MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-04 14:25:41+00:00
Other languages caught up with PHP.

As I remember it all the early languages that let you write code inline with the HTML were proprietary such as server-side Javascript built into Netscape's web server, ColdFusion, ASP, etc.

PHP was the first of these that was open source and basically competent which made it my #1 choice for making web applications in 2001. Compared to many other languages (say cgi-bin) it was pretty fast without a build step and had enough resource management that hosting firms could offer cheap PHP hosting plans which made world-changing open source products like Wordpress deployable.

It got long in the tooth quickly because people realized that to make quality web applications you had to have a part of your framework (a "router") which could serve different pages based on the inputs. For example, if you are doing server-side error handling on a form you either display a form that says "successful" or you re-display the form with error messages. You certainly can write PHP that does that if you have some discipline, but once you introduce a router you might as well write your "views" with some kind of templating system and after ruby-on-rails every language got frameworks, typically Sinatra-like, which were about as comfortable as PHP and that pushed you into having some discipline.
by ploynog | 2025-08-04 14:25:49+00:00
Being daft on purpose? I haven't heard that using an alternative browser suddenly increases the traffic that a user generates by several orders of magnitude to the point where it can significantly increase hosting cost. A web scraper on the other hand easily can and they often account for the majority of traffic especially on smaller sites.

So your comparison is at least naive assuming good intentions or malicious if not.
by dec0dedab0de | 2025-08-04 14:25:51+00:00
I think the federal reserve is too close to the status quo to be effective for this. It is owned by the federally chartered banks, the same ones that all have longstanding relationships with the current payment processors.

A government organization like the mint should be in charge of the layer 1 of money transfer. Let the current providers adapt and sell their other services on top of it. It could be crypto, copy the existing systems, or be something new all together. It doesn't even have to be free, they could add in a small transfer tax or whatever. The point is that any person or business should be able to send money to any other, for any reason. At the very least within the country.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-04 14:26:03+00:00
> I am managing projects in languages I am not fluent in—TypeScript, Rust and Go—and seem to be doing pretty well.

> It seems that typed, compiled, etc. languages are better suited for vibecoding, because of the safety guarantees. This is unsurprising in hindsight, but it was counterintuitive because by default I “vibed” projects into existence in Python since forever

[...]

> For example, I refactored large chunks of our TypeScript frontend code at TextCortex. Claude Code runs tsc after finishing each task and ensures that the code compiles before committing. This let me move much faster compared to how I would have done it in Python, which does not provide compile-time guarantees.

While Python doesn't have a required compulation step, it has both a standard type system and typecheckers for it (mypy, etc.) that are ubiquitous in the community and could be run at the same point in the process.

I would say it's not just Rust, TypeScript, and Go that the author has a weak foundation in.
by mpalmer | 2025-08-04 14:26:32+00:00
It seems like you're treating your personal knowledge and preferences as the basis for Valve to take on an entirely new source of revenue and risk. It's a fantasy.

Even if 100% of Valve's user base cared as much as you (they do not), why would Valve take on the massive risk of connecting to its users' bank accounts? Of having to collect on debts? etc.
by ben_w | 2025-08-04 14:26:55+00:00
> Now that it’s become impossible to pretend that a fœtus is anything other than a separate human, the debate has become about whether it’s a justified homicide or not.

This is a very theocratic answer.

I know zero people who regard a fetus as "a separate human". Last time I did, it was the 90s and I was in a Catholic secondary school in the UK. Since then, even famously-Catholic Ireland has liberalised their abortion laws.

That one can also make an argument that says "it doesn't even matter if you think they're a separate human or not, we don't force people do donate kidneys and that has the same risk as a pregnancy", doesn't change the fact that even thinking a foetus is a person is primarily a religious position at this point.
by Den_VR | 2025-08-04 14:26:58+00:00
You can limit access, sure: with ACLs, putting content behind login, certificate based mechanisms, and at the end of the day -a power cord-.

