MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by akoboldfrying | 2025-09-18 12:48:33+00:00
The whole concept of "taste" being important bothers me, frankly. It's often implied that it's some objective thing, when it's really purely subjective. I accept that it's important socially to present as someone "with good taste", but I genuinely feel any effort in this direction is really just a huge waste of time.

Why not just enjoy the things you enjoy? And if the things you enjoy drift over time as you experience more and notice more patterns then fine, but this does not mean the new enjoyable thing is in any objective sense better then the old.

Finally, I'm completely fine with a website that looks "exactly like every other website".
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-09-18 12:48:47+00:00
I think you are missing the nuance between the different aspects of using the Python Interpreter, and integrating new functions with Python. And compiling to a different target. Would you say Iron Python is Not Python, and quibble about it? Is there some Python purist movement I'm not aware of? Should every fork of Python be forced to take Python out of its name?

To say Mojo doesn't use Python, when clearly that is a huge aim of the project, makes me think you are splitting hairs somewhere on some specific subject that is not clear by your one liners.

Key aspects of Mojo in relation to Python:

• Pythonic Syntax and Ecosystem Integration: Mojo adopts Python's syntax, making it familiar to Python developers. It also fully integrates with the existing Python ecosystem, allowing access to popular AI and machine learning libraries.

• Performance Focus: Unlike interpreted Python, Mojo is a compiled language designed for high-performance execution on various hardware, including CPUs, GPUs, and other AI ASICs. It leverages MLIR (Multi-Level Intermediate Representation) for this purpose.

• Systems Programming Features: Mojo adds features common in systems languages, such as static typing, advanced memory safety (including a Rust-style ownership model), and the ability to write low-level code for hardware.

• Compatibility and Interoperability: While Mojo aims for high performance, it maintains compatibility with Python. You can call Python functions from Mojo code, although it requires a specific mechanism (e.g., within try-except blocks) due to differences in compilation and execution.

• Development Status: Mojo is a relatively new language and is still under active development. While it offers powerful features, it is not yet considered production-ready for all use cases and is continually evolving.
by eth0up | 2025-09-18 12:49:08+00:00
This is intriguing and I assume the mechanical and balance (force distribution) have been addressed with strange, extremely light but strong materials. I think it's the parent comment, but someone mentioned Dyson fans, criticizing them as junk. I haven't owned one due to cost, but have been impressed with air/noise ratio.

I once knew a rogue architect who rode a bicycle, wore broken glasses mended with tape and lived in a home in south Florida (warm humid summers). He had dug trenches beneath his house, which he explained were for air circulation intended to work in harmony with interior modifications which I can't remember.

Unfortunately the city condemned and demolished his house. But I've been intrigued by solid state cooling methods since. The Japanese fan, though of questionable mechanical efficiency, ispires me as an example of easily overlooked but formidable design. Neat!
by jbreckmckye | 2025-09-18 12:49:39+00:00
We tried this 20 years ago with "CSS zen" and the Bad Old Days of "semantic CSS". It failed because you cannot completely couple HTML structure and presentation.

Usually you have more complex styles and visuals than your HTML can express and trying to invent selectors / HTML heirarchies to describe them gets difficult very quickly

In addition you often need to support multiple style systems on a single web application whilst the design evolves, or else it becomes an all or nothing rollout when you change stuff.

It's common for engineers who weren't around back then to look at the abstractions that modern FE systems provide, and question if they're even necessary. That's healthy. What's not healthy is assuming they were only invented for fake or historical reasons, and telling everyone to just abandon them for commercial projects.
Tell HN: Apple Broke Fitts' Law in Tahoe
by dmd | 2025-09-18 12:49:50+00:00
In every MacOS version - all the way back to the Lisa, even - items on the menu bar could be reached by clicking on the very first row of pixels on the screen. ("Rule of the infinite edges". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law )

In Tahoe, they broke that for 3rd party menu bar icons (and some Apple ones) See video: https://shot.3e.org/ss-20250918_074040.mp4

This worked fine until Tahoe.

