MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hnarn | 2025-09-16 16:29:35+00:00
> Sell me this pen:

> What? You don’t know how? Okay, instead, sell me this Penzilla - a pen that can erase, write in different colors, play music, dial 911, act as a radio antenna, and even help you cheat on your homework.

Anecdotally, I read somewhere (and agree) that the reasoning behind the "sell me this pen" question is to quickly identify whether someone has the most basic skill necessary to become a decent salesperson: asking questions about need and listening to the answers.

I'm guessing the author of this post does not work in sales (hardly a bad thing) because "selling a pen" by listing all the excellent features of the pen and why it's better than any other pen on the market is exactly, according to the theory, what you should not do.

Do you use pens? What kind of pens do you like? What bothers you about the pen you've got? Well, if this pen doesn't have any of those issues, why not just buy a hundred of them right now and stop wasting mental energy on what pens to buy for the next ten years?
by looseyesterday | 2025-09-16 16:29:53+00:00
I think like most things the internet 'ate' SF now you can work remote and most importantly start new companies remotely. OFC scale, capital and in-person still matter, but Australia, UK, Germany, Spain, all now have significant tech hubs, with VC scale capital, decent talent pipelines and same access as everyone else. Its only a matter of time over the next few cycles as more and more future 'big tech' comes from elsewhere in the world.
by gjm11 | 2025-09-16 16:30:10+00:00
I too find the "My" stuff patronizing and annoying but I'm not convinced by your string of "my"s as showing that it's childlike. I mean, you could equally say: my files on my computer on my desk in my work-room next to my bedroom where I sleep with my wife. Or: my files on my computer in my house that my savings plus my mortgage with my bank paid for. There are as many distinctively-adult things you can put "my" in front of as distinctively-childish ones.

I do in fact talk about my computer[1] and my files on it. The problem isn't that I wouldn't call them "my". It's that (1) when the computer labels them that way it feels like it's putting words in my mouth and I don't like that even if I'd have chosen similar words, and (2) it's unnecessary because if something's already in my home directory then calling it "My Whatever" rather than just "Whatever" is unnecessary. Of course, Windows rather wants to cover up all the evidence that you have a home directory, which for me is also part of the problem.

[1] Well, I'd be more specific, because like many people on HN I have more than one computer. But that isn't really the point here.
by somerandomdude2 | 2025-09-16 16:30:47+00:00
Both sides do this: the last administration had tech giants censor anyone that that promoted the lab leak theory, or any alternative to treatment other that the new vaccines. Parents interested in managing their child's exposure to sexually related material were put on watch lists.

It's not one side or the other - any group with authority has to be watched closely and rebuked when they try to expand their power.
Show HN: Clean Clode – Clean Messy Terminal Pastes from Claude Code and Codex
by thewojo | 2025-09-16 16:30:53+00:00
I’ve been impressed with Claude Code but one thing that sometimes gets in the way in my workflows is the messy, mangled text that is shown when pasting text from the Claude Code terminal sessions. So I built an open-source utility that cleans extraneous white space, pipes, and other characters from your CC/Codex pastes.

For example, you can turn this:

`How can I create a Claude Code script that │ │ cleans up extraneous characters and cleans up │ │ extra spaces, new lines, and other messiness │

when I copy from Claude Code terminal │ │ prompts or copy code from Claude Responses in │ │ the Claude Code Terminal? It can make it │ │ hard to read, save, and reuse. `

Into this:

`How can I create a Claude Code script that cleans up extraneous characters and cleans up extra spaces, new lines, and other messiness when I copy from Claude Code terminal prompts or copy code from Claude Responses in the Claude Code Terminal? It can make it hard to read, save, and reuse. While this was built with Claude Code in mind it also works on Codex.`

Try it here: https://cleanclode.com

It’s 100% private (no data collection, tracking, completely open-source). If there’s anything you don’t like please just create a GitHub issue, contribute your change (https://github.com/TheJoWo/Clean-Clode), or comment here. Thanks and hope it’s helpful to some of you
by PhotonHunter | 2025-09-16 16:30:54+00:00
Back in the glory days of Mercedes, they proudly advertised how their pull-style door handles were a safety feature intended to make it easier for rescuers to open doors from the outside: http://oudemercedesbrochures.nl/Images/W126/USA_1990/016.jpg

Alas, “build the best car you can” wasn’t compatible with long-term viability. Something engineering-driven companies seem to keep encountering.

