MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dhorthy | 2025-09-23 18:00:55+00:00
i strongly disagree with this - if anything, using AI to code real production code in real complex codebase is MORE technical than just writing software.

Staff/Principal engineers already spend a lot more time designing systems than writing code. They care a lot about complexity, maintainability, and good architecture.

The best people I know who have been using these techniques are former CTOs, former core Kubernetes contributors, have built platforms for CRDTs at scale, and many other HIGHLY technical pursuits.
by thinkharderdev | 2025-09-23 18:01:09+00:00
> As long as the audience accepts the framing that ergonomics doesn't matter because it can't be quantified, the hand-waving exemplified above will confound.

I interpreted the parent to be saying that ergonomics IS (at least partly) subjective. The subjective aspect is "what you are used to". And once you get used to Rust its ergonomics are fine, something I agree with having used Rust for a few years now.

> The Rust community should be upfront about this tradeoff

I think they are. But more to the point, I think that safety is not really something you can reasonably "trade-off", at least not for non-toy software. And I think that because I don't really see C/C++/Zig people saying "we're trading off safety for developer productivity/performance/etc". I see them saying "we can write safe code in an unsafe language by being really careful and having a good process". Maybe they're right, but I'm skeptical based on the never-ending proliferation of memory safety issues in C/C++ code.
OpenAI Systematically hiding messages from users (270 in one conversation)
by MrRedZane | 2025-09-23 18:01:14+00:00
I discovered OpenAI has been systematically hiding messages from users and retroactively modifying conversation logs. Here's the technical evidence:

What I found: -270 Hidden system messages in a single conversation (When unknowingly enrolled in expriments) -15-40+ hidden messages per conversation even AFTER I formally opted out -Metadata shows "is_visually_hidden_from_conversation:true" and "rebase_developer_message:true" -Empty message content but cleaar evidence of post-hoc modificaiton

The Pattern: 1.I was researching AI continuity/long-term agents (within TOS) 2.Discovered massive hidden system activity (270 messages in one conversation) 3.Formally opted out of all experiments via email and build in tool. 4.Hidden monitoring continues across multiple conversations (15-40+ per chat) 5.When I requested data export, OpenAI delayed it for 4 days. Most concerning: I found hidden system messages timestamped within an hour of my export request suggesting real-time modification of my conversation even as I was requesting transparency. 6.Export revealed systematic "rebasing" and hiding of system messages.

Technical Details: The JSON metadata clearly shows: -"rebase_system_message":true - Messages modified after the fact -"rebase_developer_message":true - Developer featured modified post-conversation -"is_visually_hidden_from_conversation": true - Content deliberately hidden from user view -Empty content fields despite extensive metadata

Evidence: https://imgur.com/L44KIRC https://imgur.com/c8fqzx5

This appears to show OpenAI running extensive experimental/monitoring systems on user conversations, then systematically hiding the evidence - even from users who explicitly opted out.

I've filed complaints with my state AG and the FTC. Others should check their own exports for these metadata fields.

Questions for the community: -Is this level of hidden system activity normal? -What are the legal implications of continued experimentation after explicit Opt-out? -Has anyone else found similar patterns in their OpenAI Exports?
by prewett | 2025-09-23 18:01:18+00:00
I've been happy with the AirGradient One, which does have VOC measurement, as well as CO2, and PPM 2.5. It seems that VOC on the hardware side is relative, so the amount is just compared to a baseline (last 24 hours in the case of the AirGradient One). Also, VOCs are everywhere, but not necessarily harmful: cooking will spike your VOCs, but that's very different than having a can of varnish open.
by aeternum | 2025-09-23 18:01:26+00:00
Sure but when neighbors improving the land next to you results in your tax rate increasing significantly people obviously tend to be against that.

You're gonna fight hard against your neighbor adding a Duplex, triplex, fourplex, etc. because with an LVT your taxes very likely go up as a result.

