MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zakelfassi | 2025-09-16 02:19:19+00:00
That’s the sweet spot, honestly. It’s less about whether an LLM can crank out scaffolding faster than someone fluent in JavaScript and more about what it unlocks: the ability to collapse “thinking about it for months” into “there’s a thing I can actually click/play with.”

That’s the core of what I was trying to name with the 12-month bug: our tendency to loop in abstraction long after execution could’ve started. Doesn’t matter if the code’s rough; the point is you crossed the boundary. From there, the real operating system is iteration.

If it’s useful, I wrote a companion post called Stuck Theory: Resistance as Fitness Function. Similar~ish meta-conclusion. For me the blog as a whole is a running attempt to debug how we keep pushing dense, sometimes unwieldy information down our own neural pathways while AI is gradually offloading the lighter parts of cognition. Thanks for reading!
by timonoko | 2025-09-16 02:21:07+00:00
Based on your description, the story you're likely thinking of is Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars. The scenario you describe is a key element of the book's early colonization efforts. The colonists use electric vehicles and helicopters for exploration on Mars, and they power them by deploying vast, flexible sheets of thin-film solar cells. They would spread these out on the Martian plains to recharge their equipment, a process that was essential for their survival and mobility. Your observation that "This does not sound Scifi at all now" is spot-on. Red Mars, published in 1992, was a pioneering work of "hard science fiction" that focused on plausible, realistic future technologies. At the time, thin-film solar panels and advanced electric helicopters were speculative concepts. However, with the development of real-world technology like the flexible solar panels used on the International Space Station and the success of NASA's Ingenuity helicopter on Mars, the line between Robinson's fiction and our reality has become much blurrier.

-- Gemini
by kragen | 2025-09-16 02:21:16+00:00
Probably not. You would be right if we were talking about honest, competent central bankers. But most people live in poor countries. Why are those countries poor?

Every country is different, but poor countries are mostly poor because they are governed by kleptocrats, generally including their central bankers, and hyperinflation in particular is a constant menace. When the central bankers aren't directly kleptocratic themselves, they are very often incompetent but loyal, similar to most of Trump's nominees. In this situation, generally speaking, things that put power over individuals' lives back in the hands of those individuals, instead of the kleptocrats' hands, will improve the situation not just of the individuals but of their whole country.
by kamaal | 2025-09-16 02:21:21+00:00
Im not sure how this is a negative merit for React.

Besides if you are a small company, or a start up, your job is to get things done. Not to embark on a global technology crusade to push your favourite tech.

By and large the best thing about react is the overall ecosystem, libraries, talent and ubiquitousness. And thats a good thing.
by ipaddr | 2025-09-16 02:21:38+00:00
We are quick to blame phones and social media. Previously it was tv. Before that comics and radio. The breakdown of the nuclear family.

We ignore the food we put into our bodies, we include the medical waste going into our environment getting recycled back into food/water. We blindly take pills the doctor gives. We gladly take a needle where you need to sign a piece of paper saying you can't sue if anything goes wrong with this untested vaccine. We would never let any other drug/vaccine into the market without years of testing but this one is fine. You have to sign here because when something goes wrong we need to make sure it's your fault alone.
by kelvinjps | 2025-09-16 02:22:00+00:00
I bought chatgpt last month and I think that openai is doing things right now, mostly in the experience, for example it has a better voice mode than Claude's and I liked their new model names than the confusing ones they used to have, it simplified the whole thing. Also as a general assistant is better too, for comparison Claude for non code things is not that very good. And openai keep releasing tools and seems more reliable in their tools
by musictubes | 2025-09-16 02:22:04+00:00
This is tiresome. You cannot lock down development machines. If you pay attention you'll see that OSes made for development work will be the only ones not locked down. Android was a holdout but Google is now tightening the screws. MacOS, Linux, BSD, and Windows are the only OSes that can't be locked down. Microsoft tried but they abandoned that.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-09-16 02:24:26+00:00
I love seeing stories of people building things to make the world better, rather than “Juicero but make it AI.”