The whole brochure is an neat time capsule to browse through: http://oudemercedesbrochures.nl/W126_USA1990.html
by ComputerGuru | 2025-09-16 16:31:10+00:00
People are commenting about issues loading the images leading to them abandoning reading the article. Here is a fully cached copy of TFA, but note that the videos (and images, but especially the videos) load _really_ slowly https://web.archive.org/web/20240317122351/https://blinry.or... (but they do load if you wait long enough).
by debatem1 | 2025-09-16 16:31:27+00:00
I think there's something to what the author says about the shift from mission-driven startups to naked greed, but I don't think I would have put it that way.

Over the last two decades the startup scene has gone from trying to improve nearly everybody's lives at very low cost to consumers (ad-supported services like maps and email) to trying to improve the lives of the upper middle class with debatable impacts on everyone else (gig economy stuff) to something whose most obvious application is destroying jobs (ai).

That's a pretty quick shift from utopian to dystopian rhetoric, and people who bought the line are right to find that jarring.
by wonderwonder | 2025-09-16 16:31:29+00:00
Salary wise, we are in a race to the bottom. Massive outsourcing of jobs to India and similar where wages are much lower than comparable US employees coupled with Ai replacing entry level roles.

On a longer time scale you have humanoid robots potentially coming as well. Self driving cars and trucks are going to torpedo trucking and low pay positions such as Uber // taxi driver. The wealth is getting centralized amongst a couple dozen high tech companies.

All in all I am pretty negative on the prospects for young people as they enter the workforce and additionally for older tech people as they are currently operating in an environment where losing your job very possibly means the end of the road.
by schmookeeg | 2025-09-16 16:31:47+00:00
I job hop frequently, and have a large zeroth-order network because I did good work at each one.

When I am in a hiring role, I am not flipping through memories of good times with former coworkers that I had deep and meaningful time with -- I'm thinking back to who was the verb who got ish done and will make my project a success.
by hackingonempty | 2025-09-16 16:32:19+00:00
Physicist Sean Carroll contends that we are closer to resolving this debate. Brains are only made from three things: protons, neutrons, and electrons and we know how they work here on planet Earth well enough to say that they do not have mental properties nor is there some mysterious soul interacting with them that we just haven't detected yet.

https://philpapers.org/archive/CARCAT-33
by no-stegosaur | 2025-09-16 16:33:26+00:00
I mean OS updates are necessary, from security updates to support for new hardware. Stuff like init scripts were a suboptimal solution to begin with, it is not like that old stuff was a good solution. Xorg also doesn't fit how modern computers work, and is merely a collection of bandaids that is inherently unable to reach sane security by todays standards. So its not like progress is entirely superficial. And also with Flatpak there has emerged a way of shipping stuff such that used libraries can be shared but do not have to be, and every app can move at its own pace without conflicting with other apps or the OS. So at least in Linux land, especially in the last couple years, there has been great advances from a technical point of view. And those tackle also the problems arising when a huge number of indipendent parts come together, which were naturally very pronounced for Linux in the past.
by eloisius | 2025-09-16 16:33:35+00:00
Yeah, I didn't mean to write a "Linux is better" polemic, just that building my own Linux desktop works better for me. I also haven't used Gnome since ~2009 except briefly to discover that Gnome 3 was trash. Unity was a travesty and I also hated it when Ubuntu force fed me that.

You're right. Locking yourself into a distro, especially the more user-friendly ones, can get you into just as much of a dictatorship as macOS.

I use i3 on X11 like a neanderthal and mostly Qt/KDE apps. I'll switch to Sway and Wayland when things stop working.
by david_allison | 2025-09-16 16:33:41+00:00
> I got into tech because I wanted to help make the world better, not worse. I can confidentially say after working in the industry for over 20 years, that it doesn't do that. That's not what it is. It's not what it's ever been about.

