MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aafanah | 2025-09-05 18:57:11+00:00
Fair point. I think the bottom line is that it depends a lot on the context and how the prompt is framed. For PRs with small enough scope, I have seen LLMs provide decent value, mostly in surfacing potential issues or offering quick summaries. That said, the Semgrep analysis highlights that accuracy and coverage still fall short even in these narrow cases, so clearly there is still a lot of work to be done before this becomes broadly reliable.
by DarkNova6 | 2025-09-05 18:57:45+00:00
Ahahahahaha.

Remember when the world went insane and wanted JS (not TS) to run literally everywhere?

Now we live in a world where TS, Python and even PHP admitted the mistake of unrestrained types. People who didn’t get the memo are highly questionable, probably facing solo-dev hacker mindset syndrome.

I am not sorry for having strong opinions.
by tacostakohashi | 2025-09-05 18:57:59+00:00
Sort of, in a way. I think of myself as a neo-luddite.

* I am pretty wary and unexcited about new products, gadgets, things from startups that are unlikely to survive very long. The Lindy effect is real, and powerful. I like "boring technology", and things that will be stable and around in 2 years, 5 years, etc.

* I think dedicated, single-purpose apps, products, services, and cloud / saas things are are pretty stupid. I like text files, shell scripts, spreadsheets, and markdown. If it has to be more complicated than that, then maybe json, xml, etc., but something generic and "flat file".

* I don't like configuring or customizing things. I prefer the default, out of the box configuration, because that's what I'll get if I reinstall, get another one, have multiple devices, etc. If something has a dumb configuration by default, but can be configured/customized to be wonderful using non-default settings, then as far as I'm concerned it's broken, the out of the box configuration is the only one that counts.

* Things like "smart" houses / devices that need wifi, an app, phone home, and depend on continuous internet connectivity are moronic.

* The more the internet slides into a hellscape of ads, algorithms, and AI slop, the more I like offline things. The corkboard at the supermarket is a great way to discover products and services. Phone calls answered by humans are pretty good. Walking up to a tradesperson parked at a jobsite and talking to them to see if they can do your job is pretty great.

* I'd rather use checks than venmo or zelle.
by chelmzy | 2025-09-05 18:58:05+00:00
Crazy he wouldn't go for a Bolt. I just bought a 2019 Chevy Bolt w/ 11k miles for $14.5k (so a bit over 10k after federal rebate). It has a brand new battery because all the Bolts were recalled for battery issues. Has around 250m range. Feel like I won the lottery. Still plenty of them available https://www.donohooauto.com/searchused.aspx?Make=Chevrolet&M...
by lacy_tinpot | 2025-09-05 18:58:29+00:00
There is no solution, everything is bad, but this new thing yah it's worse than everything before it. So we must keep the horrible old bad thing while impotently critiquing it.

It seems that this is a quintessential argument that's often made and is, plainly speaking, entirely stupid.

What do you think "people" means? "People" means an organization of humans.

How that organization structures itself produces various different kinds of results.

Religious organizations, political organizations, corporations, etc. are all People, but the results are very very different from organization to organization.

Why? Because of incentive structures.

The Enlightenment "indifference of the state" can actually then be extended to the "indifference of organizations".

Cryptocurrencies/the internet are no different in that sense as it is a new organizing principle for groups of people.

But what it is deliberately designed to do actually is to facilitate transactions.

What you're actually interested in is Fascism/Authoritarianism, where the state takes a paternalistic stance to protect the poor and stupid, the "masses", from the freedom to transact among themselves.

What actually needs to be prevented is the monopolistic and excessive accumulation that concentrates transactionary powers.

Limiting transactions is then the real authoritarianism, whether that is from a government or through the accumulation of wealth to a small segment of the population.

The issue simply that there is an asymmetry where certain people should have greater powers than others because they are verifiably better, but how much better and to what extent can such persons actually accumulate that power is a difficult question.

That's where the organizations of various kinds come in. They accumulate for themselves so as to protect the individual through the collective. This is the feature of any organization but again it ends up in the same situation. Organization can accumulate excessive powers and limit the freedoms of others, just as an individual can.

