MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by borroka | 2025-08-18 01:52:14+00:00
If I see where it is coming from, I am certainly shaming them for being disgusting, impolite, vulgar, and disrespectful to other people. I am not afraid of being confrontational. If the confrontation escalates, verbally, of course, so be it.

I don't share your passive acceptance of being treated like a fool by other people. There is not a single normal person in the world saying, "You know what, what we need now is somebody farting here". As the British leader said: "Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty".

Real change happens when people refuse to accept the erosion of their freedom and stand up against the abuses of others. Sometimes it is possible; other times, such as when it is not possible to identify the abuser, it is not, and we must carry on, but I hold close to my heart my right to indignation.

As I wrote before, many parallels can be drawn; it is not just about somebody gassing the other passengers on a plane. For example, using Bluetooth speakers in public spaces.

I recall that at work, I had a colleague who would put their bare feet on the desk, next to another colleague's. I told the affected colleague, who seemed reluctant to take a stand: "You tell them to put their feet down, get the respect you deserve". In the end, according to your Zen way of life, who cares? What are you gonna do, cut their feet? But I don't think I was wrong.
by kingofmen | 2025-08-18 01:52:33+00:00
> we'll need the people to actually fight the war itself.

Will we? It appears to me that modern war works substantially like modern factories - you don't actually want a large mass of semiskilled workers to pull the levers, each of which can substitute for a different one on about five minutes' notice. You want relatively few, highly-trained specialists to instruct the ~~robots~~ drones. It is perhaps less true in war than in manufacturing, quantity still has that quality all its own, but it seems very unclear that just raw numbers of soldiers will be an important bottleneck as between Great Powers.
by shirro | 2025-08-18 01:54:10+00:00
I don't understand the business case for fake meat. Surely it has to be really niche once the novelty has worn off. The market would seem to be meat for people who don't like meat? Isn't that like making sex bots in the gender people aren't attracted to for people who aren't attracted to that gender. And its all highly processed so people who like more "natural" foods aren't going to be that interested.

Surely people who are interested in eating less or no meat would prefer to eat briam or ratatouille than some weird textured protein burger. It's not like the burger is the peak of culinary sophistication.
by vunderba | 2025-08-18 01:54:36+00:00
The story plot was "Meeting a dragon". As both a human and a writer, challenge accepted:

Long ago, there lived a golden dragon whose fractal-like scales gleamed in the glow of the morning in her cave. She was known for her kindness, and many came not with sword or spear, but with humble requests - for you see, it was widely believed that the mystical scales of a dragon would heal illness, cure ailments, and provide fortune.

One such visitor timidly looked up at her great shining body and beseeched, "Oh glorious dragon, might I have a single scale?"

Of course, the dragon replied warmly. She delicately, almost lovingly, with a slight twinge, used a single claw to prise off a single golden scale, leaving a dull patch.

Over the eons, more and more people would come as supplicants. The scales were used for good luck, for warmth, to ward off evil, as the draconic equivalent of a rabbit's foot.

In the end, the poor dragon was stripped bare - the fire from her burning furnace now showed clearly through to her patchwork, sensitive, and naked skin.

When winter came, she huddled in the cold darkness. And still, when a peasant would come asking for a scale - just one, a single scale nothing more, she would not refuse. In her eternal generosity she would carefully break off another. This time it took longer to find one left upon her body, as the humans had stripped her bare like a tree come winter.

Then thus came a knight. "I'm sorry, good sir, but I have no scales left to give," she said pitiably.

"Why, your scale was a choking hazard and wasn’t labeled not for ages under 5! Prepare for a class-action lawsuit and also to be impaled upon a lance."

The End.

I'll pretend I intended it as a parable of the destructive nature of mass tourism or something something Lorax something something truffula trees.
by ndiddy | 2025-08-18 01:54:49+00:00
Here's a great video by Smarter Every Day that came out a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY . It's about his experience with the atrophying US industrial skillset while he tries to make a grill scrubber entirely in the United States. He brings up a few good points about manufacturing that I personally found compelling:

1. During Covid, medical supplies were in short supply, to the point where the US government was flying in individual airplanes from China full of N95 masks and face shields. The guy making the video knew that Alabama (where he lives) wouldn't be on the priority list for where the masks and face shields would get distributed. His community's initial response was to 3D print face shields and donate them to healthcare facilities, but they knew that they had to step up to actual manufacturing to produce the face shields in necessary volumes. He was only able to find a single aging technician in Alabama capable of producing injection molding tooling, which he then was able to use to mass produce enough face shields to supply Alabama and neighboring states. If that one guy had chosen to retire before Covid, they would have not been able to make the injection mold locally. At a time where global supply chains were massively disrupted, they would have been screwed.