I can confidently say that it does. Sturgeon's law applies: 90% of everything is crap, but there are pockets of good, and they make all the difference.
by gus_massa | 2025-09-16 16:34:06+00:00
[Reposting an old comment writen by myself.]

I use Racket. It has a lot of standard libraries and also packages that you can download.

Using only the standard librares I made a few projects:

* Open a GUI to select a file, untargzip it, parse one of the expanded files with xlm, edit the xml and targzip everything again. (This is a common pattern. Now many applications save the data as a xml compressed with tar and gzip.) I made an executable and send it to my coworkers so they can just run it.

* A bot to reply emails, with IMAP and SMPT. It reads the email, scrap some data from one of my webpages and send it in the reply. the bot can only only handle the easy questions, but in my case it's like the 90% so it it saves me a lot of time.

* I used the webserver so the T.A. in my part of the university can fill their preferences about the courses they want to teach. It handles like 500 users in an old computer without problems.
by dylan604 | 2025-09-16 16:34:07+00:00
> I find modern primes much sharper than their older counterparts not because of the elements or the optical design, but from the glass directly

Even back in their prime, haha, the Cooke lens leaned into their glass manufacturing by calling it the Cooke Look. All of the things that gave it that look are things modern lenses would consider as issues to correct.
by oersted | 2025-09-16 16:34:34+00:00
I’ve had three long trips to the Bay area a in the last couple of years. It’s so interesting to hear locals talking about SF and SV as different worlds and making such a big deal about driving over.

They are less than an hour apart (roughly) and it’s all a connected continuum. It’s trivial to move between them several times a day for different appointments. I thought people were much more used to long drives than in EU, I suppose it varies by region.
by CodingJeebus | 2025-09-16 16:34:40+00:00
> Remember how we used to have to get taxis?

I remember that taxi drivers used to make a semblance of an income back in the day, but working in the gig economy now is essentially modern day digital serfdom. I had a buddy who got into Uber driving before the pandemic, got involved in some of the Uber social media communities in our area, and wound up knowing so many people who committed suicide because they were given auto loans by Uber to buy a car they'd never be able to pay back on Uber rides.

Not everyone benefits from this tech-driven world.
by jajuuka | 2025-09-16 16:34:58+00:00
This article is dripping with Steve Jobs worship. Way too many long term Apple users have this attitude that Jobs was perfect and always right. He wasn't. He made a lot of bad decisions through his entire time at Apple. The man has been dead since 2011. His influence and the world has changed. However people like this author want to view the world through the Steve Jobs lens.

It's okay not to like something. To go "hey, I don't think this is useful or good." But the chicken little attitude of "Apple has lost its way" or "Apple has abandoned its long term customers" grabs headlines and will be forgotten in 3-4 months when most people either embrace the current market or reject it and go somewhere else.
by omneity | 2025-09-16 16:35:15+00:00
This is also pretty subjective. I’m a power user of both and tend to prefer Claude’s UI about 70-80% of the time.

I often would use Claude to do a “make it pretty” pass after implementation with GPT-5. I find Claude’s spatial and visual understanding when dealing with frontend to be better.

I am sure others will have the exact opposite experience.
by dmix | 2025-09-16 16:35:19+00:00
That might just be media experts. Newspapers and TV channels keep have a stock list of "experts" they bring on to talk about stuff and they almost always know nothing or are only there for a particular spin.

You can always find washed up academics, ex-industry, ex-government, etc people who will reliably show up to say stuff in return for money. Lawyers do it too.
by mikae1 | 2025-09-16 16:35:46+00:00
> The initial investment into getting a usable Arch desktop was horrible.

It is my conviction that very few should go down the Arch route. If you want to sysadmin Linux or learn how to do so, fine. But if you want to do something else with your computer I'd strongly recommend looking into one of the https://universal-blue.org images (I use https://getaurora.dev btw).