But really, controlling which automated retrieval tools are allowed has always been more of a code of honor than a technical control. And that trust you mention has always been broken. For as long as I can remember anyway. Remember LexiBot and AltaVista?
by burnte | 2025-08-04 14:27:23+00:00
> Something my doctor friends remind me of from time to time is how disconnected their actual workflows are from whatever system the money folks decided to buy.

There are two ways EMRs get made. They start from the money side and grow into clinical, or they start in clinical and grow into finance. This means however they started, that's what it'll be strong in.

I would absolutely love to get to help design an EMR. A huge part of my job is finding ways to help our clinical staff spend less time in the EMR and more with patients. There's so much room for improvement, but it's a hard market to crack.
by echelon | 2025-08-04 14:27:46+00:00
Hollywood is nepo land.

That's not fair. Do you know how many dreamers and artists and great ideas wither away on the vine? It's tragic.

Movies are going to be like books today. And that's not a bad thing.

Distribution is always the hard part. Indie games, indie music. You've still got to market yourself and find your audience.

But the difference is that now it's possible. And you don't have to obey some large capital distributor and mind their oversight and meddling.
by lolive | 2025-08-04 14:27:58+00:00
They are the tools why PalantirFoundry is worth every penny

[not entirely true note: PalantirFoundry is a lowCode/noCode stack on top of a Spark cluster]

Pipeline Builder : https://youtu.be/WIQA7u1tbsY?si=iG-N9xHpUPPVAqDX

OntologyManager: https://youtu.be/SOW0IA_I0bk?si=u5eha0o-yrn4pHvu

Workshop: https://youtu.be/Uh0zpMUR6wY?si=BClTTbch70ZolRCb
by yojo | 2025-08-04 14:28:06+00:00
Ads are a problematic business model, and I think your point there is kind of interesting. But AI companies disintermediating content creators from their users is NOT the web I want to replace it with.

Let’s imagine you have a content creator that runs a paid newsletter. They put in lots of effort to make well-researched and compelling content. They give some of it away to entice interested parties to their site, where some small percentage of them will convert and sign up.

They put the information up under the assumption that viewing the content and seeing the upsell are inextricably linked. Otherwise there is literally no reason for them to make any of it available on the open web.

Now you have AI scrapers, which will happily consume and regurgitate the work, sans the pesky little call to action.

If AI crawlers win here, we all lose.
by gruez | 2025-08-04 14:28:09+00:00
>I do not really get why user-agent blocking measures are despised for browsers but celebrated for agents?

AI broke the brains of many people. The internet isn't a monolith, but prior to the AI boom you'd be hard pressed to find people who were pro-copyright (except maybe a few who wanted to use it to force companies to comply with copyleft obligations), pro user-agent restrictions, or anti-scraping. Now such positions receive consistent representation in discussions, and are even the predominant position in some places (eg. reddit). In the past, people would invoke principled justifications for why they opposed those positions, like how copyright constituted an immoral monopoly and stifled innovation, or how scraping was so important to interoperability and the open web. Turns out for many, none of those principles really mattered and they only held those positions because they thought those positions would harm big evil publishing/media companies (ie. symbolic politics theory). When being anti-copyright or pro-scraping helped big evil AI companies, they took the opposite stance.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-04 14:28:16+00:00
LLMs have successfully finally taken the last ounce of "engineering" from software engineering. Now what we have is "lgtm-ing", which is a great selling point for LLMs.

You notice how LLMs do good on small tasks and on small projects? The more LLM code you add to your projects, the slower and worse (read: more tokens) they perform. If this was by design (create bigger, unmaintainable projects, so you can slowly squeeze out more and more tokens out of your users), I'd have applauded the LLM creators, but I think it's by accident. Still funny though.
by rayiner | 2025-08-04 14:28:37+00:00
> That's still voting, which is the portion Thiel wants to remove.

The founders themselves provided for a narrow franchise!