I didn’t pick up on it from the article, but why local binaries over a SaaS? It seems like that app would be the ideal candidate for a client server model… she wouldn’t need to worry about old Windows machines or firewalls or installing it on non-technical users’ machines, as long as they had a browser.

They mentioned something about “locked down enterprise environments” but I don’t know what that means.

Edit: oh, maybe “locked down environments + firewalls” means these machines have no internet egress so you would have to poke holes in a firewall to reach the internet?
by Telaneo | 2025-09-16 02:24:27+00:00
> to focus on getting one easily available, affordable device working fully with pure Debian or PostmarketOS (no closed drivers or other modules, and preferably no blobs) and with Purism's Phosh.

I'm not sure how viable this is. Linux phones already opt for hardware that's as open as possible, i.e. they use parts with the most open documentation and drives, but the trade-off to that is that those parts are functionally already end-of-life when they're in the phone, either because it's an old design that's been opened up to squeeze a bit more money out of an old design, or the design was third-rate to begin with. Not to mention that the baseband side of things is closed no matter what, so the phone that's completely true to the FOSS ideals seems impossible to make no matter what. And who would buy a phone with a third-rate chip and battery life? And since very few people buy them, prices aren't able to drop any significant amount.

I understand why people aren't willing to make a devils bargain in order to make a decent phone first, and then put Linux on it second, but I can't see any other way for this to happen, other than the phone market magically becoming more open somehow. If you could install Linux on any phone, since all the drivers are already out there, then we wouldn't be in this pickle, but every single Android phone out there has a different set of drivers and very few of them are open and possible to implement without an enormous amount of work, unlike the PC world, were at this point, only the really weird stuff (and Wifi from certain vendors) doesn't have some form of Linux driver.
Show HN: BodyBuilding Coaching Tools Claude Coded
by faangguyindia | 2025-09-16 02:25:28+00:00
Basically, in my country people don't receive good fitness guidance, so i developed tools and guides to help them out.

These are developed using this approach: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTCoding/comments/1nh7bu1/3_ph...
by Animats | 2025-09-16 02:26:06+00:00
> Quality control became impossible. Shared kitchen facilities meant that one staff member prepared food for multiple brands simultaneously. No ownership. No accountability. Just assembly-line cooking with zero connection to customers. When food arrived cold or wrong, customers had no relationship with the brand to forgive mistakes. No loyal regulars. No servers to smooth over problems. Just angry reviews that destroyed virtual brands forever. No reason for repeat business.

That's a straight quality control problem. It ought to be solveable.

But that's hard to do.

The trouble is, the whole food app industry is based on someone else dealing with the hard problems. The drivers aren't employees, and the restaurants aren't employees. If an app company gets into ghost kitchens, they are now in a business where they are clueless. Some try to avoid being responsible for the food by just being landlords for people who buy a station in the kitchen

Bulk food prep is a solved problem. Every major hotel has it solved. There will be some senior people who went to a serious culinary academy. They look at food prep as a manufacturing problem, with batch quantity optimization, holding time limits, error tolerances on temperatures and quantities, and quality control points. It's factory planning.

The first "Doordash Kitchen", in Silicon Valley, is near me. It's still operating, but I don't see many drivers there.

> When food travels twenty minutes in a bag, quality suffers.

You'd think that would be a solved problem in packaging and prep by now. Insulated containers are not rocket science.
by IlikeKitties | 2025-09-16 02:26:57+00:00
>Banking requiring an Android or iOS Device for 2fa

>My local postal service requiring an Android or iOS Device to unlock those postal delivery boxes

>My local public transport requiring a Android or iOS Wallet app for my ticket to be used

>My Health Insurance Provider requiring an Android or iOS App to see my own insurance data

This is my daily struggle. All of these companies refuse to engage with you on this topic, you get a canned response from support that's it. How do we even win this fight? As far as I can tell we've already lost.
by Nursie | 2025-09-16 02:27:32+00:00
I had a Neo Freerunner.