These are based on atomic Fedora and my experience is that they offer extreme stability while still staying on the edge of development. Could we call it NixOS for mere mortals? Probably not if you ask the Nix peeps. :)
by looshch | 2025-09-16 16:36:11+00:00
hey there, i was trying to get my Neovim key bindings and plugins in my terminal and have spent quite a bit of time trying to solve this task. Sharing it in case you ever wanted to achieve something similar. It’s a repost, i made some updates to the original version, e.g. added a few demo gifs and clarified a couple of code snippets
by codingdave | 2025-09-16 16:36:13+00:00
> If AI is to live among us...

No. This post has jumped quite a few lines that aren't settled yet, and that line there is the biggest assumption. No, AI is not to "live among us". It is a tool. Nothing more. We need to stop anthropomorphizing these tools.

Nevertheless, I can acknowledge the need for governance with AI. I was thinking that policy around it can be summarized with the acronym "AAA", representing the 3 things AI cannot be granted: Autonomy, Ambition, and Access. Stay away from giving it those things and it remains a safe tool.
by cheriot | 2025-09-16 16:36:14+00:00
SF's culture war against tech is so tiring.

The AI boom replaced the SaaS/Gig boom. We no longer have a dozen large caps in hyper growth at the same time and market conditions are less profligate so the hiring market is different https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Mm40

Gig work was yesterday's punching bag, but I guess we're nostalgic for it now.

> Overall, it feels like we’ve drifted past a point of no return

Every day.
by Liskni_si | 2025-09-16 16:36:23+00:00
Is there any way to install CLI tools from npmjs without being affected by a recent compromise?

Rust has `cargo install --locked`, which will use the pinned versions of dependencies from the lockfile, and these lockfiles are published for bin packages to crates.io.

But it seems npmjs doesn't allow publishing lockfiles, neither for libraries nor for CLI tools, so if you try to install let's say @google/gemini-cli, it will just pull the latest dependencies that fit the constraints in package.json. Is that true? Is it really this bad? If you try to install a CLI tool on a bad day when half of npmjs is compromised, you're out of luck?

How is that acceptable at all?
by looseyesterday | 2025-09-16 16:36:34+00:00
I think I agree only partially, ofc people tend to over-react to change, however I do think as apple has grown they have become more careful in the ways that matter. I like that they are still pushing things with liquid glass and trying and failing, thats not the issue. But where is my trifold? Where is the folding iPhone? Or some sort of Dex mode? I Think they've stopped pushing the edge of whats possible and I think thats only natural, since they are worth so much money a single product managers messup could cost them millions if not billions, when thats the case its only natural to stop experimenting and play it safe, every incentive will push you towards that from D&O insurance, to activit shareholders even the increased media scrutiney.
by sublinear | 2025-09-16 16:36:56+00:00
> What these tech oligarchs are ultimately telling us, dear friend, is that they simply don’t care about us

They never did. Anyway what else would you expect regarding the ads? The marketing people are just trying to get attention in an agressive manner (and it's working). This angle wouldn't be necessary if the AI was actually worth a damn for the proposed use case and sold itself.

It's actually really funny to see the last gasps before another AI winter. There is a future for LLMs, but it's probably customer engagement chatbots. Beyond replacing customer service, but also other junk people usually ignore like marketing surveys and other feedback.
by pxc | 2025-09-16 16:37:11+00:00
It's a player of the ffmpeg lineage; a GUI frontend for mpv. If you use mpv or some frontend (e.g., SMPlayer, Celluloid, or Haruna) on other platforms, IINA is a natural choice on macOS.

It's free software, it's keyboard friendly, it supports more of less every format, and it blends into the OS's native desktop environment. I don't have an eye for design, but it seems good to me. If there's a better choice for local multimedia playback on macOS, I don't know what that is.

(It seems the only other real contender on the backend is VLC, which is likewise excellent software.)
by cubefox | 2025-09-16 16:37:15+00:00
Imagine you want to compare sizes of video game levels, where some are 2D, made from pixels, and some are 3D, made from voxels. You could stipulate that n pixels are equivalent to sqrt(n) voxels. But you could also stipulate that n pixels are equivalent to n voxels. I don't think either is more correct than the other.
by nerdsniper | 2025-09-16 16:37:17+00:00
> And WTH would you ever have things you need to download in your work email?