> But based on other comments where you call Republican dismantling of the US government right now just "Orwellian doublespeak", you're just couching a bunch of your right-wing tendencies

What is being dismantled? Executive agencies and ancillary entities that are 90% controlled by democrats regardless of who wins the election. There's nothing anti-democratic about that!

I'm not "couching" anything. I'm quite openly right wing! But the right-wing guy won the election, promising to do right-wing things! The entities that are preventing him from doing right-wing things definitionally are anti-democratic. Put differently, what some people really mean when they say "democracy" is "liberal democracy." A system of government where the people are allowed to vote for massive taxes to pay for universal healthcare, but not for mass deportations of illegal immigrants.
by Y-bar | 2025-08-04 14:28:43+00:00
I have knowingly voted for less freedoms for myself multiple times and I know it, for example I have voted:

- to have less freedom to pollute the environment.

- to have less freedom where I am able to defraud my customers.

- to have less freedom to have less ability to lie about medical "benefits" of fake cures.

I am also a big proponent of freedom-limiting legislation like GDPR which prevents myself and my employer from secretly collecting and processing your personal information.

And I am currently part of the "Stop Killing Games" initiative which will hopefully restrict the freedom of games companies to sunset and withdraw purchases without a clear roadmap or similar remedy.
by 827a | 2025-08-04 14:28:48+00:00
> “The truth is, if you want a job, you’re gonna go through this thing,” Adam Jackson, CEO and founder of Braintrust, a company that distributes AI interviewers, tells Fortune.

The fatalism in tech right now is an actual cancer. Very few people, least of all Adam Jackson, are intelligent enough to actually use these tools for what they're good at, and let humans handle what humans are good at. If we can't put AI everywhere, we can't justify the capital inflows, so the capital inflows preconclude that AI must go everywhere, and if it must go everywhere then it must be good at everything.
by JimDabell | 2025-08-04 14:29:07+00:00
No. The key difference is that if a user asks about a specific page, when Perplexity fetches that page, it is being operated by a human not acting as a crawler. It doesn’t matter how many times this happens or what they do with the result. If they aren’t recursively fetching pages, then they aren’t a crawler and robots.txt does not apply to them. robots.txt is not a generic access control mechanism, it is designed solely for automated clients.
by sbarre | 2025-08-04 14:29:07+00:00
All of these scenarios assume you have an unconditional right to access the content on a website in whatever way you want.

Do you think you do?

Or is there a balance between the owner's rights, who bears the content production and hosting/serving costs, and the rights of the end user who wishes to benefit from that content?

If you say that you have the right, and that right should be legally protected, to do whatever you want on your computer, should the content owner not also have a legally protected right to control how, and by who, and in what manner, their content gets accessed?

That's how it currently works in the physical world. It doesn't work like that in the digital world due to technical limitations (which is a different topic, and for the record I am fine with those technical limitations as they protect other more important rights).

And since the content owner is, by definition, the owner of the content in question, it feels like their rights take precedence. If you don't agree with their offering (i.e. their terms of service), then as an end user you don't engage, and you don't access the content.

It really can be that simple. It's only "difficult to solve" if you don't believe a content owner's rights are as valid as your own.
by exasperaited | 2025-08-04 14:29:21+00:00
I am not struggling to believe it at all. Because I am an old guy with a CS degree but decades of web development experience. Apparently this is called being "a legacy developer".

This is the logical conclusion of the indiscipline of undereducated developers who have copied and pasted throughout their career.

This reality is then expressed as "but humans also copy and paste" as if this makes it OK to just hand that task over now to an AI that might do it better, where the solution is to train people to not copy and paste.

Everything about AI is the same story, over and over again: just pump it out. Consequences are what lawyers are for.

It's really interesting to me that within basically a generation we've gone from people sneering at developers with old fashioned, niche development skills and methodologies (fortran, cobol, Ada) to sneering at people with the old-fashioned mindset that knowing what your code is doing is a fundamental facet of the job.
by ferguess_k | 2025-08-04 14:29:32+00:00
This has been our concern since last year when 15cm of rain poured over Montreal in just one day. Not too much for some other cities but definitely a disaster for Southern Quebec. Whole municipalities were flooded and whole streets of house owners had to worry about backflow from the main plumbing pipelines.

