MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrangle | 2025-08-02 20:19:57+00:00
That sounds sort of noble, perhaps, but that's not how it works. Ignoring the fact that there is more than enough time in childhood for what you propose, reading, and much else.

Cognitive development is a process, of which language development and reading are a major subset. That development is always in-process.

The longer that one waits to start children down the path of language development skills, the lesser the chance that they will be able to fully develop their potential for that skill.

For example if you speak to a child less than you should or could, that child's language and overall cognitive development will be significantly disadvantaged when compared to a child with similar potential but much more attentive parents.

Think of a disability where one hears less language, and then research developmental outcomes for that group.

The same carries over to reading skill. The earlier that you start, and the more that they get, both listening and eventually reading themselves, the much higher likelihood that they will become an advanced reader.

You aren't jamming them up. You are giving them an immense lifelong gift. In addition to attending to a significant cognitive need.

And again, plenty of children raised with reading are also commonly taught be adept at technical and manual skills. Most people would choose a smarter mechanic, who among other things has the proficiency to read complex documentation.

Kids want to be read stories at night. Its a major developmental need. You should read stories to your kids. Then, when they are ready, you should buy them simple books like comics. Then age appropriate books as they are ready. Content doesn't matter so much. It's mostly the volume of reading that matters. Every little bit helps.
by softwaredoug | 2025-08-02 20:20:11+00:00
So far what I've noticed with Claude Code is not _productivity gains_ but _gains in my thoughtfulness_

As in the former is hyped, but the latter - stopping to ask questions, reflect, what should we do - is really powerful. I find I'm more thoughtful, doing deeper research, and asking deeper questions than if I was just hacking something together on the weekend that I regretted later.
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-02 20:20:33+00:00
I agree, but if the streets are set up accordingly, it's about as fast as you'd normally want to drive anyway.

For the standard US road with 12-foot-wide lanes and generally straight-ahead routes, 20mph does feel very slow. I've driven on some roads though where narrower lanes, winding paths, and other "traffic calming" features contribute to a sense that 20mph is a reasonable speed.
by jebarker | 2025-08-02 20:20:58+00:00
I started looking at camping trailers recently to tow with my Rivian. I quickly went off the idea when I realized that each time I’d need to charge en-route I’d have to find somewhere to park the camper, unhitch, go charge, then do it all in reverse. That’s going to add at least 20 mins to each charging session. None of this is necessary if I were filling with gas. For typical places I go camping here in CO that could be two or three times per journey direction.
by pama | 2025-08-02 20:21:12+00:00
That’s a great reminder that what humans consider random and what is a truly random sets of states with high entropy are typically different things. In this case out of 43 quintillion combinations, there’s only 48 that fit the human imposed random criteria. In the case of passwords, websites typically ask for lots of additional constraints in what a password must have leading to dramatic reductions in the brute force effort required to find a password.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-02 20:21:58+00:00
> 50 km/h to 30 km/h on a city commute doesn't make a substantial difference.

This seems like a weird argument. If your commute is an hour at 50 km/h then it's an hour and 40 minutes at 30 km/h, every day, each way. That seems like... quite a lot?
by scotty79 | 2025-08-02 20:22:12+00:00
You might overestimate how clever human instincts are. You might paint rock red and a bird will go through entirety of mating ritual. Can't the bird see that it's a rock? I doubt it can't with it's superior eyes. But "needs" aren't triggered by high level brain functions. Triggers are usually very primitive. And many were found for humans. Lots of low level cravings are already solved by games. Yearning for a human is not unique in any way. A voice with correct vocal patterns and frequencies might do the trick.
by renox | 2025-08-02 20:22:20+00:00
> I am more interested in its explanation, now that the theory has been proven correct again and again.

What do you call an explanation? An interpretation of QM? There are dozens but none are especially satisfying..