Because you got a university email as a student 20-30 years ago back when .edu emails were "for life". Then you started working at the university as a staff-person under the same email. Then 20-30 years later you're leaving, and much of your digital identity is inextricably linked to that old "personal" email.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-09-16 16:37:30+00:00
What do you think of Price's Law, which suggests that the squareroot of people in most organizations perform half the work (e.g. 3 of 9 ; 10 of 100 ; 50 of 2500)? Put less-specifically, is the majority primarily net-neutral/-negative, productivity-wise?

From my IBEW recollections, this was probably true for our membership.

>there are pockets of good, and they make all the difference

Most-definitely. It took me my first four decades to realize this, but having spent the majority of my adult life blue collar, I certainly empathize with burning out (better than e.g. my lawyer/tech brothers "just lazy"). We cannot all be on good teams, it's statistically impossible, but surely more of oughtta.
by reify | 2025-09-16 16:37:34+00:00
I can highly recommend psychoanalysis.

It would be of great benefit to a safer society, if you reflected on your use of the words:

Sillier, riskier, more doomed the better, and the carnage.

Classic material for us psychological types.

maybe you should reconsider working with ai or in any tech role.

you might even find that working in ai or any place in the tech industry, was not your first choice.

The human unconscious mind (ai is not conscious, its a sales pitch), has many ways to manipulate us.

I can recommend a decent book for you:

Lacan: A Beginner's Guide - Beginner's Guides by Lionel Bailly
by parliament32 | 2025-09-16 16:37:42+00:00
For historic, sealed landfills, perhaps. Modern regulations require methane (LFG) capture for all non-trivially-sized landfills. In 2015, 74% of US household waste ended up in a landfill with a system to capture methane and convert it to energy[1], I suspect the number has increased over the last decade.

[1] https://ensoplastics.com/theblog/?p=2557
by mylons | 2025-09-16 16:37:42+00:00
fwiw Heng Li was "the author." He was a postdoc under Durbin's professorship. I was around when bwa was developed and was working in a collaboration with Heng Li (I was working on SOLiD R&D). Any development emails were between Heng and our team, we never spoke with Durbin.

first author on a paper like this indicates the most significant contributions https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/25/14/1754/2...
by ranger_danger | 2025-09-16 16:37:58+00:00
> People with severe mental illnesses still have Constitutional rights, including one not to get their head bashed in.

Yes, I wasn't trying to imply that. But according to court records he got hurt because he was being combative during the execution of an arrest warrant.

> Running a Tor exit node is also not a crime

Probably correct, and the original headline seemed to try to imply that it was in fact what they got in trouble for (it has since been changed), but there's way more to this story than OP lets on... by a mile.
by shagie | 2025-09-16 16:38:20+00:00
Hmm... You have something there (and I was likely off in my timeline). The case was filed in August 2019. The document was filed in 2022(?). The transcript was from 2020.

Given the plea in 2019 and those conditions... as shown in the judgement document, the things that were alleged in the 2020 transcript were a clear violation of those conditions.

Where there any pretrial bond conditions prior to 2019?
by JumpinJack_Cash | 2025-09-16 16:38:44+00:00
SV and SF are a huge mouse trap. And Intellectual Ego is the cheese.

You are indeed "building the future" (mind as a simple cogwheel, for sure you are not the one calling the shots in terms of products) but unlike the industrial revolutions that happened through the centuries there is no quality of life advantage of being near the epicenter of it all.

Each and every product is rolled out globally and in zero time, so a person from the opposite side of the world say Bali gets to enjoy the same product in a far better environment as far as quality of life, cost of life etc, plus they didn't even have to build the thing at all! They just get to use it, best of both worlds.

And although they are not at the frontier of tech and human advancement I imagine they own their business and they get to call the shots on how the gym/bakery/scooter renting is run

The only localized things which are only availible in SV are the "autonomous vehicles" which as of now are absolutely the most blatant failure of tech industry in this century considering that they kill occupants on a daily basis.

I expect people who currently populate SV to either wise up and recognize they are in a mouse trap or simply make the leap into an even higher intellectual ego dimension of theoretical physics and mathematics which can be done from everywhere and either way at that point SV would just unravel