This dynamic is the problem. How to resolve? Can it be resolved? Who actually knows.

Cryptocurrencies, really the internet and computer technologies as such, are just another instance where we're re-evaluating the values and re-organizing ourselves around those principles. It'll address some of the old problems, it'll create new ones, but it's not any different than any other previous technological revolution.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-09-05 18:59:45+00:00
Maybe that needs a sawzall. But getting into a utility box only took hand tools. Only recently after thefts have gotten so bad have they been welding these boxes shut. When they stole all the historic lights off the Hyperion Bridge in LA, it looks like they were merely unbolted:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-05/historic...
by nonethewiser | 2025-09-05 19:00:00+00:00
>The standard answer is scale. “Small programs don’t need types,” the reasoning goes, “but large programs become unmaintainable without them.” This sounds reasonable until you realize what we’re actually admitting: that we’ve designed our systems to be inherently incomprehensible to human reasoning. We’ve created architectures so tangled, so dependent on invisible connections and implicit behaviors, that we need automated tools just to verify that our programs won’t crash in obvious ways.

A few thoughts...

1. Some things are complicated. Of course we should elminate needless complexity - but not all complexity is needless.

2. If your system has huge thing 1 connected to huge thing 2, then you have to understand 2 huge things and a little glue. If you instead have a system comprised of small thing 1 connected to small thing 2, ... connected to small thing 100, you now how to understand 100 small things and 99 connections. The nature of these things and connections matter but you can't just keep dividing things to simplify them. John Carmack's email about inlining code springs to mind: http://number-none.com/blow/john_carmack_on_inlined_code.htm...

3. "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)

I would love to see the author take a complex system where Typescript (for example) is "necessary" and refactor it to JavaScript.
by henning | 2025-09-05 19:00:03+00:00
Prove it. Write a very large program in an experimental state chart-based language and prove that doing the same thing in any conventional language would have been impractical or impossible.

> We debate whether Rust’s borrow checker is better than Haskell’s type classes. We argue about whether TypeScript’s structural typing is superior to Java’s nominal typing.

Life is too short to argue about stupid programming language bullshit. If you want to use Rust, do it. If not, don't. The actual code that makes up the computer system as a whole is still 99.99% the same because you are running on an operating system written in C calling a database or other systems also written in C.
by steveklabnik | 2025-09-05 19:00:42+00:00
Hm, yeah I guess you're probably right.

I find myself not being particularly upset by the tone thing. It seems like it really upsets some other people. Or rather, I guess I should say it may subconsciously affect me, but I haven't noticed.

I do giggle when I see "You're absolutely right" because it's a meme at this point, but I haven't considered it to be offensive or enjoyable.
by rogerkirkness | 2025-09-05 19:00:53+00:00
Definitely not the leading cause of autism, definitely a contributing factor to the complicated generic expression cascade that can lead to autism [1].

"We identified 46 studies for inclusion in our analysis. Of these, 27 studies reported positive associations (significant links to NDDs), 9 showed null associations (no significant link), and 4 indicated negative associations (protective effects). Higher-quality studies were more likely to show positive associations. Overall, the majority of the studies reported positive associations of prenatal acetaminophen use with ADHD, ASD, or NDDs in offspring, with risk-of-bias and strength-of-evidence ratings informing the overall synthesis."

Added link for lazy people who don't have Google.

[1] https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-...
by wtbdbrrr | 2025-09-05 19:00:54+00:00
> assuming that reducing blood flow one place, and increasing it in another place

should have made it clear that I did not mean decreasing in one place while increasing in another but increasing throughout all proximate areas.

> Your whole comment is full of this type of worse than weak reasoning.

Agreed, should have tagged it #sciencephilosophy or something ... I was thinking out loud. But there is merit. I am not uncertain any studies can prove me entirely wrong. But I understand why such a discussion might be a waste of time.

> This cannot possibly be assumed when talking about physiology already known to be atypical.