It gets stranger, though - this is only broken if the menu bar is light-colored. That means it's broken if Reduce Transparency is turned on - OR if it's off, but you're using a very light (white or light gray) colored desktop background.

This isn't just the canary in a coal mine. The miners are dead. The mine has collapsed.
by streptomycin | 2025-09-18 12:50:04+00:00
If they were for some reason doing `npm install` rather than `npm ci`, then `npm install` does update packages in the lock file. Personally I always found that confusing, and yarn/pnpm don't behave that way. I think most people do `npm ci` in CI, unless they are using CI to specifically test if `npm install` still works, which I guess maybe would be a good idea if you use npm since it doesn't like obeying the lock file.
by sigwinch | 2025-09-18 12:50:19+00:00
In death, Mr. Kirk has become more useful than he was in life. There’s so much more coverage of him compared to, say, routine Russian drone incursions over NATO states. And I haven’t heard anyone actually quote him; not a word of his supposed wisdom. But, this occasion gets to be scribbled into the blank for “________ takes down that Jimmy Kimmel”.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-09-18 12:50:35+00:00
Fair point, but I did not attempt to integrate google search into my processes or workflow ( shows what I know about future predictions ), because while it was useful and did provide access to information, it was obviously limited in a sense that it could only take a mule like me to the water.

I don't want to delve into specifics, because it is a public forum. But the difference between learning google syntax and llm handling ( which I suppose would include prompt engineering ) should not be understated.
by thyristan | 2025-09-18 12:50:38+00:00
Even the "guaranteed measure of maintenance" is not guaranteed. You don't get an SLA on patches or bugfixes from microsoft. You don't get an uptime SLA. Its all "best effort" or worse "when we feel like it". And the few SLAs they give you, e.g. on cloud stuff, are useless because it basically is "get your money back for that month". And the SLA measurement is done by their own downtime announcements, so a complete joke. Software lifetimes exist and are published, but guess what? Within that lifetime, you get "updates", but nowhere do you get any kind of guarantee about what is updated, what is fixed, how fast, if ever.

And no kind of safety-oriented anything will run windows or any microsoft software. There is no windows edition of therac-25. The stuff you see in a hospital is normal workstation PCs for non-safety-relevant data entry and display. As soon as it becomes safety-relevant like controlling your heart-lung-machine, auto-dosing your medications, controlling the x-ray beam, you are far away from anything microsoft.

And actually, OSS is used more often in those safety-relevant settings. Why? Not because the OSS maintainers themselves would themselves provide any support, SLA or warranty. But because the nature of OSS provides third parties the possibility to certify, maintain and guarantee for their special 'safety-relevant-libxml2-fork'. Sometimes this is done by the device vendors themselves, sometimes they buy this from others. But it happens, and it is growing in frequency.

https://www.codethink.co.uk/news/trustable-software.html (Linux) https://access.redhat.com/en/compliance/iso-26262-asil-b (Linux) https://www.lynx.com/case-studies/secure-linux-medical-devic... (Linux) https://developer.arm.com/Tools%20and%20Software/Arm%20Compi... (clang/llvm)

There is tons more. Basically any compiler for safety-relevant embedded stuff is either clang or gcc under the hood. Linux is frequently encountered when the real-time requirements aren't too strict. With Linux also comes the usual Linux ecosystem of OSS libs and services. It won't look like your normal desktop OS, but quite a lot in that area is OSS.

Nothing at all from microsoft (except a useless BS certification "you can use Azure Devops as a code repo to store you ASIL-D code...").
by general1465 | 2025-09-18 12:51:15+00:00
Video is not a single stream, but many smaller chunks daisy chained after each other. Reason for this is that you can then change i.e. quality of video and it will seamlessly change - because it will start daisy chaining higher quality chunks and show them in the player.

