MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gethly | 2025-08-16 11:01:01+00:00
Actually event-sourcing solves most of the pains - events, schema, push/pull, caching, distribution... whatever. The downside is that it is definitely not suitable for small projects and the overhead is substantial(especially during the development stage when you want to ship the product as soon as possible). On the other hand, once you get it going, it's an unstoppable beast.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-08-16 11:01:28+00:00
The idea that ideas are primary is exactly what you'd expect from an Oxford academic.

Unfortunately it needs a definition of "idea" which isn't recursive, so...

As for math - it's a conceit to believe that the mechanisms we call math aren't just a patchwork of metaphors that build up from experience.

There's some self-insight in the sense that after a while you start making meta metaphors like category theory.

But it's a very bold claim to suggest that any of this has to be universal, especially when the structures math uses can't be proved from the ground up.

Or that completely different classes of metaphors we can't imagine - because we evolved in a certain way with certain limitations - might not play an equivalent role.

Does the universe know what pi is? Or an integer? Or a manifold?

Does it need to?
by 7952 | 2025-08-16 11:01:37+00:00
For many businesses the situation is that technology has dramatically underperformed in doing the most basic tasks. Millions of people are working around things like defective ERP systems. A modest improvement in productivity in building basic apps could push us past a threshold. It makes it possible for millions more people to construct crazy excel formulas. It makes it possible to add a UI to a python script where before there was only a command line. And one piece of magic that works teliably can change an entire process. It lets you make a giant leap rather than an incremental change.

If we could make line of business crud apps work reliably, have usable document/email search, and have functional ERP that would dissolve millions of jobs.
by bboygravity | 2025-08-16 11:03:05+00:00
90 percent definitely passes reviews.

Source: my commits pass reviews and it's not because the reviewers don't have like 50 years of experience between them.

It's funny how the comments on HN went from complete denial about coding with LLM's ever being possible at all like 1 year ago to "oh, it might be happening" now. I find it hard to understand how people can simultaneously be skilled (older) engineers while at the same time being completely oblivious to the concept of exponential improvement of tech in general. I guess people don't WANT to see the reality that is change and prefer to just look away and cope?
by xpe | 2025-08-16 11:03:09+00:00
I think you are mixed up here. I quoted from the comment above mine, which was harshly and uncharitably critical of antirez’s blog post.

I was pushing back against that comment’s snearing smugness by pointing to an established field that uses clear terminology about how and why markets are useful. Even so, I invited an explanation in case I was missing something.

Anyone curious about the terms I used can quickly find explanations online, etc.
by Tade0 | 2025-08-16 11:03:14+00:00
In the case of one project I've been in, the issue was the ORM creating queries, which Postgres deemed too large to do in-memory, so it fell back to performing them on-disk.

Interestingly it didn't even use JOIN everywhere it could because, according to the documentation, not all databases had the necessary features.

A hard lesson in the caveats of outsourcing work to ORMs.
by saalweachter | 2025-08-16 11:03:53+00:00
Eyeballing C++ 20, struct initialization with .member = blah is the one that jumps out.

But also, since the referenced bug involves Boost... I also haven't used Boost in years, since most everything I was using got pulled into modern C++ versions/STLs.

So if you're using C++98 and Boost, do yourself a favor and just switch to C++17 or 20 or whatever.
by marstall | 2025-08-16 11:04:13+00:00
temporary - thats the key. people were able to move to the cities and get factory and office jobs and over time were much better off. I can complain about the socially alienated condition I'm in as an office worker, but I would NEVER want to do farm work - cold/sun, aching back, zero benefits, low pay, risk of crop failure, a whole other kind of isolation etc etc.
by kace91 | 2025-08-16 11:05:15+00:00
That’s only true as long as the technical difficulties aren’t covered by tech.

Think of a world where software engineering itself is handled relatively well by the llm and the job of the engineer becomes just collecting business requirements and checking they’re correctly addressed.