Imagine the uproar when a developer comes in and converts some of the SFHs next to granny's house into a 4-plex and now granny's social security doesn't cover her taxes and she has to move to the old folks home. Sure she can theoretically take out a mortgage or second mortgage against the theoretical increased land value but now you're forcing granny into debt.
by leakycap | 2025-09-23 18:01:37+00:00
> No, I'm saying there's a lot of people who won't even know this happened.

In the world of "I'm sorry to that man" this seems like a given about literally everything.

Not knowing something happened is called being uninformed, and it doesn't change things or make the person right just because they don't know about something that occurred.

> There will be a lot of amazing Rubyists that leave

We agree. Listen, WebObjects still has a somewhat active community. Ruby's community won't be helped by recent events, but recent events happened because the Ruby community has been backstabby for a long time and no one has stopped it because there's too much money to be made in the meantime to care about things like people.
by MeridianMindset | 2025-09-23 18:01:38+00:00
This post suggests replacing the H-1B lottery system and its new $100k fee with a market-based "TV-5" visa that works quite differently. Instead of a lottery, Congress would set yearly caps and let employers bid for visas through a uniform-price auction—essentially allowing market forces to show what companies are really willing to pay for foreign talent.

The key innovation is that employers would hold the visas, not workers, but here's the catch: workers would have complete job mobility from their first day in the country. They'd get the same labor protections as anyone else, a five-year term that can be renewed once, and then become eligible for green cards.

To win over skeptics and benefit American workers, the program would channel money directly back into local communities. The auction revenue, combined with a small payroll surcharge of around 5%, would create an American Workforce Fund supporting apprenticeships, community colleges, and scholarships for disadvantaged students.

The plan also addresses common concerns about the current system. It includes separate auction pools for nonprofits and small businesses that genuinely need them, caps on how many workers can come from any single country to ensure diversity, and strong rules to prevent companies from gaming the system.

What would this actually change? The lottery disappears entirely, along with mountains of paperwork. Workers gain real bargaining power since they can switch jobs freely, which naturally pushes employers to offer competitive pay and better conditions. The auction price itself becomes a useful economic indicator—if companies claim severe talent shortages but won't pay market rates, that tells us something important. And unlike a flat $100k fee, this approach reveals whether employers genuinely need specialized skills or just want cheap, captive workers.
by doubley2 | 2025-09-23 18:01:38+00:00
I've been following the whole upset about the banner ad. As a podcast app, 90% of the time I have it in the background, and I'm not doomscrolling on the app. So the banner ad doesn't really bother me.

The argument on a "lifetime subscription" also does not really apply here. The app was a one-time purchase and then made free somewhere in 2019. Their logic was that early app purchasers would still receive the same set of features when the app was made free and a subscription was introduced. Source https://support.pocketcasts.com/knowledge-base/lifetime-acce...

Basically, purchasers didn't lose any features in 2019 onwards. The purchase was also for the entire app, not just an ad-free version, as there were no ads to begin with.
by latexr | 2025-09-23 18:01:39+00:00
Say you asked “what’s the point of running? Why should I do it every day? I’ll only get tired” and I answer “you could do it for the intrinsic satisfaction of pushing yourself, out of love for the sport, to be healthier, to become an athlete”. Do you understand that to mean “anyone who doesn’t run every day is unhealthy, not an athlete, and doesn‘t love sports”? Hopefully not, that would be ridiculous. All that’s needed is to point at a swimmer or a cyclist as a counter example.

So yes, you are extrapolating too much. Saying “doing this is good or decent” does not automatically mean “not doing this is bad or indecent”. You are not reading some “obvious subtext” (as you put it in another comment), you’re making up beliefs and ascribing negative intentions to complete strangers.
by stego-tech | 2025-09-23 18:01:44+00:00
This has been a continued bugbear on my housing hunt for years, now. So many townhomes, condos, townships, and communities arbitrarily limiting who I can share my space with, even as a full-time owner-occupant of that space. It’s particularly brutal for the LGBTQ+ community because so many of us find our happiness in “found families” which often aren’t related by blood or marriage and thus can be evicted or fined by an HOA or condo board.