2. When an American company gets their products made overseas, the factory overseas that manufactures the product owns the tooling. This means that they're able to fill your order during the day, then at night make exact clones of your product with lower quality materials and undercut you, and you have no recourse. He brings up an example of a local small business that had this happen to them. Even though they had a design patent, they needed their lawyer to continually send letters to get Amazon to take down no-name clones of their product (and then the seller would just pick a new random set of 6 characters to sell it under). If US companies have no choice but to get their products made in countries that don't care about IP, then we're not just giving up on manufacturing, we're also giving up on designing products in the US.

When he was trying to get the injection mold for his grill scrubber made, lots of companies in the US were willing to do the actual plastic manufacturing in the US, but could only get the injection mold tooling done in China. He brought up that in the past, an American company would build a machine and then ship it away to the developing world to be operated there. We've now reversed this, so the high-skill portion of manufacturing is done overseas and the only Americans involved are just pushing the buttons to operate the machine.
by lifthrasiir | 2025-08-18 01:55:44+00:00
The original spirit of Markdown was to use HTML elements (or custom elements if you like) for whatever is missing from Markdown. That's surprisingly versatile in hindsight, but the specification didn't fully anticipate what happens to Markdown contents inside such elements. Some implementations supported them, some didn't, some used the `markdown` pseudo-attribute, and so on. And it was even less clear how block syntaxes work inside HTML elements. (CommonMark defines a very lengthy list of rules for them [1].) Markdown could have been extensible... if it did have a sensible specification from beginning.

[1] https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#html-blocks
by hypeatei | 2025-08-18 01:56:01+00:00
> There are 340 million or so people in the United States - what’s the human capital problem?

As I mentioned, the unemployment rate is already low. Looking at total population numbers is a fools errand since not every single person is able to work (or willing)

> it’s not like America can’t issue seasonal work permits or something

How does that fare against the anti-immigration i.e. "only Americans should work these jobs" sentiment?

> and plenty of folks who would come work here.

Agreed.

> but if both parties get behind it, I don’t think it would matter too much.

That's pretty hand wavey and doesn't address the very price sensitive culture that the US voter base has.
by rglover | 2025-08-18 01:56:31+00:00
> why not use Bun and forget about node?

Because Node is controlled by and maintained via the OpenJS Foundation. Bun is a venture-backed startup. That would be fine, but multiple, direct requests from me to the founder (Jared) about what the business model is (what I personally need to say "yes" or "no") have gone without response every time.

That led me to the assumption that Bun may very well be technically superior (or at least on the track to being so), but I can't bet anything significant or long-term on it. I need to know that this isn't just an exit vehicle for the founder (masquerading as a desire to fix JS server runtimes). Silence to a simple (dare I say, obvious) question doesn't bode well.
by rocketvole | 2025-08-18 01:57:55+00:00
While I am disappointing, I'm not exactly surprised. I'm willing to bet that this is in response to the Windows 10 Mail App, which was a lightweight metro app that Microsoft depreciated to try to push people to use it's new outlook app. People hated it, so they downloaded older versions and shut off app updates. Eventually, Microsoft did a server side switch that essentially broke functionality on the old app with outlook emails, although other providers work fine (for now).
by dostick | 2025-08-18 01:57:58+00:00
The desktop companion is not the problem that needs to be solved. It seems that every developer who successfully used CC and go on to create some tool for it is doing it for the wrong reasons or because they have to do just something.

CC development is not just development, not all types of development. it’s frontend JS based , and it’s backend development. Only those scenarios work.

Try creating native desktop or mobile app and it’s like a swamp of trial and error.

You have to learn by trial and error what documentation sets and instructions you have to provide at which moment and context and balance at with token cost.. it’s a multi dimensional problem for which there are no recipes that work.

On top of that your direct instructions to not use particular patterns or approaches gets forgotten and ignored y CC with later “you’re right, I should have…”. I am starting to think it’s not solvable by the user by providing docs, examples and instructions. That Claude must have native development baked in to the same level as they baked in the frontend and backend.

What I am getting to is - make a tool to manage those doc sets and contexts and instructions and allow to share those sets between users globally as recipes.
by x-complexity | 2025-08-18 01:58:41+00:00
> So, an ai generated psuedo-game engine with a majority of users under the age of 13? I'm sure that WILL make a lot of money. Those of us who didn't grow up playing Roblox will find this comparison impossibly stupid.

> ...with a majority of users under the age of 13? I'm sure that WILL make a lot of money. > ... will find this comparison impossibly stupid.

I'm ignoring the insinuations here for obvious reasons.