In that world the limit for scarcity might be less in the difficulty of training and more in the willingness to bend your back in the sun for hours vs comfortably writing prompts in an air conditioned room.
by MichaelZuo | 2025-08-16 11:05:16+00:00
That’s the fundamental issue with most “analysis”, and most discussions really, on HN.

Since the vast vast majority of writers and commentators are not literal geniuses… they can’t reliably produce high quality synthetic analysis, outside of very narrow niches.

Even though for most comment chains on HN to make sense, readers certainly have to pretend some meaningful text was produced beyond happenstance.

Partly because quality is measured relative to the average, and partly because the world really is getting more complex.
by keiferski | 2025-08-16 11:05:42+00:00
CGI is a good analogy because I think AI and creators will probably go in the same direction:

You can make a compelling argument that CGI operators outcompeted practical effects operators. But CGI didn’t somehow replace the need for a filmmaker, scriptwriter, cinematographers, etc. entirely – it just changed the skillset.

AI will probably be the same thing. It’s not going to replace the actual job of YouTuber in a meaningful sense; but it might redefine that job to include being proficient at AI tools that improve the process.
by k9294 | 2025-08-16 11:06:16+00:00
If you profit from the problem, you shall not get a vote on the solution. Especially when we are talking on a commonwealth problem.

---

A "like-minded group" of oil states (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, Bahrain, Russia) refused to accept:

- Legally binding obligations to reduce plastic production

- Mandatory phaseouts of hazardous chemicals

- Disclosure requirements

- Any controls on new plastic production

I mean does anyone expected anything like this to happen?

---

And here's the biggest joke:

Taxpayers around the world are funding all of this. Countries should represent their citizens' interests, right? So taxpayers collectively spend tens of millions to send their representatives, only to get this unexpected result. Saudi Arabia, Russia, and co. blocked the agreement.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-16 11:06:35+00:00
Yes, human vision is so bad it has to rely on a swivel joint and a set of mirrors just to approximate 360 coverage.

Modern cars can have 360 vision at all times, as a default. With multiple overlapping camera FoVs. Which is exactly what humans use to get near field 3D vision. And far field 3D vision?

The depth-discrimination ability of binocular vision falls off with distance squared. At far ranges, humans no longer see enough difference between the two images to get a reliable depth estimate. Notably, cars can space their cameras apart much further, so their far range binocular perception can fare better.

How do humans get that "3D" at far distances then? The answer is, like it usually is when it comes to perception, postprocessing. Human brain estimates depth based on the features it sees. Not unlike an AI that was trained to predict depth maps from a single 2D image.

If you think that perceiving "inertia and movement" is vital, then you'd be surprised to learn that an IMU that beats a human on that can be found in an average smartphone. It's not even worth mentioning - even non-self-driving cars have that for GPS dead reckoning.
by magicalhippo | 2025-08-16 11:06:40+00:00
I think it's more like avoid doing a "limiting" join in the application, ie where the join is used to limit the output to a subset or similar.

As a somewhat contrived example since I just got out of bed, if your software has a function that needs all the invoice items from invoices from this year which invoice address country is a given value, use a join rather than loading all invoices, invoice addresses and invoice items and performing the filtering on the client side.

Though as you point out, if you just need to load a given record along with details, prefer fetching detail rows independently instead of making a Cartesian behemoth.
by Wilder7977 | 2025-08-16 11:08:20+00:00
I respect the personal opinion, but I personally find unbearable the number of times Apple devs demonstrate to think to know better how I should use my machines. Having sane defaults and customizing basic things (like not using a docking bar, or moving icons on the window on the other side) is something that I don't think requires any maintenance, or at least nothing that a trillion dollar company can't afford.

> For me the value of apple consistency and aesthetics far outweigh the costs.