Every affordable home I find inevitably has language that precludes buyers like me from owning it unless I’m willing to live alone or get married, and I’m just not willing to screw over friends like that. Thus, we rent instead of buy a starter condo and begin building equity.
by tgma | 2025-09-23 18:01:46+00:00
Citation needed. Where did you get that additional term in front of it? Which United States founding document suggests that?

Democratic Republic, just like People's Republic, is actually a euphemism for communism.

What you are describing is "representative government" and "self government" not necessarily democracy. The will of the people is an abstract concept that is, depending on the issue, not always accurately measurable by equally weighted vote of a subset of the people that are enfranchised.
by piva00 | 2025-09-23 18:01:48+00:00
> violence on that day, but a small bunch of unorganised Trump supporters entered the Capitol during a protest. One person was tragically killed (a Trump supporter). The political transition happened.

Why are you ignoring that Trump riled them up way before all that? Are you unaware of that fact?

> January 6th, 13:10

> Mr Trump ends his speech with the words: "We fight. We fight like hell and if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore. So let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue."

> Shortly afterwards a Capitol police officer calls for backup.

Can you picture Clinton, Bush, Obama, or Biden doing a rally like this, completely aware that the Proud Boys were in the crowd, even invited by the administration to be there? Picture that and tell us again how peaceful all of it was.
by allthatineed | 2025-09-23 18:01:50+00:00
I remember playing with megahal eggdrop bots.

This was one of my first forays into modifying c code, trying to figure out why 350mb seemed to be the biggest brain size (32 bit memory limits and requiring a contiguous block for the entire brain).

I miss the innocence of those days. Just being a teen, tinkering with things i didn't understand.
by lqstuart | 2025-09-23 18:01:52+00:00
I tend to agree with you, but I hoped the field would start collectively figuring out how to be big boys with CICD and dependency management back in 2017–I thought Google’s awkward source release of BERT was going to be the low point, and we’d switch to Torch and be saved. Instead, it’s gotten so much worse. And the kind of work that the Python core team has been putting into package and dependency management is nothing short of heroic, and it still falls short because PyTorch extends the Python runtime itself, and now Torch compile intercepting Py_FrameEval and NVIDIA is releasing Python CUDA bindings.

It’s just such a massive, uphill, ugly moving target to try to run down. And I sit here thinking the same as many of these comments—on the one hand, I can’t imagine we’re still using Python 3 in 2035? 2050?? But on the other hand I can’t envision a path leading out of the mess making money, or at least continue pretending they’ll start to soon.
by cbeach | 2025-09-23 18:03:07+00:00
> Google vowed on Tuesday to offer YouTube accounts that were permanently banned for political speech the ability to be reinstated, and the big tech giant admitted that it once faced pressure from the Biden administration

Damning indictment on the Biden administration. Biden acted in clear violation of the First Amendment.

And many of the "conspiracy theories" which people were banned for e.g. the Lab Leak theory, were found to be the most plausible explanation later on.
by quotemstr | 2025-09-23 18:03:25+00:00
I'm still having a hard time understanding who is supposed to use Zig.

If I don't need absolute best performance, I can use GC-ed systems like Node, Python, Go, OCaml, or even Java (which starts fast now thanks to Graal AOT) and enjoy both the safety and expressive power of using a high-level language. When I use a GCed language, I don't have to worry about allocation, lifetimes, and so on, and the user gets a plenty good experience.

If I need the performance only manual memory management can provide (and this situation arises a lot less often than people think it does), I can justify spending the extra time expressing my thoughts in Rust, which will get me both performance and safety.

Why would I go to the trouble of using Zig instead of Rust? Zig, like Rust, incurs a complexity and ecosystem cost. It doesn't give me safety in exchange. I put in about as much effort as I would into a Rust program but don't get anything extra back. (Same goes if you substitute "C++" for "Rust".)

> All it took was some basic understanding of memory management and a bit of discipline.