The problem is, the infra simply cannot handle that amount of precipitation. I doubt the city has the backbone to solve the issue other than adding a few pieces of mini-forests to absorb the water. What is worse is that even the highways cannot handle such amount -- actually it could handle far less than that, and improving highways is even more expensive.
by bombcar | 2025-08-04 14:29:50+00:00
Even if Bluey was strange Australian propaganda to make fatherhood desirable and respectable, it still wins because it actually works at it.

Avoiding the "dumb sitcom dad" has been done before a few times, and well (Bob Parr of Incredibles; Stoick the Vast of How to Train Your Dragon; King Fergus of Brave could be some examples) - but Bandit just is a dad; he's not perfect, he's not brilliant - but he's there (except when he has to leave) and he loves - his children, his wife, himself.

And even though he says "I'm not taking advice from a cartoon dog" we all end up doing so.
by guywithahat | 2025-08-04 14:30:00+00:00
I cannot think of anything worse than an official post office email I have to maintain. Do you not remember how many government sites would simply shut down after business hours because they couldn't figure out how to do on-call? Have you ever used US-treasury direct?

This site would be slow, the code base would be unmaintained, it'd get enormous amounts of spam you have to sort through to get some important tax document, and it would be down all the time. Think the line at the post office but for server up-times.

Similarly if the mint maintained a payment processor then they'd just create a legal monopoly (like the USPS did) and ban new processors. Not only would they be worse than VISA and MasterCard, but they'd make paypal and venmo illegal. Don't forget the USPS bans competitors from being cheaper than itself, and this is exactly what would happen if the Mint had its own payment processor.
by hexmiles | 2025-08-04 14:30:06+00:00
All (most?) Steam games have a very simple DRM that is extremely easy to bypass, and you can find examples on github.

However, a lot of games add their own DRM and/or protection scheme that complicates things.

EDIT: technically there are two distinct component: the actual DRM, called steamstub, and the steamwork library, that does not work without steam but it is not considered drm. Both can be easily bypassed/emulated.
by throwaway29303 | 2025-08-04 14:30:11+00:00
That's a cool project, OP.

I'd like to share other historic projects which I had a hard time searching for and they seem to be gone from most search engines (at the time I searched for them anyway):

https://archives.darenet.org/ (not available) https://arsiv.behroozwolf.net/index.php (it seems to be working)

Those are software repositories for a lot of IRC related projects from clients to servers and bots, etc.

Cheers.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-04 14:30:39+00:00
I’ve used PHP for more than 20 years. It’s my “go-to” language for the backend. I’m not a server programmer, and PHP is fast, well-supported, and, if you’re a decent programmer, you can write robust, secure, performant servers in it.

I also really don’t like the language. I’ve never warmed to it.

But I think it will still be around, as a principal backend language, for the next fifty years.

I feel like this graph says it all: https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programmin...

I call it "The Fishtank Graph," for obvious reasons.
by preommr | 2025-08-04 14:30:47+00:00
Not op, but I assume it means that there's rank polymorphism (i.e. data can be of arbitrary dimensions, and there's support for things like functions working on both N-dimensions, without having to specify n, or maybe setting constraints on n), and that the polymorphism can be used on the programmer side (so it's not limited to just a handful of language builtins) through the oop equivalent of subclasses and interfaces.
by josephg | 2025-08-04 14:30:53+00:00
There are plenty of great TV shows and movies set in London at least.

Its weird - I know about little american towns like Boulder, Colorado. I've never been there. But I know what it looks like because its featured - or at least mentioned - in plenty of movies and shows.

But the population of Boulder is just 100k. Australia has lots of way bigger cities - like Brisbane, Queensland (population 2.8 million) or Perth, WA (2.4 million) that are never depicted on screen. Even on Australian TV, I basically never see brissie or perth shown at all. I only know what they look like because I've visited.

