-29 17:16:27+00:00
Commercial, criminal, and state interests have far more resources than you do, and their interests are in direct conflict with yours.

That would be fine, you could walk away and go home, but if you're going to drive on their digital highways, you're going to need "insurance" just protect you from everyone else.

Ongoing multi-nation WWIII-scale hacking and infiltration campaigns of infrastructure, AI bot crawling, search company and startup crawling, security researchers crawling, and maybe somebody doesn't like your blog and decides to rent a botnet for a week or so.

Bet your ISP shuts you off before then to protect themselves. (Happens all the time via BGP blackholing, DDoS scrubbing services, BGP FlowSpec, etc).
by matheusd | 2025-08-29 17:16:47+00:00
Local governments in BR have already made ads using generative AI that were shown during prime time TV hours[1].

You can argue that is a bad thing (local designers/content producers/actors/etc lost revenue, while the money was sent to $BigTech) or that this was a good thing (lower cost to make ad means taxpayer money saved, paying $BigTech has lower chance of corruption vs hiring local marketing firm - which is very common here).

[1]https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/tecnologia/video-feito-com-inte...
by saubeidl | 2025-08-29 17:16:47+00:00
China is about the same size as the US. Here's a map of their HSR network: https://www.travelchinaguide.com/images/map/railway.jpg

Flights are nowhere near as efficient as rail, not to speak of the environmental issues.

It's factors like this that show how the US is falling behind in international competition.
by imiric | 2025-08-29 17:17:43+00:00
> When I’m driving, I hand my phone to a friend and say, “Reply ‘on my way’ to my Mom.” They act on my behalf, through my identity, even though the software has no built-in concept of delegation. That is the world we are entering.

That is a very small part of the world we're entering.

The other vast majority of use cases will come from even more abusive bots than we have today, filling the internet with spam, disinformation, and garbage. The dead internet is no longer a theory, and the future we're building will make the internet for bots, by bots. Humans will retreat into niche corners of it, and those who wish to participate in the broader internet will either have to live with this, or abide by new government regulations that invade their privacy and undermine their security.

So, yes, confirming human identity is the only path forward if we want to make the internet usable by humans, but I do agree that the ideal solution will not come from a single company, or a single government, for that matter. It will be a bumpy ride until we figure this out.
by cultofmetatron | 2025-08-29 17:18:04+00:00
was going through something similar. here's my anti burnout protocol thats kept me functional all the way to my current position as founder and CTO of a profitable startup.

1. 1 tablespoon of cold extracted cod liver oil EVERY MORNING

2. 30 min of running 3-4 times a week

3. 2-3 weight lifting sessions every week

4. regular walks.

5. cross train on different intellectually stimulating subjects. doing the same cognitive tasks over and over is like repetive motion on your muscles

6. regularly scheduled "fallow mind time." I set aside an 30 min to an hour everyday to just sit in a chair and let my mind wander. its not meditation. I jsut sit and let my mind drift to whatever it wants.

7. while it should be avoided, in the event that you have to crunch, RESPECT THE COOLDOWN. take downtime after. don't let your nontechnical leads talk you out of it. thinking hard for extended periods of time requires appropriate recovery.

the human brain is a complex system and while we think of our mind as abstract and immaterial, it is in reality a whole lot of physical systems that grow, change and use resources the same way any other physical system in your body does. just like muscles need to recover after a workout to get stronger, so too does your brain after extended periods of deep thinking.
by isaachinman | 2025-08-29 17:18:06+00:00
Hah, funny to see this reposted – I'm the author.

We've had great success with Replicache+Orama since this was written. We're keen to give Zero a spin once it's a bit more stable.

Triplit has essentially folded as a "company" and become some sort of open-source initiative instead.

InstantDB has matured massively and is definitely worth a look for anyone starting a new project.
by eldenring | 2025-08-29 17:18:09+00:00
I recently found out my website has been blocked by AI agents, when I had never asked for it. It seems to be opt-out by default, but in an obscure way. Very frustrating. I think some of these companies (one in particular) are risking burning a lot of goodwill, although I think they have been on that path for a while now.
by alvises | 2025-08-29 17:18:33+00:00
Train a license-plate detector from scratch with YOLOX object detection models, on a public ~7k image dataset. In this video I start from a clean machine, install everything, configure YOLOX, fine-tune on plates, debug the usual setup hiccups, export to ONNX, evaluate real metrics (mAP/AP50-95) and finally run the model on dashcam footage.
by nickff | 2025-08-29 17:18:42+00:00
I think you hit the nail on the head when you mention the complexities of the business being the cause for the inefficiencies. Private Equity has figured out that they can buy into businesses with high legal, regulatory, and 'friction'-related barriers to entries, and squeeze the clients (either by increasing prices or decreasing service level/quality). The solution would be to make entry into these businesses easier by reducing legal and regulatory barriers, but that seems vanishingly unlikely.
by ehnto | 2025-08-29 17:19:13+00:00
No one gave them permission to access their webservers back then either. Before it's cited that there is precedent in law, that is in the US. No such precedent exists in my country, and our laws suggest that unauthorized access regardless of "gates up or down" would constitute trespassing. There are also no protections for scrapers coming out of prior lawsuits, and copying copyrighted material is of course illegal.

Which is just to point out that the world wide web is not its own jurisdiction, and I believe AI companies are going to be finding that an ongoing problem. Unlike search, there is no symbiosis here, so there is an incentive to sue. The original IP holders do not benefit in any way. Search was different in that way.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-29 17:19:17+00:00
If we price the extra travel time at the level of US minimum wage, $7.25/hr, the extra ~15 hours of travel alone would add up to a price tag of $100. And if you don't have a bullet train, then the time-economy gets even worse.

That sure seems like it explains a lot about the state of US passenger rail.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-08-29 17:19:35+00:00
Communism does not take off in stable prosperous societies because there isn't a market for it.

I'm more careful with those kinds of generalizations these days than I used to be. As a rule, Trump-like demagogues don't win elections in stable, prosperous societies, either. It always takes some kind of crisis -- a lost war, oppressive debt, ruined national self-image, runaway inflation, intolerable abuse by the incumbent regime -- yet here we are.

Propaganda is more powerful than I thought it was... and who's better at propaganda than the Communists?
by sdesol | 2025-08-29 17:19:36+00:00
> Actually, chunking isn't such a bad problem with code, it chunks itself, and code embeddings produce better results.

I can't remember what post I read this in (but it was on Hacker News) and I read when designing Claude Code, they (Anthropic) tried a RAG approach but it didn't work very well compared to loading in the full file. If my understanding of how Claude Code works is correct (this was based on comments from others), was it "greps like a intern/junior developer". So what Claude Code does (provided grep is the key), is it would ask Sonnet for keywords to grep for based on the users query. And it would continuously revise the grep key words until it was satisfied with the files that it found.

As ridiculous as this sounds, this approach is not horrible, albeit very inefficient. For my approach, I focus on capturing intent which is what grep can't match. And for RAG, if the code is not chunked correctly and/or if the code is just badly organized, you may miss the true intent for the code.
by pempem | 2025-08-29 17:19:46+00:00
This is so intensely misleading.

The trains are new. The wires etc they run on aren't. When there's funding to update those, the trains will run faster.

If this was done in the opposite way, we likely would still be working on infrastructure (it's a bigger project) and the trains would still not run faster cuz they would be old.

We need to hold the fourth estate to better account.