As for the 'delayed choices' IMHO it is a poor interpretation of the data: see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQv5CVELG3U for example.
by Strilanc | 2025-08-02 20:22:41+00:00
The standard explanation for light "knowing" the angle of diffraction is that actually light just propagates in every direction and then constructive interference is stronger for paths near the shortest path because its length is more consistent when the path is perturbed (meaning the phases of the perturbed paths tend to agree more so they add up instead of cancelling). I don't think you even need quantum mechanics for this; it occurs in classical wave optics.

You can see Feynman explaining mirrors this way in recorded lectures [1]. There's also a recent Veritaseum video explaining why the shortest paths dominate [2].

1: https://youtu.be/SsMYBWpsQu0?si=o1eAEvESwjroTke3&t=2251

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q10_srZ-pbs
by PaulKeeble | 2025-08-02 20:22:41+00:00
I recently switched ISP to one that supports IPv6 and I have had nothing but problems. I have had DNS servers going missing from OpenDNS, I have seen all sorts of really weird routing errors and transient problems, its barely usable at all. Linux seems to be more strict about how it handles IPv6 and I found my server couldn't find its upgrade packages because some of their mirrors are broken for IPv6 routing. All in all it was a mess and I turned it off. My ISP must be partially at fault but it was clear Debian was too as was OpenDNS and most of my problems no one could explain what was happening or why.
by apparent | 2025-08-02 20:22:42+00:00
This is the result of the winner-take-all (most) economy. If the very best LLM is 1.5x as good as good as the next-best, then pretty much everyone in the world will want to use the best one. That means billions of dollars of profit hang in the balance, so companies want to make sure they get the very best people (even if they have to pay hundreds of millions to get it).

It's the same reason that sports stars, musicians, and other entertainers that operate on a global scale make so much more money now than they did 100 years ago. They are serving a market that is thousands of times larger than their predecessors did, and the pay is commensurately larger.
by whizzter | 2025-08-02 20:22:46+00:00
Not necessarily, ASE is has a smooth UI that people like and as long as you're fine within the constraints.

This one is great since it allows for in-editor previewing of "weird" ideas, I know I've re-invented that UV-mapping workflow shown with the skeleton on the page once for a game-jam and wanted to use it but skipped it in the end since asset-creation was "annoying", having support in an editor to preview it easily can be a game-changer.
by kens | 2025-08-02 20:23:09+00:00
The application note gives more details [1], but I find it a bit confusing. The idea is that as long as you are within about +/- 100 kHz of the station (a wide range), the radio will lock onto the right frequency (because of the frequency-locked loop), giving the nominally 70 kHz IF. Since the 70 kHz signal doesn't vary much over a half-wavelength (as you said), the correlator will be happy. The correlator will still stay locked as the IF varies +/- 15 kHz with the audio signal. (The correlator doesn't require a perfect match, just mostly matching.)

The problem is that if you mis-tune the radio by 100 kHz or so, the FM detector will give you an output, but it will be distorted. The issue is that the FM detector is linear over a small range, but outside that range, you get non-linear side lobes. So if you tune to a side-lobe frequency, the radio will lock onto the frequency, but the output will have harmonic distortion. In this case, the IF frequency is way off from 70 kHz, enough that the delayed signal and the inverted signal don't match at all, so the correlation fails and mutes the audio. Then you'd re-tune and find the right frequency.

[1] See Figures 8-12. Link: https://www.tel.uva.es/personales/tri/radio_TDA7000.pdf
by stouset | 2025-08-02 20:24:29+00:00
If this were the case, you’d see more trucks with wear and tear on them and fewer with five years in and pristine paint jobs. Most people buy trucks as a lifestyle choice, not as a practical one.

That’s not to say there aren’t real uses for trucks, or people who use them for their designed purpose.

That’s also not to say people should be required to purchase only vehicles that meet their basic transportation requirements. People drive sports cars even without ever going out to a track.

Trucks (and full-size SUVs) specifically push some pretty crappy externalities onto other road users, so it’s not exactly crazy to be annoyed with people who buy and drive big trucks a personality trait.
by chojeen | 2025-08-02 20:24:41+00:00
I really don't get a lot of this criticism. For example, who is using iceberg with hundreds of concurrent committers, especially at the scale mentioned in the article (10k rows per second)? Using iceberg or any table format over object storage would be insane in that case. But for your typical spark application, you have one main writer (the spark driver) appending or merging a large number of records in > 1 minute microbatches and maybe a handful of maintenance jobs for compaction and retention; Iceberg's concurrency system works fine there.