So what you are describing is already happening, ads are added directly into video stream, problem is that ads need to have access to API, because you don't want to show an ad for menstruation pad to a guy so you also need to know which user is watching and that's what cookies and the whole login is for, so you are effectively hitting a design limitation of the system.

And no, you can't do this ad selection on the server, because for example when you have 10 users behind a NAT how are you going to tell which user is which from the server point of view? So you need to be calling these APIs from the client side.
by oftenwrong | 2025-09-18 12:51:47+00:00
I have been struggling with some team members who don't have taste, and amplify that via this sort of uncritical application of AI. The issue for one if them seems to be that they think the AI is perfect. They think: "If it comes up with it, it must be good/correct. If people are not using it for everything, they are wasting time doing something that the AI could do." It's frustrating to work with people like this because they rapidly produce bad results. I find it disrespectful to generate a large design document in one go, probably without even reading it, and then put it up for review, wasting the reviewers' time picking it apart. Someone "with taste" could produce something decent to begin with.
by naasking | 2025-09-18 12:51:57+00:00
The point has nothing to do with speed, but with expressive power / what is achievable and learnable, in principle. Again, if you accept that a computer can in principle run a program that qualifies as AGI, then all I'm saying is that an LLM with memory augmentation can in principle be trained to do this as well because their computation power is formally equivalent.

And coincidentally, a new paper being discussed on HN is a good example addressing your concern about existing models learning and developing novel things. Here's a GPT model that learned physics just by training on a data:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13805
by michabyte | 2025-09-18 12:52:35+00:00
Speaking as a member of Hack Club and a former summer intern of the same, we started on IRC if memory serves. The first issue is that HC aims to serve teen coders of all skill levels, and IRC is hardly a user-friendly medium. Sure, a skilled power user can learn to work around its quirks in a few hours. However, a beginner to programming/complex computer skills with nothing aiding them but a passion for learning more would find it confusing enough that giving up before learning the ropes is a realistic possibility. In addition, we make use of message search, threads, and other rich features (think Slack Canvases, Huddles, ping groups, etc.) that either can be added to IRC or are already in some server implementations, but simply aren't powerful and user friendly enough. I hope this helps answer your question :)
by madnirua | 2025-09-18 12:52:58+00:00
LibrePCB is revamping their UI with Slint to deliver a sleek, modern experience for their open-source EDA tool. In their latest blog post, they share a preview of LibrePCB 2.0’s new UI and the story behind migrating their 10+ year old Qt C++ codebase to Rust + Slint.
by tremon | 2025-09-18 12:53:04+00:00
I'm not convinced. The latest Battlemage benchmarks I've seen put the B580 at the same performance as the RTX 4060 (which is a two years old entry-level card) but with 50% more power consumption (80W vs 125W average). It's good to have more than one open source supporting graphics vendor, but I don't think Nvidia is losing any sleep over Intel's GPU offerings.
by clan | 2025-09-18 12:53:26+00:00
Is there no middle ground?

I love the clean approach with classless. Documents do have a structure and is makes it easy to change by just swapping out the CSS without touching the document.

But could you not just add the class only when you really really need to break the structure? The middle ground for me would to do my utmost to avoid classes within reason. So as few exceptions as possible. I know this is selling elastic bands by the meter.

On the other end you have Tailwind CSS. I know many are happy with it and find it has a nice developer velocity. But I find it overly verbose and "framework of the day"-ish.

So for me it is classless until my head hurts. Then I'll sprinkle in a class to get work done.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-09-18 12:53:29+00:00
<< I do see an argument that taste, a critical attitude and a good "bullshit detector" are now more important than ever.

Yes. Oddly, for once, English majors may actually benefit, because they may be better prepared than most to prepare prompts for the jobs of tomorrow ( mild sarcasm, coffee didn't kick in yet ).
by jasode | 2025-09-18 12:54:20+00:00
>Remember when Microsoft invested in Apple when Apple was down in the dumps? This is giving similar vibes.