1. Roblox is the newest (note: not necessarily the best) iteration of the genre that Secondlife & (to a limited extent) modded Minecraft servers occupy: An interactive 3D platform that permits user-generated content.

2. Generative models just accelerate their development up to the brick wall of complexity much faster.

> Some what related: im still amazed that no one has made a Roblox competitor

This comment is just the HN Dropbox phenomenon, *again*, only this time from the angle that thinks it's easy to build a "pseudo game-engine" from scratch.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Few competitors exist because of the moat they have built in making their platform easy to develop on, so much so that kids can use them with little issue.

> , as in, a vague social building game that tricks children into wasting money on ridiculous MTXs.

This part is entirely separate from the technical aspects of the platform. Roblox is a feces-covered silver bar, but the silver bar (their game platform) still exists.

> Maybe you are right, but I think that taking an already sorry state of affairs, and then removing the only imagination or STEM skills required by giving children access to GenAI.... is a really depressing thought.

This is a hyper-nihilistic opinion on children laid bare.

To think that the children (*with the dedication to make a game in the first place*) wouldn't try to learn about debugging the code that the models are spitting out, or that 100% of them would just stop writing their own code entirely, is a cynical viewpoint not worth any attention.
by viraptor | 2025-08-18 01:58:50+00:00
Fashion is a weird parallel universe. There's bad cheap hoodie, there's plain hoodie, there's influencer bad plain hoodie, then there's something like https://acrnm.com/S40-RS_FW2324 which is... who knows but it sure is expensive. (And they'd probably lose customers is they used usual influencers)
by lmm | 2025-08-18 01:59:02+00:00
computeIfAbsent doesn't need a second kind of absence because it can never return absence. That's fine if that API is a good fit for your use case, but it isn't always (there's a reason Map.get exists as well as Map.computeIfAbsent).

> I would personally argue that exposing the 2 levels of absence is exposing an implementation details

Probably you wouldn't want to return Option<Option<X>> (or Nullable) to outside callers - maybe you want to convert None to one kind of domain-meaningful error and Some(None) to a different kind of domain-meaningful error, maybe you want to take some different codepaths to respond to "recover" from the different kinds of absence.

But it's extremely valuable to be able to compose together existing libraries that might use absence to mean something and have them just do the right thing rather than always having to worry about the edge cases where one has a kind of absence that's subtly different from the other's kind of absence. I mean fundamentally you can't ever assume that a random third-party function in Java is safe to call with null, because many of them aren't. But you also can't ever assume that a random third-party function won't return null, because some of them do. So even to just compose two functions you've got to check their docs and think about the behaviour of this special value, and it's just all so avoidable.
by tough | 2025-08-18 02:00:23+00:00
> Is it still satisfying if that software is bad, or harms many of those people?

sadly many engineers might detach or feel powerless or simply not their part of the job, and only be attracted to the huge scale. sadly you can only ever work at that scale if you work for a few of the giants, of which mostly all do the same algorithmic dark patterns extraction methods shareholder benefit maximalism capitalism pushes them into
by thwarted | 2025-08-18 02:01:30+00:00
> I think this is similar to AI generated images: it puts a new creative tool in the hands of people who might have had good ideas, but didn't have a mastery of the medium.

Reading this sentence reminded me of the classic HN position of "ideas are worthless, what matters is the execution", usually mentioned in the context of an "ideas person" looking for their "technical cofounder" and the ideas person thinking they deserve at least 50%, often more, of the ownership of what would be built because without them there'd be no idea.

> if you had a great idea for a sci-fi story but no talent for writing, and if an LLM let you realize your vision, that's neat.

If your "vision" is only the "idea for a sci-fi story", is that really a vision? Good books leave the reader changed/influenced in some fashion, through the way the idea is presented and developed over the course of the story, not just from a blurb on the book jacket.

> overall, more creativity is hardly a bad thing.

Is coming up with an idea for a for a sci-fi story the meat of creative act such that that flooding the market with ideas counts as an increase in creativity overall?
by abe_m | 2025-08-18 02:01:45+00:00
It seems a bit of a tautology to ask the survivors if things are OK. Of course is is OK for them, they are in an industry segment that survived the trend of moving everything possible to China. If you go ask where the factories were shutdown, you'll find different responses.

The dip in number of manufacturing employees corresponds time-wise to China joining WTO, and the massive CEO hype of shutting down US factories and moving them to China, rather than super-duper automation hitting the scene and automating the factories in place.

I have a suspicion that the displayed manufacturing output chart is in dollars, not amount of stuff, and that is likely bumped up by highly automated IC/chip manufacturing that is high cost/value, but low tonnage work.
by ekusiadadus | 2025-08-18 02:03:46+00:00
I don't have direct experience yet since my son is only 0 years old, but I'm absolutely planning to introduce him to competitive programming when he's older.