Is the idea behind Zig just that it's perfectly safe if you know what you're doing --- therefore using Zig is some kind of costly signal of competence? That's like someone saying free-solo-ing a cliff face is perfectly safe if you know what you're doing. Someone falls to his death? Skill issue, right?

We have decades of experience showing that nobody, no matter how much "understanding" and "discipline" he has, can consistently write memory-safe code with manual memory management in a language that doesn't enforce memory safety rules.

So what's the value proposition for Zig?

Are you supposed to use it instead of something like Go or Python or AOT-Kotlin and spend more of your time dealing with memory than you would in one of these languages? Why?

Or are you supposed to use it instead of Rust and get, what, slightly faster compile times, maybe? And no memory safety?
by panarky | 2025-09-23 18:03:44+00:00
> shitty VoIP ...

Or grey-route bulk messaging and SMS OTP bypass so actors can register throwaway accounts on Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram, social platforms, fintech, crypto etc. then burn the numbers after use.

You need 100k SIMs to defeat per-SIM rate/behavior caps, receive OTPs for mass account creation and run thousands of campaigns/conversations in parallel while keeping each SIM's pattern below carrier detection thresholds.

It's not about the UN.

NYC is a prime market for "local presence" numbers (212/917/646 etc.), which boosts answer rates and trust for scams, impersonation, mass disinfo campaigns.
by viraptor | 2025-09-23 18:04:04+00:00
> In practice, attackers often find ways around those measures

I really don't see this as a good explanation. You can say that about any security measure, but we can't keep slapping more layers that check the previous layer. At some point that action itself will cause issues.

> for example, through misconfigured deployments, command injection, supply chain attacks, or overly broad privileges.

Those don't apply if the file owner is not the app runner or the filesystem is read-only. If you can change the file in that case, you can disable the check. Same for misconfiguration and command injection.

> For example, PCI DSS

Ah, BS processes. Just say it's about that up front.
by aiono | 2025-09-23 18:04:04+00:00
A lot of criticism of Rust (not denying that there are also a lot useful criticisms of Rust out there) boils down to "it requires me to think/train in a different way than I used to, therefore it's hard" and goes on to how the other way is easier which is not the case but it's just familiar to them hence they think it's easier and simpler. More people should watch the talk "Simple made easy" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4
by zer00eyz | 2025-09-23 18:05:11+00:00
> Voters don't actually want house prices to come down.

You have this wrong.

> Somehow the homeowners almost always win against the renters

First lets look at homeownership rates: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S Home ownership is a functionally unmovable number staying around 63%

Home owners are in the majority.

Do you know what one of the biggest predictors of voting is? It is home ownership and local elections with zoning issues (or things that might impact home values) will drive turn out: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/if-you-lived-here-you-...

Meanwhile to the original article, 80s TV like Golden Girls (shared housing) and Boosom Buddies (boarding houses) are quaint historic notes, the reality is that our use of housing stock has made the problem of where to live worse: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q...

When you dig down into the data, the article is highlighting a real problem. We have destroyed a lot of historical co-habitation that kept the system working and healthy. We did this with zoning (getting rid of high density to prop up home values) banning types of housing (dense single room, affordable) and making other types impossible (owning a home and renting a room or two, people dont do this because of tenants rights issues).
by leosanchez | 2025-09-23 18:05:32+00:00
From the same article.

> Recently, a projection that Danes would be a minority in their own country by 2096 caused an enormous stir in Denmark.

I can totally understand this point btw. What I don't understand is

> London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits.

Can you tell me how has London changed for the worse from '90s and early 2000s to today for a Dane to lose interest in it ?

> I don't want to guess too wildly.

Please don't. I am a brown dude from a Third World country. I do follow DHH's blog.
by bhouston | 2025-09-23 18:05:42+00:00
I read the DHH post in question: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64. It is pretty standard anti-immigrant. It feels like it is acknowledging the fact that the populations of Western countries are in a demographic crisis, they are sub-replacement in terms of fertility but instead of fixing that he just wants to ban immigrants. It feels like fixing the fertility issue would solve the root issue.
by nmz | 2025-09-23 18:06:11+00:00
I didn't say it was forth, I said it was concatenative.

