MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by speerer | 2025-08-11 19:58:06+00:00
We already have a constitution. It just isn't a written constitution:

> The United Kingdom constitution is composed of the laws and rules that create the institutions of the state, regulate the relationships between those institutions, or regulate the relationship between the state and the individual. These laws and rules are not codified in a single, written document.

Source for that quote is parliamentary: https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/commons-com... - a publication from 2015 which considered and proposed a written constitution. But other definitions include unwritten things like customs and conventions. For example:

> It is often noted that the UK does not have a ‘written’ or ‘codified’ constitution. It is true that most countries have a document with special legal status that contains some of the key features of their constitution. This text is usually upheld by the courts and cannot be changed except through an especially demanding process. The UK, however, does not possess a single constitutional document of this nature. Nevertheless, it does have a constitution. The UK’s constitution is spread across a number of places. This dispersal can make it more difficult to identify and understand. It is found in places including some specific Acts of Parliament; particular understandings of how the system should operate (known as constitutional conventions); and various decisions made by judges that help determine how the system works.

https://consoc.org.uk/the-constitution-explained/the-uk-cons...
by throw-qqqqq | 2025-08-11 19:58:28+00:00
Purely guessing, but the "unstable tooling" could perhaps refer to the fact that C++ as a language has evolved a lot.

I have had trouble compiling older C++ code bases with newer compilers, even when specifying C++98 as source standard. I gave up trying to get Scott McPeak's Elkhound C++ parser to compile, last I had to attempt it.

C is a bit more forgiving on that topic (it hasn't changed as much, for better or worse).
by lucideer | 2025-08-11 19:58:52+00:00
History has gone the way it went & we have HTML now, there's not much point harking back, but I still find it very odd that people today - with the wisdom of foresight - believe that the world opting for HTML & abandoning XHTML was the sensible choice. It seems odd to me that it's not seen as one of those "worse winning out" stories in the history of technology, like betamax.

The main argument about XHTML not being "lenient" always centred around client UX of error display - Chrome even went on to actually implement a user-friendly partial-parse/partial-render handling of XHTML files that literally solved everyone's complaints via UI design without any spec changes but by this stage it was already too late.

The whole story of why we went with HTML is somewhat hilarious: 1 guy wrote an ill informed blog post bitching about XHTML, generated a lot of hype, made zero concrete proposals to solve its problems, & then somehow convinced major browser makers (his current & former employers) to form an undemocratic rival group to the W3C, in which he was appointed dictator. An absolutely bizarre story for the ages, I do wish it was documented better but alas most of the resources around it were random dev blogs that link rotted.
by mccoyb | 2025-08-11 19:59:34+00:00
I believe these are fundamentally two different types of abuse — the OP is engaging in a significantly less harmful version … the seriously harmful version is the account sharing / massively concurrent one which abuses whatever holes exist in the streaming API to allow Claude to “complete the completion and then stop because of limit” (which I think is there to make the UX better)

Just letting a single instance run all the time … is not that bad, seriously.
by cm2012 | 2025-08-11 20:00:18+00:00
It's just a statistical correlation. Who loves porn demographically?

1) Men.

2) Men age 18-40 in particular.

3) No evidence for this but in my experience tech people tend to like porn more than others for whatever reason.

So a survey of HN users would show more pro-porn respondents than a survey of the UK or the US or EU as a whole.
by smsm42 | 2025-08-11 20:00:48+00:00
For Microsoft it probably makes a lot of sense. For me as a Github user, I don't need "generative coding space" from github at all. That's not what I have been using it for for many years, and that's not what I want to use it for. I mean, Copilot is nice and useful but has preciously little to do with Github per se - if it didn't mention "Github" in the name, I'd see no relationship between the two at all. Code generation belongs in the IDE, Github is not an IDE - Github is what happens before and after the IDE, and keeping it separate works just fine. I'm afraid though Microsoft would try to push them together, and the result would be much worse than the starting point.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-11 20:01:27+00:00
'There is no honor amongst thieves' is a proverb for a reason. Case in point, my nephew, who got shot at point blank range (from behind, no less) by his 'best friend'. Criminals trust each other just long enough until there is a way to get ahead at the expense of the other.