If you have any use case like one the author describes, maybe use an in-memory cloud database with tiered storage or a plain RDBMS. Iceberg (and similar formats) work great for the use cases for which they're designed.
by voxl | 2025-08-02 20:25:05+00:00
Slippery Slope is a logical fallacy. This is an undeniable fact. There is no syllogistic, propositional, predicate, or type theoretic argument you can make that uses a slippery slope to derive a theorem.

Of course, we are not doing proper logic, which is why I balk at bringing up fallacies anyway, it's bad form and idiotic. Nevertheless, the argument that we shouldn't try to improve safety on the roads because that would lead us to the conclusion that we need to ban driving altogether is so incredibly pathetic that you should feel embarrassed for defending it.
by fooker | 2025-08-02 20:25:12+00:00
Presumably this would need some advancements in formal verification to make sure the results are correct.

But ignoring that for now, LLMs can already do better than modern compilers when it comes to optimizing code.

It has become a neat way of finding opportunities to implement in a compiler.

Give the LLM a compiler generated piece of assembly and it will sometimes spit out a slightly better version. Then you try and figure out if it's possible to implement it in the compiler. This works really well for blind spots in compilers like generating good vectorized code.
by dceddia | 2025-08-02 20:25:13+00:00
Sketch, CleanShot, and Jetbrains come to mind as software that uses this model. It seems the most fair to me: pay once, get forever usage of the software, and one year of free updates. After that, additional years of updates are often a discounted rate.

An issue I ran into when I tried this with my software is that it’s not a very common model so people didn’t really get it. They’d call it a subscription, or they’d call it lifetime, and some got very angry when I mentioned anything about renewing for updates.

It’s a hard thing to describe succinctly, and it’s even harder to ensure that description survives the game of telephone as they tell their friends/followers.
by renewiltord | 2025-08-02 20:25:28+00:00
I have a Subaru Forester. When I drive a sedan everyone shines their headlamps into my face. I parked my Forester behind a sedan and drove back and forth. My lights were not in their cabin.

So other people drive in a way that is not compatible with my driving because I don’t want headlamps in my cabin. Occasionally there’s a lifted truck behind me and it brightens my cabin.

In those moments I fantasize about placing retroreflectors all over my rear seat headrests but then I pull over and let them past and the moment passes.

Besides, a HN truism is “Yield to gross tonnage”. I liked that. It makes sense that HN users who believe that if you’re big others should get out of the way also get large cars.

“The cemeteries are full of people with right of way” so smaller vehicles should get out of the way of larger vehicles or risk death. It’s a good lesson. Can’t say it’s false.
by ddejohn | 2025-08-02 20:26:16+00:00
Completely agreed. The codebase I work on really badly abused multiple inheritance all over the place. Some of our classes are 5+ layers of inheritance deep.

All the code I've written since joining has used `typing.Protocol` over ABCs, simple dependency injection (i.e., no DI framework), no inheritance anywhere, and of course extensive type annotations... and our average test coverage has gone from around 6% to around 45%.

It's honestly baffling to see how insanely over-complicated most of the Python is that I see out in the wild, especially when you consider that like 90% of the apps out there are just CRUD apps.
by IvyMike | 2025-08-02 20:26:18+00:00
> When I was an undergraduate at MIT I loved it. I thought it was a great place, and I wanted to go to graduate school there too, of course. But when I went to Professor Slater and told him of my intentions, he said, "We won’t let you in here."

> I said, "What?"

> Slater said, "Why do you think you should go to graduate school at MIT?"

> "Because MIT is the best school for science in the country."

> "You think that?"

> "Yeah."

> "That's why you should go to some other school. You should find out how the rest of the world is."

-- Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman
by HPsquared | 2025-08-02 20:28:24+00:00
My biases were that Eastern Europeans like a drink, I was surprised to see the laws. I already knew about Nordics and my hometown, Glasgow.

Public drinking is generally illegal in Poland ('police take a strict approach'), Romania, Lithuania, Slovakia (apparently not enforced in Slovakia).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_in_public
by scotty79 | 2025-08-02 20:29:38+00:00
I'm a person that doesn't need others. Occasional online chat few times a week with 2-3 of my friends basically fulfills my needs completely.

When reading about this I'm w bit afraid that my adoption of AI will be stifled because I don't need people. It kept me out of almost all of the social networks already.

While I don't care about people or social networks I would really like to not miss on AI.
by impure-aqua | 2025-08-02 20:30:05+00:00
Documentation on features your SQL dialect supports and key requirements for your query are very important for incentivizing it to generate the output you want.

As a recent example, I am working on a Rust app with integrated DuckDB, and asked it to implement a scoring algorithm query (after chatting with it to generate a Markdown file "RFC" describing how the algorithm works.) It started the implementation with an absolute minimal SQL query that pulled all metrics for a given time window.

I questioned this rather than accepting the change, and it said its plan was to implement the more complex aggregation logic in Rust because 1) it's easier to interpret Rust branching logic than SQL statements (true) and 2) because not all SQL dialects include EXP(), STDDEV(), VAR() support which would be necessary to compute the metrics.

The former point actually seems like quite a reasonable bias to me, personally I find it harder to review complex aggregations in SQL than mentally traversing the path of data through a bunch of branches. But if you are familiar with DuckDB you know that 1) it does support these features and 2) the OLAP efficiency of DuckDB makes it a better choice for doing these aggregations in a performant way than iterating through the results in Rust, so the initial generated output is suboptimal.

I informed it of DuckDB's support for these operations and pointed out the performance consideration and it gladly generated the (long and certainly harder to interpret) SQL query, so it is clearly quite capable, just needs some prodding to go in the right direction.
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-02 20:30:40+00:00
>the importance of exercising the right to vote - especially if your ancestors didn't enjoy the right

So we shouldn't talk about the 19th Amendment[0] because it's no longer an issue because your mom, sister, wife and daughter are now allowed to vote? As such, we should actively stop talking about the fact that there was ~150 years of activism, protest and discussion before half the population was "allowed" to participate in the political life of the US?

Is that your contention? If not, claiming that we should ignore those same issues around the right of indigenous peoples to vote seems more than a little hypocritical.

Your thoughts on this would be appreciated. Thanks!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
by necovek | 2025-08-02 20:30:42+00:00
That's not how markets work (and I disagree that it would be reasonable).

Price is usually established based on how much something cost to make (materials, effort, profit), combined with market conditions (abundance/shortage of products, surplus cash/tough economy...).

If you want to continuously extract profit from consistent use of a hammer or vacuum cleaner, somebody else will trivially make a competing product at a lower price with no subscription.
by amluto | 2025-08-02 20:31:34+00:00
A lot of modern “trucks” are pretty crappy for actually hauling anything. A few months ago I had the pleasure of loading some furniture into an Escalade. The outside is huge, but the inside is remarkably small. The height of the interior floor is also ridiculous, so it’s extra difficult to lift anything into the vehicle. I don’t think most full size pickups are a lot better.

Also, check out the underside of most of these monster vehicles. The approach, breakover, and departure angles may be awesome, but that’s only because the definitions assume uniform height transverse to the driving direction. If you drive these things over any substantial bump that the wheels don’t go over, the differential will bottom out. Oops. This means that, for many practical purposes, the height of the vehicle and the absurd suspensions don’t buy nearly as much capability as they might appear to.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-08-02 20:31:40+00:00
It may feel like you aren’t going very fast, but at the end of the day you’re probably only arriving at your location a couple of minutes later than you normally would and when applied at scale this could potentially save thousands if not tens of thousands of lives a year depending on how widely this is adopted. Hell maybe hundreds of thousands, but I don’t know the numbers well enough to make a claim that high, seems steep at first glance.