It was a terrible experience. I bought it with the impression that it had calls, texts etc working fine, and they were looking for developers to come along and add apps, games, whatever to round out the experience.

I couldn't have been more wrong. They had about four different distros. There was the 'old' one, the 'new' one which was already scheduled for deprecation because of the new-new one in the pipeline and there was also a debian distro. Each one used an entirely different UI framework (gtk/efl/qt), and the developers seemed focused on these endless interface rewrites when the unit couldn't reliably receive a call or a text under any of them.

After that I had a Nokia N900, which was a great experience. They'd nailed down the basics perfectly (as you'd expect from a much larger company) and the unit was a capable smartphone with linux under the hood and easily accessible. It's just a shame the app ecosystem never took off, and nokia flushed itself down the toilet shortly thereafter. I guess Sailfish is the successor in this space, though I liked that Maemo was debian-ish rather than rpm-ish :)

I guess what I'm saying is that a linux phone doesn't have to be raw, but for god's sake make it able to take calls and send a few messages...
by alberzurano | 2025-09-16 02:27:57+00:00
I’m fully aware of the risks in business travel, which is exactly why I’ve designed our AI Agents on a resilient architecture with redundancy, fallback mechanisms, and strict validation layers. In the private beta, I’ve been stress-testing the system under real client scenarios to anticipate edge cases and potential failure points before scaling further.

So far, I can confidently say the performance is not only reliable enough for production, but it’s also shaping up to become a benchmark in the industry. That said, I’m continuing to harden the stack and optimize for scalability and compliance as we move forward.
by daedrdev | 2025-09-16 02:29:05+00:00
I do feel like there is some man shaking fist at cloud here.

The post dismisses airpods, yet they are one of the most popular products in the US, with like 75% of young people owning a pair, great quality, features, and battery life. I dont think a swappable battery is even a good feature, the parts would be tiny and break easily given their size not to mention how often they could get lost
by Telaneo | 2025-09-16 02:29:17+00:00
> What government apps do people run?

Public transport ticket app, government ID app, drivers licence app.

I do believe all of these specific examples run fine on rooted Android without too much hassle (unsure about the second one), so they should be emulatable or whatever on a Linux phone, but that assumes that experience holds up decently well, which I would be surprised if it did for apps like this.

> Why do you need to access your bank account on your phone?

Because the app is a whole lot better than the web interfaces my previous banks had. Plus the added convenience. I'd prefer that the web interface was just as good as the app, but I'd still use the app even if that existed, just due to the convenience.
by BirAdam | 2025-09-16 02:30:42+00:00
I started using Linux in the 1990s, and I flirted with Apple through out the 2010s. I finally switched full time to a Mac Studio this year despite the UI, despite the read-only root and kexts no longer being a thing and inconsistencies and stupid settings app and everything else.

For one, M4 Max is awesome. For two, every other OS is now more annoying to me. Linux is more inconsistent, and the changes being made by major distros make little sense. Windows is a dumpster fire. The BSDs don’t work on anything I own, and the M4 is better anyway. Finally… pricing. For the price of my M4 Mac, there is no PC with as good a spec considering the price of GPUs. RAM and SSD? Yeah, Apple is nearly criminal… but the price of an NVIDIA GPU? Actually kinda criminal.
by bombcar | 2025-09-16 02:31:30+00:00
AirPods are one of Apple’s best products in forever and their size forgives them battery complaints, to me.

Even phones and laptops I’m willing to give a pass on, ever since USB-C got “good enough” and the battery life long enough.

If I had one complaint it’d be that they should sell one fat phone with no camera hump (because it has more battery).