Between 'calculative trust' and 'personality based trust' there are many poles (and other varieties of trust besides), on the whole you're much better of trusting a non-criminal than a criminal.
by bbor | 2025-08-11 20:01:31+00:00
It blows my mind how many computing professionals truly think this is the case. It doesn't take a tech blogger to draw a trend line through the advancements of the past 2.5 years and see where we're headed. The fact that grifters abound on the edges of the industry is a sign of the radical importance of this unexpected breakthrough, not an indication that it's all a grift.

To engage in some armchair psychology, I think this is in large part due to a natural human tendency for stability (which is all the stronger for those in relatively powerful positions like us SWEs). Knowing that believing A would imply that your mortgage is in jeopardy, your retirement plan up-ended, and your entire career completely obscured beyond a figurative singularity point makes believing ~A a very appealing option...
by p0w3n3d | 2025-08-11 20:01:41+00:00
Imagine you're studying, for example math, and you have to learn calculus, and you're living in a dormitory with a colleague, who's great at integration calculus, and every time you get another integration function puzzle to solve, this guy (or gal) pops up and says "it's 2*e^2/x+C dx", "it's e^2+C dx", "it's sin(x)/cos(x)+C dx" after 5 milliseconds, even before you fully comprehend the function...

I have a question for you

will you be able to pass the exam at the midterm?
by jastice | 2025-08-11 20:01:56+00:00
JetBrains | Tech Lead / Senior for Bazel plugin | REMOTE or onsite (Germany, Poland, Netherlands, Czechia, Cyprus, Armenia)

About us: we make devtools. Our team is working on Bazel integration for all our IDEs, primarily IntelliJ IDEA. We recently announced GA[1] of our new plugin and looking to make it the best build tool experience you can get in an IDE. You'll be taking a key role in shaping the technical direction of the product.

Learn more and apply for Tech Lead: https://www.jetbrains.com/careers/jobs/technical-lead-idea-b... Senior: https://www.jetbrains.com/careers/jobs/senior-software-devel...

[1] https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2025/07/bazel-ga-release/
by hodgesrm | 2025-08-11 20:02:22+00:00
Seems like this is going to be a permanent issue, no? Library level storage APIs are complex and often quite leaky. That's based on looking at the innards of MySQL and ClickHouse for a while.

It seems quite possible that there will be maybe three libraries that can write to Iceberg (Java, Python, Rust, maybe Golang), while the rest at best will offer read access only. And those language choices will condition and be conditioned by the languages that developers use to write applications that manage Iceberg data.
by taylodl | 2025-08-11 20:02:23+00:00
Correction, you're talking to someone with 40 years of experience building systems that people’s lives and money depend on. This conversation was never exclusively about you as there are plenty of HN readers lurking and learning. This is just one way for an old, grizzled geezer to share what he’s learned. Sure, I could write blog posts, but that’s too formal and hardly anyone reads those anyway.
by expensive_news | 2025-08-11 20:02:38+00:00
It is interesting seeing the difference in model perception between “normal” people and the Hacker News crowd.

My perception is that a huge percentage of the mass market just like OpenAI because they were the first to market and still have the most name recognition. Even my coworker who works in DevOps says “Gemini sucks, Claude sucks” even though he has never once tried either of them and has never looked at a single benchmark comparison.
by FreakLegion | 2025-08-11 20:02:53+00:00
Preferred stock isn't protected against dilution. That's why the big investors also negotiate pro rata rights, which allow them to buy proportionally more shares in future rounds to maintain their target ownership percentage (the key word here being "buy"; they still have to pay up for the new shares at the going rate).

Under standard deal terms (1x liquidation preference), preferred stock simply means you're first in line to get your money back if the company is liquidated for less than the price you paid. But if you haven't paid anything, if you're just sitting on options, then the preference does nothing. And those shares will cost 5x+ more than common shares, so now you probably can't afford to exercise them. That means you've limited your upside to protect yourself from a downside you can't afford to expose yourself to in the first place. It makes no sense.