But maybe that's normal in the english speaking world - at least outside the US. We've gotta raise our game and make more good content.
by Gareth321 | 2025-08-04 14:31:06+00:00
> These jobs are not going to return. 'The system' is too profitable in its current form.

The system is set up to ensure efficient allocation of capital. If it's more profitable for manufacturers to produce goods in-country, that is exactly what they will do. It's a bold claim that tariffs will have no impact whatsoever on investment and spending, because it's clear that they absolutely will.
by ilikehurdles | 2025-08-04 14:31:22+00:00
Why is our media literacy so in the gutter? A few second clip of an easily accessible and free interview from a NYT podcast would not be accepted as gospel fact in the hn of the past.

You may very well and with good reason disagree with Thiel on the downstream effects of climate regulating agreements/regimes on global productivity and liberty, but regurgitating “Greta is the Antichrist” just replaces discussions of interesting issues to yelling at shadow puppets in Plato’s cave.
by g_sch | 2025-08-04 14:31:24+00:00
What I'd really like to know is:

- how many people that currently work at your company had to go through an AI interviewer to get the job? - do referrals have to go through an AI interviewer too?

To me, this just smacks of a tool that increases the cost of cold-submitting your resume so companies can optimize for "preferred" hiring paths likeinternal referrals.
by BrunoRB | 2025-08-04 14:32:19+00:00
I'm not clear on the point you're making, but I do know that reading/reviewing is often more time-consuming and harder than actually writing code - at least if you're doing it right. Anyhow, I think we all just got too mesmerized with the LLM magic tricks and are slowly realizing that in real software writing we simply got a "slightly better stackoverflow". The claims of hyper-productivity are the same old ones of "I just copy and paste stuff other people wrote", i.e. people are just writing simple PoCs and really bad software - it's mostly bullshiters that couldn't and still can't do fizzbuzz. The real stuff continues to be written same way as before - and this is gonna become more and more apparent as the LLM garbage sneaks in more and more software.
by notahacker | 2025-08-04 14:32:28+00:00
Strictly speaking luxury goods are income elastic (by definition) but can be either price elastic or inelastic at different points on the pricing curve, with profit-maximising suppliers attempting to set prices at the level where it reaches unitary elasticity. But when we're talking about designer brands (as opposed to the strict economic definition of a 'luxury good' which encompasses most of the shoe market), they typically price above that level anyway to maintain "exclusivity". Hermes made a point of publicly stating that it would pass on 100% of tariffs costs to consumers, and whilst I haven't tracked Louboutin shoe prices I doubt their customer base for shoes costing 10x their less fashionable equivalent is going to permanently refuse to pay a 15% price increase. Particularly not when it also applies to the brand's closest competitor in the form of other trendy European designer shoe brands. I suspect the tariff-eating that occurs in the US fashion market will tend to be US-based retailers cutting their margins rather than the foreign brand cutting its wholesale prices too...

see also: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/012915/what-effect-...
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-08-04 14:32:58+00:00
The key is skin in the game. If a human interviews me, if they're wasting my time, they're also wasting their own. So they have some incentive not to do that. But if an AI interviews me, the humans have no incentive not to waste my time.

You want to have an AI interview me? No. It can interview my AI agent if you want, but not me. You want to interview me? Put a human on the line.
by zamadatix | 2025-08-04 14:33:26+00:00
The real loss was in the inability to sell the 90% of titles I no longer care about owning, but that's already true immediately after purchase.

Steam shutting down and taking your library with it really doesn't change much except you lose that nice delivery platform with good integrations (achievements, workshop mods, multiplayer integration, automatic updates) for games you're active in. For the 90% you were never going to touch again it wouldn't be noticeable, outside the annoying reminder you were never able to resell them. The other 10% just reverts back to "pirate it" which is about here on my scale:

"find that legal physical copy to play with" < "pirate it" < "click button on Steam"