Surely we can agree the pros outweigh the cons here? I can wake up 5-10 minutes earlier for safer roads.
by cflewis | 2025-08-02 20:31:47+00:00
Agreed. The most unique thing I find with vibecoding is not that it presses all the keyboard buttons. That’s a big timesaver, but it’s not going to make your code “better” as it has no taste. But what it can do is think of far more possibilities than you can far quicker. I love saying “this is what I need to do, show me three to five ways of doing it as snippets, weigh the pros and cons”. Then you pick one and let it go. No more trying the first thing you think of, realizing it sucks after you wrote it, then back to square one.

I use this with legacy code too. “Lines n—n+10 smell wrong to me, but I don’t know why and I don’t know what to do to fix it.” Gemini has done well for me at guessing what my gut was upset about and coming up with the solution. And then it just presses all the buttons. Job done.
Show HN: Shiproom – A Browser-Based Cloud IDE with File-Level Access Control
by adityakumarr | 2025-08-02 20:32:03+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m experimenting with an idea that’s been on my mind for a while — what if developers could jump into a shared codebase without being overwhelmed by everything at once?

I’ve built a prototype called Shiproom — a local, browser-based IDE where access to files and folders is controlled at a granular level. Instead of seeing the whole project, each user only sees the parts they’re allowed to. No setup, no distractions, no access to sensitive stuff like .env or core business logic unless it's needed. What Shiproom (Prototype) Does: Simulates a cloud dev environment with instant onboarding.

Uses a mock file system with user-based access control. You can switch between users to see how their file access differs. Files are fully hidden if not allowed, or marked read-only if view-only. Runs Monaco Editor (like VS Code in the browser) entirely locally. Includes a dummy 2-page app to simulate real-world modular projects.

Why?

Most cloud IDEs today give you the entire repo the moment you're onboarded — which can be overwhelming for juniors, unnecessary for interns, and risky in security-sensitive environments.

With Shiproom, the idea is simple: show people only what they need — and nothing more.

This could be useful for:

Dev teams onboarding new engineers Bootcamps giving students a focused coding view Secure contract development environments Even pair programming with role separation

What It Isn’t (Yet)

This is just a prototype — there’s no real authentication, no server-side isolation, and no actual code execution. It’s a simulation of the experience, running locally on Node.js + Vanilla JS. But it shows how the concept could work.

Would love feedback or thoughts. Does this use case resonate with anyone? If it’s useful, I’m thinking of turning it into a real service with:

Auth, Git integration, isolated containers Team-based permissions Developer onboarding templates

Thanks!
by didibus | 2025-08-02 20:32:34+00:00
I'm curious what's the difference between "observational science" and "cognitive science"?

I assume it means the former is just one person theorizing from his personal experience as a teacher? That's what we call "observational science"?

Where as the cognitive labs, they tried to setup some experiments and did some double blind? Or was it more looking at brain activation?
by M4v3R | 2025-08-02 20:32:40+00:00
Not with Claude Code but with Cursor using Claude Sonnet 4 I coded an entire tower defense game, title, tutorial, gameplay with several waves of enemies, and a “rewind time” mechanic. The whole thing was basically vibe coded, I touched maybe a couple dozen lines of code. Apparently it wasn’t terrible [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44463967
by giancarlostoro | 2025-08-02 20:33:23+00:00
If you are a Senior Developer, who is comfortable giving a Junior tips, and then guiding them to fixing them (or just stepping in for a brief moment and writing where they missed something) this is for you. I'm hearing from Senior devs all over thought, that Junior developers are just garbage at it. They product slow, insecure, or just outright awful code with it, and then they PR the code they don't even understand.

For me the sweet spot is for boilerplate (give me a blueprint of a class based on a description), translate a JSON for me into a class, or into some other format. Also "what's wrong with this code? How would a Staff Level Engineer white it?" those questions are also useful. I've found bugs before hitting debug by asking what's wrong with the code I just pounded on my keyboard by hand.