Like, to boil this down: What you're asking for is the right to invest in the company at the same price and on the same terms as other investors. And if you ask for that, some companies would say yes! A gung-ho employee with that level of buy-in? Hell yes! But you probably can't afford it. Luckily common shares are a much, much better deal.

Dilution also isn't in itself a bad thing. It just means new shares are being issued. Generally your shares are going up in value at the same time, but if they aren't, if they're being devalued, it's not because of the dilution. It's because the company is failing. And in this scenario the capital raised from the dilution is actually maintaining a higher value for your shares than they'd otherwise have, because again, the company is failing. At least now it's failing with some cash in the bank.

> I’ve know hundreds of people fucked over by the empty promise of common stock options.

To be clear, I'm not saying you and your friends haven't been shafted. I'm saying the underlying mechanism of the shafting isn't what you think, and wouldn't have been fixed by having preferred stock. If the company(ies) were successful and the outcome wasn't great for the team, then the grants were too small. The fix for that is to give people more ownership. If the company(ies) failed, then believe it or not all the preferred shares did for investors was best-case get them their money back. Either way, preferred stock is a red herring.

> I would also invite you to follow up with the person who responded to me in the affirmative.

rjbwork? They're just regurgitating the common talking points. Anytime someone brings up cap tables you can safely ignore them. The cap table has sensitive information; even most investors don't get to see it.

Happy to explain any of this in more depth. I had extremely good outcomes as an employee with common stock at companies that actually cared, and now with my own company have spent tens of thousands of dollars on lawyers optimizing our stock plan to be as employee-friendly as possible.
by G74 | 2025-08-11 20:03:01+00:00
I’ve been helping Amazon brands for the past 4 years, auditing over 50 accounts and optimizing hundreds of product listings.

One thing I noticed: improving a listing can easily take 2–3 hours, researching keywords, writing titles, bullet points, and descriptions that are both SEO-friendly and conversion-focused.

So I built Superlisting.io : an AI-powered tool that does this less than 20 seconds. You paste your product info (or ASIN), and it generates an optimized title, bullets, and description instantly, aligned with Amazon SEO best practices.

I’m launching it publicly this week and would love feedback from the HN community especially on UI/UX and any technical bottlenecks you’ve faced building AI-powered tools.

Demo & free trial: https://superlisting.io

AMA about building AI SaaS for a niche market, optimizing for Amazon search, or the stack I used.
by nobleach | 2025-08-11 20:04:22+00:00
If that's what you "mostly" remember, your memory is awfully selective. It's totally fine for you to have a bias, but you're overlooking decades of massively successful products and services.

Having owned plenty of Thinkpads (Linux), Dells(Windows and Linux) and plenty of Macbook Pros, I can say, Apple's superiority of hardware is so far beyond the rest. Having an OS with a BSD-ish experience is really nice as well. I've spent 27 years in engineering and during most of that time I get the random "Linux is far superior", "I like Windows better" folks... but by and large, yes, Apple's tech has a ton of good will.
by throwup238 | 2025-08-11 20:04:28+00:00
Oh absolutely. If the history of the internet, social media, and smartphones is anything to go by, those negative consequences are coming like a freight train and this will all end in tears in a decade or two. Or even sooner, because that cycle seems to be accelerating too - education probably being the prime example.

But like the OP said, we can’t even predict what’s going to happen even three years out so I’ve just resigned myself to “going with the flow” and enjoying the ride as much as I can. If the negative consequences are coming for us, might as well get as much benefit as we can now while we’re all still wide eyed and bushy tailed.
by lupusreal | 2025-08-11 20:05:20+00:00
He didn't say the majority of HN loves porn. He said that male demographic likes porn more than any other, and that demographic is the majority of HN. It doesn't logically follow that the majority of HN supports porn.