I don't understand. If reduced bloodflow is known to be the cause for atypical physiology, then the opposite is certainly also known.

I understand that -q doesn't necessarily mean p, but in the case of reduced bloodflow we have proof, don't we?

There's a little lump in my lag that causes reduced bloodflow if I don't do certain exercises or movements, which causes a bit of lag. If I do the movements for a bit or several times per hour, no lag. That is true for a considerable percentage of the population.
by bediger4000 | 2025-09-05 19:01:14+00:00
I'm going to hypothesize that there are two big drivers of this:

1. Everyone has swatted a few flies, or smashed a cricket or a grasshopper, but almost nobody has raised cattle or chickens or especially pigs. Eggs come out of hen's cloacas. It ain't great. If you're comfortable with the reality of farm animals, insect protein doesn't seem that odd.

2. Alex Jones. Globalists forcing you to eat bugs was one of his favorite Boogeymen.
by techpineapple | 2025-09-05 19:01:21+00:00
But what is better? I mean yes, reading 20 sources on a topic and coming to your own conclusions about an issue is the right answer, but the fact that Wikipedia published its edit history and discussions page makes it seem better than then what everything?

Almost every book you read about Israel Palestine will probably be biased in some way, certainly the news will be. It feels like perfect being the enemy of good. Like sure it’s a mess like all compendiums of human knowledge, but also seems massively better than the alternative.

Your point about the encyclopedia seems strange, sure it’s likely to be less accurate less complete and more biased, but it’s narratively interesting is like? What are you trying to accomplish than that that’s better?

Annoyance at Wikipedia feels nihilistic. Like “it’s not perfect so why try”. “I’d rather read things where I think I know what the bias is (but probably don’t”
by motorest | 2025-09-05 19:02:11+00:00
> Type checking is a first line of defense against bugs. That's all.

Exactly, and it goes way beyond that point. Static type checking turns expensive, hard-to-catch bugs that manifest only at runtime when exercising specific code paths into cheap, trivial to spot bugs that you spot at compile time.

On top of that, nowadays it greatly improved developer experience as IDEs use type hints to detect and avoid bugs even before you compile the code, and even helps autocomplete code you are typing.

We've been through this before. Haven't we learned this yet?
by tveyben | 2025-09-05 19:02:17+00:00
Just came back from a vacation in Japan, and completely agree - even compared to the (much better than SF) danish public transport system the Japanese are orders of a magnitude better on so many levels!

Nu then - having 37 mio people just in one city, Tokyo, does require you to get the logistics in order (all of Denmark is just around 6 mio…)
by PhantomHour | 2025-09-05 19:02:40+00:00
> If they all have valid visas and are legal to work, I'm confident they'll be released

The Trump administration has been in court several times already for trying to deport people who, not only are not supposed to be deported, but whose deportation would and is be illegal.

Even if they're released, ICE is known to be abusive and inhumane in it's detention practices.

Your response reeks of "they'll be proven to be illegals soon enough, and then all the abuse is fair game". Disgusting.
by creatonez | 2025-09-05 19:03:20+00:00
What I'm saying: Because Wikipedia is a premier world-class source in debunking scientific racism, presents a constellation of facts that are rather damaging to frauds like Charles Murray, and has likely prevented the radicalization of tens of thousands of people... nearly every single critic of Wikipedia on this particular topic is a scientific racist. Which is a set of positions indistinguishable from eugenics. Pretty much without exception.
by IshKebab | 2025-09-05 19:03:40+00:00
Wow, so much wrong here. I dunno whether it's worth picking apart because it's so obviously wrong but... I'll start:

> The standard answer is scale. “Small programs don’t need types,” the reasoning goes, “but large programs become unmaintainable without them.” This sounds reasonable until you realize what we’re actually admitting: that we’ve designed our systems to be inherently incomprehensible to human reasoning. We’ve created architectures so tangled, so dependent on invisible connections and implicit behaviors, that we need automated tools just to verify that our programs won’t crash in obvious ways. > > Type checking, in other words, is not a solution to complexity—it’s a confession that we’ve created unnecessary complexity in the first place.