Forth itself is hard to categorize since it refuses to standardize but we all know what it looks like, I'd say its a low level language/VM that manages everything through stacks (usually 2) there's forthlike languages and also concatenative languages. concatenative languages can be far removed from forth, I don't mean that the shell itself is concatenative, but only the shell pipelining aspect, which you can imitate in any forth. take an object and keep passing it to subsequent functions without popping that know s how to handle that object, that's a shell pipeline to me, all of unix can be passed the /dev/std* objects and they can all modify it and pass it along to the next function/program.

https://concatenative.org/
by coryrc | 2025-09-23 18:06:21+00:00
> Those approved residents are not allowed to then decide to allow different people to reside at the property. Even new tenants sought out in an attempt to sublease, will have to be endorsed by the landlord. Not the current tenants.

Depends on what your lease says. The owner can give that option.

The landlord cannot legally give you the right to weigh in on a separate lease (SRO) if you'll make decisions using a protected class (i.e. you only want a particular sex in the SRO).
by merlincorey | 2025-09-23 18:06:27+00:00
It seems we're still collectively trying to figure out the boundaries of "delegation" versus "abstraction" which I personally don't think are the same thing, though they are certainly related and if you squint a bit you can easily argue for one or the other in many situations.

> We've gotten claude code to handle 300k LOC Rust codebases, ship a week's worth of work in a day, and maintain code quality that passes expert review.

This seems more like delegation just like if one delegated a coding task to another engineer and reviewed it.

> That in two years, you'll be opening python files in your IDE with about the same frequency that, today, you might open up a hex editor to read assembly (which, for most of us, is never).

This seems more like abstraction just like if one considers Python a sort of higher level layer above C and C a higher level layer above Assembly, except now the language is English.

Can it really be both?
by littlecranky67 | 2025-09-23 18:06:45+00:00
It is a bit unfair to say you cannot build any x402 offerings on top of lightning, when the very same driving force behind x402 (=Coinbase) didn't design it to, but instead pushes it's very own corporate technology into the standard (Base). There is no technical limitation in lightning that wouldn't allow it to be integrated into a standard - if you design that standard accordingly.
by fusslo | 2025-09-23 18:07:34+00:00
Maybe I am just misunderstanding. I probably am; seems like it happens more and more often these days

But.. I hate this. I hate the idea of learning to manage the machine's context to do work. This reads like a lecture in an MBA class about managing certain types of engineers, not like an engineering doc.

Never have I wanted to manage people. And never have I even considered my job would be to find the optimum path to the machine writing my code.

Maybe firmware is special (I write firmware)... I doubt it. We have a cursor subscription and are expected to use it on production codebases. Business leaders are pushing it HARD. To be a leader in my job, I don't need to know algorithms, design patterns, C, make, how to debug, how to work with memory mapped io, what wear leveling is, etc.. I need to know 'compaction' and 'context engineering'

I feel like a ship corker inspecting a riveted hull
by daxfohl | 2025-09-23 18:07:47+00:00
> And yeah sure, let's try to spend as many tokens as possible

It'd be nice if the article included the cost for each project. A 35k LOC change in a 350k codebase with a bunch of back and forth and context rewriting over 7 hours, would that be a regular subscription, max subscription, or would that not even cover it?
by derbOac | 2025-09-23 18:07:48+00:00
By that metric all of science has failed, or at least the biomedical fields.

Psychology looks like particle physics compared to fields like dentistry, and not a lot different from a lot of biomedical fields.

Psychology is just the messenger — meta-science goes under the radar but it's probably its biggest contribution to science at large.

I agree about replication in any case (not just psychological studies), but I have to say this seems like it probably would. If anything I think it underrepresents the phenomenon it studies because support for corruption and unethical behavior is likely to be underestimated in this kind of setting/design.