Fake statistics just to illustrate the difference. Males 18-40 support porn at 60%, which is higher than any other demographic. HN is 60% males 18-40. With these numbers, 36% of HN is males 18-40 who support porn, and if all other demographics on HN oppose it, then those 36% are the minority.

(By the way, I have no idea what the real numbers are, and don't really care. I'm just responding to an evident confusion about what was actually said.)
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-11 20:05:59+00:00
>One example that was recently pointed out to me: the first 737 was closer in time to the wright brothers first flight than to today

Out of curiosity, why use the 737 as a benchmark? Especially since the first Jet plane, the Heinckel HE 178[0] (1939) was the first jet plane, the de Havilland Comet[1] (1952) was the first commercial jet airliner, and the Boeing 707[2] (1957) was the first Boeing jet airliner, Followed closely by the McDonnel Douglas DC-8[3].

All of which are (unlike the 737) closer in time to the Wright Brothers' 1903 flight than to the present. That said, as was mentioned, in just three-six years the 737 will also be closer in time to that 1903 flight than to that future date.

So why the focus on the 737 rather than the 707 or DC8? Not trying to dunk on you or the 737, just trying to figure out why the 737 would be more notable than other jet planes/commercial jet airliners.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinkel_He_178

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Comet

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_707

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_DC-8
by tguvot | 2025-08-11 20:06:00+00:00
don't. you will be either downvoted to hell or flagged in case you will provide some external links that actually support what you say.

if you want to reach out to silent readers, go to reddit. there is no nonsense as flagged posts, people are more open minded to discussion and reach is much bigger.

here at this point of time it's sect of genocide witnesses.
by martin-t | 2025-08-11 20:06:02+00:00
I've heard this story so many times.

1) A company starts by serving a real customer need, is driven by the people doing real (engineers, designers, mechanics, etc.). 2) The company gets large. The hierarchy gets deeper, decisions are made by people removed from the actual work. 3) The company either a) drives away all the people who actually enjoy quality work and stagnates/devolves b) or is bought by a large corporation, decapitated and absorbed.

How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only just system of governance at the nation state level but are perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level?

Worker cooperatives exist and should be the default choice any time people get together to work towards a common goal.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-11 20:06:23+00:00
I am sorry you experience antisemitism, this bs should have disappeared long long long ago.

> As with pretty much all war I'm disgusted by what Israel is doing

We are too! The same way we decried the despicable genocidal actions Germany did on the Jewish population during WW2, we now decry the despicable genocidal actions of the state of Israel on the population of Palestine.

> (neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis will wake up suddenly and say "Oh, HN has decided we're to blame; I guess we'll call the whole thing off"

Only one side is actually doing genocide at the moment, and that's Israel. Israel should stop the genocide and either engage in a war without war crimes, or better yet, stop annexing foreign territories and stop the war altogether. I appreciate your "there are two sides to every conflict" point, but there is only one side currently shooting at civilians at aid sites, stopping food from reaching the civilian population, and killing journalists.
by conradev | 2025-08-11 20:06:41+00:00
I’d love for someone to try to define “AI wrapper”.

I’m trying to imagine a graph where at some point in time t

the status of a company changes from “wrapper” (not enough “original” engineering)

to “proper company” (they own the IP, and they fought for it!!!)

At what point did OpenAI cease being an NVIDIA wrapper and become the world’s leading AI lab? At what point did NVIDIA graduate from being a TSMC wrapper?

Clearly any company that gets TSMC N2 node allocation is going to win, the actual details of the chip don’t matter super much.
by redsymbol | 2025-08-11 20:06:42+00:00
There may be something I do not understand about LLMs. But it seems it is more correct to say LLMs are chaotic - in the mathematical sense of sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

The only actual nondeterminism is deliberately injected. E.g. the temperature parameter. Without that, it is deterministic but chaotic. This is the case both in training LLMs, and in using the trained models.

If I missed something, someone point it out please.
by singhrac | 2025-08-11 20:06:55+00:00
I switched from a 2019 MBP to a new M4 Pro a few weeks ago and I didn’t even know Rosetta wasn’t installed (I assumed on and installed by default) until I had to run a Go binary that hadn’t been updated since 2020.