Woah woah, where did unnecessary come from? Yes we have made super complex systems that need automated checking. But they are (mostly) necessarily complex. Are you going to write a 10k line OS kernel? A 10k web browser? A 10k line word processor? Yeah good luck.

> electronics engineers routinely design systems with millions of components, intricate timing relationships, and complex interactions between subsystems. Yet they don’t rely on anything analogous to our type checkers.

I dunno if he's talking about PCBs... but actually having types for wires is a pretty great idea. Seems like Altium kind of has support for this but I don't know how much checking it does: https://www.altium.com/documentation/altium-designer/sch-pcb...

Anyway, aside from the fact that PCB design is a completely different thing, PCB designers accidentally make wrong connections all the time.

> The problem isn’t that software is inherently more complex than hardware.

It is though. Way more complex. Find me a PCB as complex as Chrome or LLVM. Hell, find me a CPU as complex. Even the latest OoO designs don't come close.

> UNIX pipelines

Ha I knew he was going to suggest this.

> yet they require no type checking at the transport layer

"require" sure, I guess. Now go and look up how many quoting options there are in `ls`. And nobody has ever realized that structured piping is better and have written two popular shells (at least) that support it.

Ugh so many misguided words remain, I'll stop there.
by ethbr1 | 2025-09-05 19:04:24+00:00
100%. Imho, parents should generally at least skim books before giving them to younger children, if only to know what topics their child might ask about after reading.

As a YA author at a recent con panel put it: "I let my kids read any book they want, but I describe the themes. Sometimes, they decide they might not be ready for specific topics"

Help kids censor for themselves, if they choose. (Personally, less-so on censoring for them, especially books)
by cjs_ac | 2025-09-05 19:04:27+00:00
All of the ideas the founding fathers discussed arose in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the 1600s. If you're familiar with that conflict, particularly that between the Parliament of England and Charles I, a lot of the US founding fathers' particular obsessions (the word tyranny, for instance) make more sense. The real magic in the American Revolution was how spectacularly unambitious it was; all of the most important parts were already in place in Britain, and only denied to the colonies through sheer bloody-mindedness.

The US is not the first modern democracy; it's just the best at self-aggrandisement.
Show HN: Convey – build forms and collect responses in plain English
by nliang86 | 2025-09-05 19:04:44+00:00
Hi all! I built a form tool around two ideas:

1) Plain text building: Say what you want, it generates and updates the form for you

2) Chat to respond: Respondents answer naturally by chatting with a helpful and flexible agent

Try it at https://www.conveyform.com

Demo (no login required):

- Contact form: https://www.conveyform.com/forms/9/respond

- SWE job application: https://www.conveyform.com/forms/8/respond

The builder side is free to start but requires a login.

What’s different

- For builders: faster creation and iteration than drag/drop editors ("I want a SWE job application form", "require a github URL")

- For respondents:

– Can ask clarifying questions ("what do you mean by X?", "where do I find Y?") – Can reply naturally ("I work as a SWE" → "Software Engineer", flexible dates/times, etc.) - Can answer questions out of order, grouped together where it makes sense, etc.

Privacy

- Uses the Claude Sonnet API; no training on user data.

Rough edges

- CSV export only; no integrations yet.

- No conditional logic yet

I'm looking for feedback - is it useful? is it an improvement on existing form builders? what functionality is missing? additional rough edges, etc.

Thank you for taking a look!
by turtlebits | 2025-09-05 19:04:46+00:00
Its not supposed to be a usable computer. I've never hooked up any of my Pis to a monitor longer a few minutes other than to enable SSH, which now you don't even need to. Either way, I'm fine leaving out all the accessories.

The best part of the Pi ecosystem is that if one dies, I can easily find a replacement and just swap out the SD.
by t_tsonev | 2025-09-05 19:05:04+00:00
This is not a general rule and many non-cooled and air-cooled batteries can hold up pretty well. The battery cooling becomes a limiting factor for DC charging, especially if multiple charging sessions are required per trip.