Doesn't feel the same because the 1997 investment was arranged by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. He had a long personal relationship with Bill Gates so could just call him to drop the outstanding lawsuits and get a commitment for future Office versions on the Mac. Basically, Steve Jobs at relatively young age of 42 was back at Apple in "founder mode" and made bold moves that the prior CEO Gil Amelio couldn't do.

Intel doesn't have the same type of leadership. Their new CEO is a career finance/investor instead of a "new products new innovation" type of leader. This $5 billion investment feels more like the result of back-channel discussions with the US government where they "politely" ask NVIDIA to help out Intel in exchange for less restrictions selling chips to China.
by pj_mukh | 2025-09-18 12:55:07+00:00
Honestly, I’m an avid user of Ray-Ban metas and I agree that if Zuck doesn’t want to re-hash his old original sin (distracting algorithmic feeds) into this new form factor, he would block out any feeds and notifications from the glasses when it detected someone was talking to you, which the glasses can do really well. I’m hoping whatever answer Apple comes up with here has this behavior as default because they don’t have an active user axe to grind.

The glasses shine bright when you’re alone, on a walk.

Also while you’re at it, kill the Facebook and Instagram feeds to save humanity. Too much to ask?
by shade | 2025-09-18 12:56:00+00:00
Yeah, I've been deaf for over 40 years now and captioning glasses are something that I've wanted ever since I was a kid. I'm not a particularly big fan of Meta and I have some serious reservations around privacy that need to be satisfied, but at the same time it's really exciting to see this going from "pie in the sky thing I dreamed about having when I was ten" to "actual existing product."

There's a few other companies/startups working on this too, but a lot of the glasses they're producing are very ugly. There's a couple that didn't look bad, but from what I'm seeing Meta's are a combination of the best-looking ones and best display so far, and I'll be very curious to see the reviews.
by k__ | 2025-09-18 12:56:01+00:00
" I only get the most basic feedback: it should be in X style, pass Y linter, have N% coverage, have documentation"

Those are things that AIs can check by themselves.

What AIs are lacking is common sense.

They have no problem to inline everything they do which makes the codebase unmaintainable for humans

If you tell them to refactor, you get useless abstractions, like functions that get called in random places with no sense of structure.
by troupo | 2025-09-18 12:56:02+00:00
You have either too much time, or too much money, or both to curate code bases, to run 20x agent evals on those curated databases and spend time micro-optimising your agents... for those curated codebases. The moment you step outside of those curated codebases and run the agents against non-curated codebases?

Well, no one knows. They may or may not work because the actual codebase may be similar to, or may be completely different from the curated one.

And how do I know that it may not work? Well, let's turn to our friends at Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-...

--- start quote ---

When Claude generates text, it calculates probabilities for each possible next word, then randomly chooses a sample from this probability distribution. We use "top-p sampling" to avoid nonsensical outputs—only considering words whose cumulative probability reaches a threshold (typically 0.99 or 0.999). On TPUs, our models run across multiple chips, with probability calculations happening in different locations. To sort these probabilities, we need to coordinate data between chips, which is complex

--- end quote ---

So it's a probabilistic next word (which is quite likely to be different for a non-curated codebase), and there's top sampling, and then the complex sorting of probabilities, and on top of that are all the changes and bugs and limits and input/output transforms that Anthropic introduces.

> share your specific case and I'll help you set it up.

I have several side projects in Elixir. And at work we're developing a product that runs across 14 different (but similar, but different enough) platforms using the company's proprietary services.

It's especially funny to see the claims of "oh just one more fine-tuning, bro, and everything will be gazillion times better" when I have already used and found issues with every "diligently researched" "guaranteed eval'ed" hype tool under the sun. This is just one of the results: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1967306828418818217

Yours are unlikely to be any different.
by milkshakes | 2025-09-18 12:56:19+00:00
> Meta seems like one of the few large tech companies where if the whole company vanished, the world would be purely a better place.