I use a lot of nonstandard software (not just a browser), not a single piece needed Rosetta.

I agree recent AMD chips are power efficient like the M series (though I don’t have one to compare with) but I thought everyone agreed the comparable chips in 2020 weren’t?
by meindnoch | 2025-08-11 20:07:30+00:00
Microsoft being the cool guys? The cool guys? Mwuhahahhaa.

This gave me the good belly laugh I needed.

For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for:

- being the no. 1 enemy of free software

- shipping the worst web browser in existence, despite 80%+ market share

- making corrupt deals with governments around the world to tie them to their office software suite

- creating vendor-locked proprietary extensions to kill open technologies (ActiveX plugins, Silverlight, C++/CLI, MSJVM, etc.)

- making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)

The last time they might have been considered the "cool guys" was sometime in the 90s.
by kachapopopow | 2025-08-11 20:07:52+00:00
Kotlin is fatter, compiler is slower, code completion is slow as hell on large projects, but other than building small applications - there's really no reason to not use kotlin except for the fact that you need to actually learn the language or else you're going to end up with very very slow codebase where opening a file and waiting for syntax highlighting takes 2-3 seconds and typing autocomplete is just painfully slow.
Show HN: I built an open-source workout tracker app in 4 days with Claude Code
by randomlylelo | 2025-08-11 20:08:05+00:00
Hey HN! I just built an iOS weight lifting logger app for myself. I mainly built it to learn how to use Claude Code and iOS development. Now I am learning what to do now that I have built it! I am a recent CS grad (so an entry level SWE) and I come from a fullstack and robotics dev background. Made a mobile app using Flutter in HS but never did any iOS development.

Quick Blurb: I built the app as a better version of Apple Notes but a simpler version of the full-featured workout logging apps. I wanted this app to be super simple, just log workouts in the least amount of clicks and show the data while having an amazing watch interface.

Testflight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/mAfE5kJD Github link: https://github.com/randomlylelo/curlsapp

Here are some of the lessons I learned from using Claude Code:

- Agents are powerful, but the best way to use them is to be ultra-specific and do it per project. The general repos are quite useless. I made a iOS developer agent and it was super powerful: https://github.com/randomlylelo/curlsapp/blob/main/.claude/a...

- I initially used it to help add animation to all my screens and make everything consistent in my code. The commit is here: https://github.com/randomlylelo/curlsapp/commit/524fd65dac6d3534bd5862b91e3f7d507803e030 - It broke one of my screens but it was a simple fix. - I used it whenever I had a difficult feature. It worked better than just 'ultrathink', it did use more tokens though.

- It is quite useful in learning and exposing concepts. I used it to expose me to iOS app patterns. I ended up using a weird combo for the design, but I put the description of the new structure in Claude.md. Then the agents and Claude Code was able to build to this new structure.

- While using Claude Code, I could prompt it with a feature I would want, while it was building it, I would think about the next feature, then come back to it once it finished building. I was doing this sequentially and was able to spend a lot of my time thinking about the design. I was pretty specific in drafting my prompts and ideas before.

This is my current experience with Claude Code and I would love to hear your thoughts on my app / code / experience with Claude Code. If you are an iOS dev, I would love learning from you.

I am still working polishing the app so I can use it everyday but wanted to publish something first :). The apple watch integration will be worked on next.

Note: My initial version took about 4 days, then I took a break to go through the App Store process. I tried to keep the code as clean as possible but I think I do need to refactor it manually soon. I have been working out and using it myself.
by quantified | 2025-08-11 20:08:23+00:00
Now in addition to "Elon said something, so we have to repeat it" journalism, we have "Sam said something, so we have to repeat it" journalism. No particular evidence for the concept, just "it could be". Lots of things more likely could be.

At least Sam is more nuanced than the journos: "could be" instead of "will". I can't see how's he's envious of today's grads except for being 22 years old.