For me this has ~0 value. I use a device multiple hours every day, muscle memory that makes sense for me is 100x more important that an abstract consistency for things that do not make sense for me. I know that different people have different priorities, though. To make a similar example, I use routinely two keyboards, a TKL and a split 58-keys keyboard. I use 2 layouts (one en-US and my native language). I have absolutely no trouble switching from one to another, and from one layout to another, it requires no effort or concentration, it's all muscle memory and context awareness. The same is with devices or programs for me. Consistency is for what _I_ decide is important to stay consistent, otherwise it doesn't have an absolute abstract value.

> It is just too much work to get to basic ok defaults, to have any energy left to think about what I might want to customize.

I have used Linux for about 10 years before I became even aware of all the things I could do with it. For everything I had to do from high-school to university I never touched more than the basics (Ubuntu and Mint, at the time). I think the defaults were totally OK, and nothing _needed_ to be customized. When I started working I started having additional requirements and the flexibility allowed me to customize and make more efficient the aspects of my workflow I considered important. All of this to say, while this is my experience, I can't relate at all with what you are saying.

> Iphones are another story, but eventually the tradeoffs outweigh android ux illogical nature and inconsistency there too.

I can't comment much on this. I find iOS UX to be completely a mess, full of hidden interactions (on this topic, see https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/july-august-2025/s...), but I use my only iPhone minimally just for my work phone, so I concede this is a matter of habit (as it's probably the opposite - given 90 yo tech illiterate people can use Android phones).
by smolder | 2025-08-16 11:08:46+00:00
It's very much a matter of of marketing. I think the explanation for why partially hydrogenated oils have been replaced is because there was a viable alternative (palm oil, mainly) and no one was devious enough or saw profit in countering the honest narrative that they were hurting everyone's health. That's unlike tobacco or oil industry games. They spend as much as needed to protect their profits, consequences be damned. More importantly, I think, plastics are actually wonderful materials and the cost of overproducing is hard to convince people of. It's like the abuse of antibiotics or CO2 pollution. Some people try being alarmist to compensate for how little most people care about these serious problems. But most people go on uninformed or just don't care, even if they are informed.
by bboygravity | 2025-08-16 11:08:53+00:00
Writing the code? How about reading it and explaining it?

Working on undocumented legacy code (read: probably the majority of all embedded code in the world) is now like 100x faster. No need to plow through a massive codebase and trying to grasp expired toolchains for weeks/months anymore.

How is that not part of programming?
by klabb3 | 2025-08-16 11:09:56+00:00
Yes it’s total madness to synchronize and replicate complex state that logically belongs together. This is why microservices are such hot garbage. Well, how people tend to use them anyway.

Monotonic state is also better than mutable state. If you must distribute state, think ownership. Who owns it? Eg Theres nothing necessarily wrong with having state owned by eg a mobile client that can be adjusted by the user. Then you can sync it to the backend if you want, but they are only a reader/listener, and should never try to control it directly.
by subscribed | 2025-08-16 11:10:28+00:00
American cops get surprisingly little training and all the public-recorded videos show cops pulling out their guns to to escalate and intimidate, even in the seemingly innocuous situation like a traffic stop.

I wouldn't believe American cops are trained with "safety first" rule in mind. The evidence doesn't seem to support it.

https://hub.wsu.edu/law-justice-realtime/2015/11/18/the-incr...
by AdrianB1 | 2025-08-16 11:10:35+00:00
The SQL database has more than a dozen semi-independent applications that treat different aspects of the manufacturing process, for example from recipes and batches to maintenance, scrap management and raw material inventory. The data is interlocked, the apps are independent as different people in very different roles are using it. No, it never starts in the front end, it started as a system and evolved by adding more data and more apps. Think SAP as another such example.
by throwaway314155 | 2025-08-16 11:11:34+00:00
I'm telling you right now, man - keep talking like this to people and you're going to make zero friends. However good your intentions are, you come across as both condescending and overconfident.