This is what I disagree with. Specifically, I don't disagree that Meta has caused serious harm. I just don't think we live in such a black and white world "where if the whole company vanished, the world would be purely a better place".
by michalu | 2025-09-18 12:56:25+00:00
You buy fashion item precisely for what it is - a fashion item. To look good, to have a nice style - to make a better social impression when you go out, to social events, business meetings, etc. This is a reality of life, clothes make a human and watch is pretty much only jewel you can wear as aman that doesn't make you look like a teenager. Obviously depends on where you hang out, how old are you and what are your priorities but this is a reality of life in some places.

Now if I have to choose a watch and I can make a choice between a losing item and likely winning item I'll take the likely wionning one. Perhaps it's like crypto or mutual funds but I'd rather buy crypto than flush money down the toilet.

So no you don't buy a watch for investment, there are better investments. No you don't buy it a fashion item to get time - I already have precise time on my phone. Not into wathches - all good. You don't like to dress nice, perhaps you live in a big city where nobody cares - no problem.

But let's not argue I'm not wise for not buying "precise time" Casio over Rolex because I have 8k on my wrist I paid 4.5k for and I've been wearing beautiful watch for 7 years now :) And yes there are better investments and million better things to buy - I could drive $2k car, I could make best investments and so on and end up like this guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/comments/10ec45k/i_think_i_r...

It's all simply a point of view + making the best out of your money. At the end of the day it's just paper.
by literalAardvark | 2025-09-18 12:56:43+00:00
Many people find advertising valuable.

It's tracking, micro targeting, retargeting, and trying to sell me a fridge that I literally just bought while I'm off reading about sailboats that's intrusive.

Advertise shoes, cleats, sails, and charters in the Bahamas while I'm doing that, not singles near me and bicycles because I posted in a Facebook group.
by 9rx | 2025-09-18 12:56:44+00:00
> Generating profits is about the most tasteless thing one could do

Why's that? Profit, of course, is just the measure of how much trade is undelivered.

The old: I give you my corn to feed your chickens, and at some point in the future you will give me chickens in return once they are fed and grown. The amount of undelivered chickens are my profit. But eventually you will provide the chickens as promised, theoretically. Fair trade doesn't seem tasteless.

And if I forever hold on to that profit and never expect you to give me the chickens in the future as you originally promised, then I literally gave you the corn for free. How could it be tasteless to help someone out by giving them something for free?

Perhaps you are actually thinking of something like regulatory capture that is oft associated with profit? I can see how that becomes quite tasteless and certainly the tech industry in particular loves to exploit that. I am not sure that underpins our professional efforts, though. The tech industry would still exist even without all the insane laws that surround it.
by netbioserror | 2025-09-18 12:57:26+00:00
I like KDE, but every time I use it as a daily driver, I again run into all of those little issues that make it frustrating over time. Little breakages, weird Qt dependency hell, the works. I came to Mint because Cinnamon really has been built with being bomb-proof as the highest priority. The details are sweated, and the feature set is lean, so they can really focus on quality.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-18 12:58:23+00:00
Broadcom cleaned house though - the overwhelming majority of old school CA Technologies from line level ICs to VPs and Execs were all cut.

There was a notorious incident where some ex-VPs at CA made a whole stink about being downgraded to Managers at Broadcom due to title inflation at CA and Hock Tan personally flamed them, along with CA's shenanigans around their private jet (Broadcom demanded CA to fly commercial).

Sometimes, companies with lazy and inefficient leadership and staff need to get the stick.
by tpoacher | 2025-09-18 12:58:34+00:00
Only for modern definitions of advertising, mind you, which are all about dark patterns and invasive marketing, rather than putting a descrption of your product out there that can be searched by interested parties looking to buy a product like yours.

There were times were advertising was useful and desirable, e.g. Small Ads pages.

There was also a time when ads were a single unintrusive scrolling line, curated by the website owner so as to be relevant to their audience. Those were fine.