I personally got hooked on AtCoder and Codeforces when I was in middle school. Back then, many contests started around 2 AM Japan time, which was tough, but it was incredibly fun. That experience is what led me to become a software engineer.

This hasn't changed even in the AI era. I now have Claude Code write most of my code, and I don't spend nearly as much time actually writing code as I used to. However, the underlying data structures and algorithms still excite me immensely. There's something deeply satisfying about understanding the fundamental concepts and problem-solving techniques that no AI tool can replace.

Competitive programming teaches you to think algorithmically and break down complex problems - skills that remain valuable whether you're writing code yourself or directing AI to do it for you.
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-18 02:04:47+00:00
I do use my AI as an augmentation of therapy. It can help in the moment when it's 2am and I'm upset. It can mirror like a therapist does (they don't really tell you what to do, they just make you realise what you already know). And can put things into perspective. And it shouldn't be underestimated: even the mere act of telling someone (or something) what's bothering you has a huge benefit because it orders your thoughts and evaluates them in a way your mind doesn't do on its own. Even if it says nothing insightful back but just acknowledges it's a mental win. This is also why rubber duck debugging works like someone else mentioned. This is just a better duck then that can ask followup questions.

My therapist doesn't like when I call her at 2am, you see. The AI doesn't mind :) I know the AI is not a person. But it helps a little bit and sometimes that's enough to make the night a bit easier. I know it's not a real therapist but I've had so much therapy in my life that I know what a therapist would say. It just makes a world of difference hearing it.

I use only local models though (and uncensored, otherwise most therapy subjects get blocked anyway). I'd never give OpenAI my personal thoughts. Screw that.
by throw10920 | 2025-08-18 02:04:50+00:00
Yes, it's over because I've demonstrated to other, sane HN readers who find this thread in the future that you're a malicious individual who has to resort to lies and fallacies to defend his points about "equality". This is not about convincing you - this is about preventing you from deceiving others, and at this point, you've made that argument for me better than I ever could have.
by robto | 2025-08-18 02:04:59+00:00
I've been meaning to try this out, from my read it's a declarative way to get some structured concurrency. I work in a codebase that heavily uses core.async channels to manage concurrency and you really need to pay close attention to error handling. When you're spawning new threads you need to set up your own custom machinery to re-throw errors on a chans, close chans, and it looks like core.async.flow is a way to do all of this declaratively.

Just like `core.async` itself was a frontrunner of Virtual Threads on the JVM, I view `core.async.flow` as the Clojure version of the upcoming [0]Structured Concurrency JEP. I do wonder if it will use that under the hood once it becomes stable, the same way `core.async` is planning to move away from the `go` macro to just have it dispatch a virtual thread.

[0]https://openjdk.org/jeps/453
by chamomeal | 2025-08-18 02:05:48+00:00
I’d say clojure is very alive and happy. I’m a clojure newb and have been having a super fun time getting into it. Lots of very neat tools are in active development (babashka is the best thing that’s happened to my developer life in a while!!)

The small-medium sized community is actually fantastic for learning. The big names in the community are only a slack away, and everybody is so enthusiastic.
by thwarted | 2025-08-18 02:07:19+00:00
The process described reminded me of "pristine source" and RPM spec files that take the upstream pristine source and patch it during the build process. Maintaining that is always a little bit of a headache if you don't do it regularly, especially having to maintain (generate and apply) a separate set of patch files for the changes and express/apply the patches in the spec file. This looks to make light work of that.
by vunderba | 2025-08-18 02:07:53+00:00
Agreed. Have a read through the 10 dragon stories - the majority of them are rich in spices, but bereft otherwise.

LLMs seem to revel in throwing layer after layer of decorative paint in the hope that people will fail to notice that they're not actually painting anything.

As a writer, the best advice that I can give is to build your house upon the rock and not upon the sand.
by lifthrasiir | 2025-08-18 02:08:49+00:00
That's plus for individuals but minus for languages.

Personal anecdote: I was exactly there a decade ago when I was working on Chrono, now one of best-known date and time libraries in Rust. Since I was simply my own, my design was not as good as it could have been. Of course it is still much better to have a suboptimal Chrono, but I can't deny that it remains and probably will remain suboptimal due to my design a decade ago.
by Aeolun | 2025-08-18 02:09:17+00:00
https://www.royalroad.com/fictions/search?globalFilters=fals...

Though I’ll admit I can’t speak to the quality of that except my own stuff (which I’m naturally predisposed to like).

This was my attempt at fully AI generated (though edited by human):

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/101072/inherited-wounds