Edit: I should have clarified as AirPods Pro are the ones I have experience with; no idea how the original AirPods are. But the Pros are phenomenal.
by saghm | 2025-09-16 02:31:36+00:00
It's not as much that they should do it that it's weird that they don't do it. They're already doing a ton of work to try to get people to download fonts from them, supposedly without an ulterior motive other than being helpful, and yet for some reason they seem kinda hesitant to let people actually, you know, actually download them. It's like if Netflix didn't make anyone sign in or charge any money, and went out of their way to get to get people to link to them, but then got shy when someone wanted to download a video to host on their site directly. Being surpsingly unmotivated to do something that ostensibly should be less effort in the long run kind of makes it seem like maybe there's something else going on here.
by epistasis | 2025-09-16 02:31:49+00:00
How many people do you know who want to change their own oil in their car? This is a frequent, required maintenance. Yet I can't think of a single car that advertises its ability to be maintained by somebody without special tools. The only people who change their own oil would have the skills to change an iPhone screen.

I have changed the battery on two iPhones on my own, and replaced one screen on my own. I've also once had one of those little shops do it, quickly and cheaply. I only did it on my own because I wanted to see how difficult it was. The savings in money and extra time was completely wasted other than for the entertainment value of changing it.

The slice of people who get entertainment value out of changing their screens, yet does not have the skills to do it on a current iPhone, must be quite small. Surely less than 10% of the population, for a "feature" that has easy alternatives of paying somebody $20-$30.
by lutusp | 2025-09-16 02:33:21+00:00
Total agreement with the article's conclusions. I'm an Android developer who once had about six apps listed in the Play Store. But as time passed, maintenance became more and more baroque, and a simple Android version change required me to rewrite all my apps or lose my listings. Like many developers, I gave up.

Then Google announced a decision to disallow sideloading (not clear when this will take effect) and many tablet/cellphone manufacturers intend to disallow bootloader unlocking. If all this happens, it basically closes the Android platform to anything but "official" software releases.

Consider this from my perspective. My first computer was an Apple II in the late 1970s. I could do anything I wanted with it, and I did. But over the decades I've watched the world of software development -- with the exception of personally owned Linux machines -- gradually turn into a walled garden.

What can I say -- it sucks the joy out of programming.
by Gigachad | 2025-09-16 02:33:34+00:00
Hot swappable batteries kind of became not so important after battery banks and fast charging became a thing. Makes more sense to carry one battery bank that can charge anything than to have 2-3 phone batteries in your bag (which would be exposed to puncture too).

I still think the price of battery replacements is way too high from apple. It's $150 AUD here which feels far and beyond the cost of the part cost itself.
by dijksterhuis | 2025-09-16 02:35:02+00:00
FSF has approved it, OSI has not. Make of that what you will. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL

Notes from OSI rejection board meeting

> It's no different from dedication to the public domain.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL#cite_note-osi-2
by WuxiFingerHold | 2025-09-16 02:35:15+00:00
No OP, but I've also used Angular, React, Vue, Solid and Svelte in real world projects and my default choice is Vue, because it's on par with Solid and Svelte (and with Vue Vapor those three are basically the same) but with the larger ecosystem (vuerouter, vueuse, nuxt, nuxt-ui, primevue, nuxt-content, ...). I must also say that React was by far the most unpleasant and unproductive to use.
by tomhow | 2025-09-16 02:35:57+00:00
Please stop this style of commenting. It's against the guidelines:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by _heimdall | 2025-09-16 02:36:16+00:00
It isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn't align with the idea of how good react is or the technical merits of it.

I also am not saying teams I have been on that picked react made the wrong choice. That's all in context and as you said startups are often in the "get things done" mentality where tech debt won't matter if you can't survive long enough for it to matter.
by j3s | 2025-09-16 02:36:25+00:00
wonderfully written article -- my thanks to the author. there's a heavy amt of cynicism, but i enjoyed the argument, and i believe it's well reasoned. i do think that modern tech companies have lost all sight and attachment to the products that customers actually experience. it feels dissociative & much like another step of our broader culture shifting towards "bend-the-knee-ism", thanks to our current cabinet of clowns.

companies like Valve & Panic! remind me that focusing on producing high quality, enjoyable software/hardware experiences is not only still doable, but highly desired.