The Leaf limited battery life is mainly to its battery chemistry (LMO), although it arguably doesn't go to great lengths to ensure thermal stability of the pack.
by vorpalhex | 2025-09-05 19:06:13+00:00
There's an old network admin adage that if you ever need a backhoe to show up, all you need to do is bury some fiber optic cable.

Soon enough a backhoe will magically appear to sever your buried fiber.

This trick works great if you ever get lost. They say a master network admin always carries 6ft of fiber optic just for this reason.
by wtbdbrrr | 2025-09-05 19:06:47+00:00
> Showing that some effect can result from some cause is not sufficient to show that it does result from that cause.

Definitely something I should have cleared up: it's utterly useless to claim or proof that some mental problem is caused by some reduction in bloodflow in some part of the brain, but I believe it is beneficial to know, if you are afflicted, that it's an area worth investigating, rather than assuming that your personality, your brain or your mind lack innate, exogenous mechanisms to deal with anxiety, depression and or other stuff.

> You're resting big confident assertions on "I read this somewhere, go look it up." In fact biology and mentation are complex and we don't have the whole picture. It's easy to put together whatever "just so story" you want by rearranging fragments of evidence, but it doesn't make it true.

Science philosophy starts somewhere. I'm sure at least some of it started in garages =]
Ask HN: Shall we launch a HN Fund to invest in startups?
by mandeepj | 2025-09-05 19:06:49+00:00
Hello, fellow HN members -

I've had this idea for a while, but never posted here until now. As you might have heard, it's a great time to start a company, given advancements, especially in technology, and also the availability of guidance more broadly.

On a high level, it doesn't have to be just one fund, and it can be like many ETFs - Tech, High Tech, Agriculture, Climate Change, Carbon Cleaning, Aerospace, Healthcare, Hospitality, Retail, Media, etc.

Also very briefly on this as well - pitchers submit their 'Show HN' post sharing how much they are looking to raise. To illustrate the concept more clearly, there can be various slots, like Kickstarter projects have, to raise funds - offering high dollar amounts for control and input, or simply buying shares like you would in a stock market. There can be subsequent funding rounds, like how many privately held companies do, for e.g., SpaceX.

I think the idea has a lot of potential. Hopefully, it'd click at least with some of you. Happy to explain more in comments!!

Let's talk!!

MJ
by nativeit | 2025-09-05 19:07:05+00:00
> In the Oblique Strategies deck, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt counsel us to "be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before"[1]

This sounds a lot like Musk's engineering mantra "the best part is no part."[2]

Maybe I am reading to much into these things, but I'm consistently annoyed with the tech industry's habit of framing of age-old philosophies into revelatory paradigms.

Keep it simple. It's been taught to every Engineering 101 student since long before any of us were alive to hear it. It's fundamental design practice. Everyone needs to learn it for the first time, of course [insert XKCD comic], but I don't know that we need to pretend that Brian Eno or Elon Musk possess more insight than any given engineering student with a passing grade point average.

1. https://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html

2. Which itself was a riff on Lotus' founder's "Simplify, then add lightness"
by dolebirchwood | 2025-09-05 19:07:06+00:00
The other problem I encounter is designers working in B2B, but designing like they're working in B2C.

For B2B (especially enterprise B2B), your software is just a tool your customers' employees need for their day jobs. Fancy animations, multi-colored gradients (because gradients mean "AI" now, right), and other gaudy crap does not make it easier for anyone to do their job. It's just noise -- constantly distracting users who are just trying to navigate through dense, text-heavy dashboards.

If you want to design "pretty" and "delightful" experiences, then it doesn't make much sense to join a company that revolves around CRM/ERP workflows. Work for a company whose value is directly tied to users' warm and fuzzy feelings.
by thoroughburro | 2025-09-05 19:07:07+00:00
I do not accept the assertion that the content I host is anything other than my own to serve to whom I wish. Get your hands off my belongings, freeloader.

Or, shorter: I hold you in as much contempt as you hold me.

> If guys like this have their way, AI will remain stupid and limited

AI doesn’t have a right to my stuff just because it’ll suck without it.