And, for what it's worth - your position is clear, your evidence less-so. Deep learning is filled with mystery and if you don't realize that's what people are talking about when they say "we don't understand deep learning" - you're being deliberately obtuse.

===========================================================

edit to cindy (who was downvoted so much they can't be replied to): Thanks, wasn't aware. FWIW, I appreciate the info but I'll probably go on misusing grammar in that fashion til I die, ha. In fact, I've probably already made some mistake you wouldn't be fond of _in this edit_.

In any case thanks for the facts. I perused your comment history a tad and will just say that hacker news is (so, so disappointingly) against women in so many ways. It really might be best to find a nicer community (and I hope that doesn't come across as me asking you to leave!) ============================================================
by ccppurcell | 2025-08-16 11:12:00+00:00
I agree with your broader point. But I used to get a free beer on British Airways flights and no longer do. It's been many years since I flew on a plane with even a compartment for my stuff in front of me let alone a screen. Admittedly I fly less than I used to but that's at least partly because the relative experience vs cost of trains has got better and I have no reason to fly across the ocean.
by CafeRacer | 2025-08-16 11:12:24+00:00
Im heavily using claude code right now... because i need something now. But it's a huge pile of technical debt.

With every piece of code created i write a doc of what id need to focus on when rewriting chunks.

AI has its usage, it makes some things faster... but spitting out more code does not necessarily make it more productive.

I ride AI train, but i ride my cb650r same way... sometimes wondering why i am still alive.
by dondraper36 | 2025-08-16 11:12:34+00:00
That also depends on what you would consider "business logic in the database".

What would you say about CHECK constraints, though? I don't think it's something few developers expect to see, and having these checks is very convenient.

I know that there are even opponents of foreign keys (which makes sense sometimes), but in general, I don't understand why I would ever throw away the nice features of Postgres that can enforce correctness.
by anonzzzies | 2025-08-16 11:12:36+00:00
I am unsure but as a formal verification (pupil of dijkstra and his students in eindhoven and Amsterdam) person, I see this happening in a crazy waterfall and indeed people on HN are the last deniers who keep saying 'it does not work for them'. It works for the rest of the world and things are going completely ape shit now. I am happy to be old as I probably won't live through the fallout; I would say I hope we change our ways and redistribute the gained wealth here but it won't happen. And then we also do not learn from having terrible software ruining lives...
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-08-16 11:14:34+00:00
This is why an economics based strictly on scarcity cannot get us where we need to go. Markets, not knowing what it's like to be thirsty, will interpret a willingness to poison the well as entrepreneurial spirit to be encouraged.

We need a system where being known as somebody who causes more problems than they solve puts you (and the people you've done business with) at an economic disadvantage.
by nxobject | 2025-08-16 11:15:25+00:00
The achievement is massive - but if I understand what’s going on the title is misleading; I think it is more like running a patched macOS userland via chroot. From an outside point of view, the author is cryptic about context, but the technical details are even more fascinating. Some technical details in this thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/jailbreak/comments/1mn7mk1/comment/...

- Based on a POC done by Zhuowei Zhang few years ago, I think that is happening is that the author is using a filesystem from an existing macOS to run WindowServer and and enough of the supporting daemons.

https://worthdoingbadly.com/macappsios/

- Moreover, TFA’s solution requires a host iPhone Simulator to all Metal acceleration via XPC, using the same shim that provides Metal debugging.

To be clear, though, “iOS kernel provides enough facilities to run entire macOS userland” is an incredible discovery and achievement. It demonstrates that it is an order of magnitude easier to give iOS a genuine desktop environment than we would assume.
by FranzFerdiNaN | 2025-08-16 11:16:43+00:00
Too easy. Unfortunately it takes forever to decouple, but that doesn’t mean steps aren’t being taken.