it's a beautiful art form - the exploration of human computer interaction. we're only really touching the surface, even still. it's exciting.

i thought tech companies were exciting? that they cared about this future? when did Apple & co start becoming IBM? when did the shareholders that Jobs despised win?
by AlexErrant | 2025-09-16 02:36:28+00:00
Fair. My bitching would've been better expressed as "I groan every single time I attempt to violate a hook rule." Which is a lot, because I'm new to React. It's almost certainly a "skill issue", but hooks are NOT just "JavaScript functions", contrary to React marketing PR.

My conditional beef: in my app, users can choose between using the built-in mic for speech recognition or a 3rd party service (LiveKit). If the user chooses the built-in mic, I still must allocate memory for LiveKit's services because it's exposed as a hook, even if the user will never use it. This problem compounds - every option that I expose that uses a hook requires that I allocate memory for an option that may never be used. Also TTS - users can choose to use the phone's TTS, or a remote service, etc. Every option I offer, if the library exposes it as a hook (and they virtually always do), if I naively implement the feature, allocates memory for a hook that might never be used.

Fuck. React. Hooks.

My workaround is to conditionally render empty fragments. These fragments wrap hooks, which I then inject into the context. This makes it so I can conditionally run hooks. This is why I complained that React can handle conditional components, but not hooks. Concretely: https://pastebin.com/sjc3vXTd I'm using Zustand because god I need a lifecycle outside of React.

Y'know how people complain about how Async "colors" functions? Hooks are also a type of function coloring. And they don't compose with Async.
by mpalmer | 2025-09-16 02:36:53+00:00
With Apple, the bloom is off the rose, and as with a lot of big business lately, the prose misses the mark.

Its copy was once great. Now we get "Awe-dropping", the latest example of marketing professionals coming up with the most basic rhyming wordplay that fits in a three word sentence. Smack a big period on it so it looks like a fact, then head to the bar.
by joshstrange | 2025-09-16 02:36:59+00:00
I think you’ve misunderstood the article. The FOSS didn’t sell out. It seems that Varnish (as an open source project) was created/sponsored by a company who later took the name “Varnish Software”. It was sponsored by a company but not bought and we wouldn’t have had Varnish at all if not for that sponsorship (to literally create the software in the first place).

They admit they should have gotten a firm agreement about their use of the name but it wasn’t a FOSS selling out and handing over power.
by dugite-code | 2025-09-16 02:36:59+00:00
Arguably the OS is the least important aspect.

The greatest issues facing mobile computing are:

1. The lack of any open firmware

2. Locked bootloaders

3. Obnoxious security "features"

a. Security attestation that is out of the owners control. b. One time burn out resistors when you do unlock a device.
by defrost | 2025-09-16 02:38:54+00:00
https://makerplane.org/

(not a plane) https://www.youtube.com/@Ground-Effect/videos

Trains - not so hard, it's getting legit real track time that's the issue - and you can always 'cheat' with a Hi Rail Pickup Truck modification.

Automobiles - .. you are kidding, right? You've never built (or met a builder of) a road certified car, truck, or other vehicle?
by k310 | 2025-09-16 02:39:00+00:00
ICE doesn't care. It's all for the quotas, the show and the cruelty. Many are hooligans. None want to be identified.

Beat up people first. Check later. Often a force without badges, badges without numbers, without ID, without faces and without warrants.

It's an imperial private army.

Don't expect better. If the courts turn their backs, expect more cruelty, more disdain for law and procedures, more groups swept up, until ...
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-09-16 02:40:06+00:00
> How many people do you know who want to change their own oil in their car? This is a frequent, required maintenance. Yet I can't think of a single car that advertises its ability to be maintained by somebody without special tools.

Those are two very different topics. Sure, cars don't advertise their ability to be maintained without special tools. But I also know a lot of people who do in fact want to change the oil in their own car (because it's not hard, and much cheaper once you have the tools).