And yes, we’re all stuck under capitalism so anything that really threatens the profitability of companies will be opposed as much as possible. Combine that with geopolitical events like Americans being the dumbest people possible who elect an openly corrupt authoritarian not once but twice and everything becomes even harder.
by playcache | 2025-08-16 11:16:52+00:00
Should anyone be interested I am working on AgentUp:

https://github.com/RedDotRocket/AgentUp

I believe its quite unique as far as agents go. Runtime is config driven, so you can get caching, state management, security (oauth2, jwt) , Tools and MCP capabilities are granted based on scope allocation (file:read, api:write, map:generate) etc, retry handlers, push notifications / webhooks (for long running tasks). This means you can get a fully baked agent built in minutes, using just the CLI.

From there, when you need to customize and write you own business logic, you can code whatever you want and inherit all of AgentUps middleware, and have it as a plugin to the core. This is pretty neat, as it means you're plugins can be pinned as dependencies.

Plugin Example: https://github.com/RedDotRocket/AgentUp-systools

You then end up with a portable agent, where anyone can clone the repo, `agentup run` and like docker, it pulls in all it needs and is serving.

Its currently aligned with the A2A specification, so it will talk to Pydantic, Langchain and Google Agent SDK developed agents.

Its early days, but getting traction.

Previous to this , I created sigstore and have been building OpenSource for many years.

The docs also give a good overview: https://docs.agentup.dev
Show HN: A Privacy-First Temp Email Service
by gkoos | 2025-08-16 11:18:01+00:00
Hey all, as a little weekend project I built a privacy-focused temporary email service:

https://nullmail.cc

- No sign-up or personal info required. - Instant, disposable, ephemeral mailboxes. - Deletes all data on expiration. - No tracking or logging of user data. - No Cookies. - Ideal for quick, anonymous email verification and sign-up flows. - Domain rotation is the email domain gets blacklisted.

Github repo: https://github.com/gkoos/nullmail

Feedback is welcome here or on GitHub.

I know there are lots of other tempmail services out there, but I wanted to make sure the one I use doesn't collect any personal data so I came up with my own. And I open sourced it because I hope others might find it useful too.
by mojuba | 2025-08-16 11:18:05+00:00
There was a wave of outsourcing of engineering jobs to countries with cheaper labor back in the 1990s and 2000s, all at the expensive of quality, accompanied by mass layoffs in the western countries of course. The industry was testing the limits of how much lower the bars of quality can go until customers stop paying for software, and as it turned out, customers could tolerate a lot.

Now, AI is the new outsourcing it seems. Let's lower the bars of quality, see how much crappiness and glitchiness can be tolerated, freeze it right there as the new "industry standard" and move on to the next cost cutting thing.
by spwa4 | 2025-08-16 11:18:23+00:00
Don't worry, EU governments have already JUMPED into action. They have collectively decided they will make the rich richer and use whatever means required to insulate the government from the economy. Zero economic compromises when it comes to government's own functioning ... You know, things that absolutely do not matter for competitveness.

So the plan is to save their way to growth. For example: less students, less research, less teaching (including at lower levels), less ...

https://universitytimes.ie/2025/05/french-students-protest-b...

https://www.uni-mannheim.de/en/news/higher-education-budget-...

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/layoffs-begin-dutc...

It gets a lot more vindictive than this. For example, one of the few things that is getting increased funding is debt collection. Also, the laws are getting "strengthened" (e.g. pensions are no longer untouchable for debt collectors in France). There's a saying "you can't whip blood out of a stone", by which they mean that you can't get money from the poorest of the poor. Clearly, the plan is to lash the poor until blood comes out.

It's not like the economic theory these governments claim, in their high school economy courses, clearly states that governments should save when things go well, like the last 15 years, and then seriously increase expenses in times like these ... Otherwise, given that they saved less than nothing, those courses amount to lying to essentially every student in the EU. Hell, given that it's lying about the money of these students, you could argue it's fraud ...

Oh wait ... that's exactly what they teach.