MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by netruk44 | 2025-09-29 19:27:10+00:00
I have some friends in game dev who have shipped some pretty big titles (and still do). They have very similar sentiments with regards to constant self-inflicted breakages and (lack of) testing and code reviews as well.

It’s given me an appreciation for the kind of code quality everybody just naturally agreed on and did back when I worked at a FAANG. Nobody needed to be convinced to write/maintain tests for their change, or be told to keep the mainline branch building cleanly.

I wonder if any of the large studios out there today have a culture of testing and reviews?
by DataDaoDe | 2025-09-29 19:28:56+00:00
interesting. I agree that governmental power should be stoppable in a functioning democratic republic. At least, we have some such examples. However, I would think, at least in the examples that come to my mind, it is far easier to end corporate abuse, although I will admit often the two are tightly intertwined with governmental overreach working hand-in-hand with private corporations so its quite commonly a blurred line.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-29 19:29:04+00:00
On the plus side, GPT5 is very malleable, so you CAN prompt it away from that, whereas it's very hard to prompt Claude into producing hard code: even with a nearly file by file breakdown of a task, it'll occasionally run into an obstacle and just give up and make a mock or top implementation, basically diverge from the entire plan, then do its own version.
by ryukafalz | 2025-09-29 19:29:04+00:00
That's how it should be ideally, but that can be a problem depending on the infrastructure around you. In my area (South Jersey) the design speed of our roads is consistently much higher than the posted speed limit. This leads to a lot of people consistently going much faster than the posted limit, and to people internalizing the idea that e.g. it's only really speeding if you're going 10+ mph over the limit. Which isn't actually safe in a lot of places!

If the design speed of your roads is a safe speed for those around you then yeah that works perfectly.
by barathonapp | 2025-09-29 19:29:13+00:00
Hi HN — I built Barathon, a mobile/web app that turns a night out into a social race.

What it does: you pick the location, invite friends, split into teams and Barathon gives you a sequence of clues for teams to guess, challenges, scoring, and real-time leaderboard updates.

Why it matters:

It turns a typical bar crawl into an exhilarating race against your mates to guess clues that take you to bars.

Encourages exploration and serendipity: maybe you discover bars you’d never try.

Designed for low friction: sign up with minimal data, plug in your friend group, start.

Tech behind it:

Uses map + route optimization (travel distance balancing)

Real-time score sync via websockets

Modular challenge engine (e.g. “buy a round”, “take a group selfie”, “guess the cocktail”)

Current status / traction:

Working MVP deployed

~100 users tested in 3 cities

Interest from local bars — thinking of partnerships

Happy to hear feedback, war stories, or feature ideas.
Ask HN: Last time you needed a web analytics answer (real steps, not opinions)
by robomiri | 2025-09-29 19:29:19+00:00
I’m building an analytics platform and want to fix real—not hypothetical—pain. Can you walk me through, in as much detail as you’re comfortable sharing, the last time you needed a web analytics answer—what you did step-by-step, the tools involved, constraints that shaped the path, and where it broke?
by tasuki | 2025-09-29 19:30:06+00:00
> Philosophically we are able to understand that God must exist without even requiring theological revelation.

Perhaps you are, but this is not universal for philosophers. Most modern day philosophers do not believe in any god.

> Catholicism is Judaism! It is the continuation and fulfillment of the covenant God made with Abraham. The Old Testament and the many, many very specific Jewish prophecies of Jesus that are fulfilled in the New Testament are part of the Catholic faith.

Judaism does not accept any of the claimed fulfilments of prophecy that Christianity attributes to Jesus[0].

> Catholicism is correct because Jesus founded a church with the 12 apostles as the first bishops and the succession of bishops from the 12 apostles has never been broken in the catholic church.

I don't see how that follows.

> Normal people like Martin Luther or Calvin or Joseph Smith do not have the authority to start valid religions on their own especially since Jesus (who is God) has already created the religion He wants us to follow and has been very clear that it is the way God wants us to worship Him.

This is just your opinion: I'm sure Jesus was a remarkable character, but I don't see how it's clear that he was god. From my point of view he was just a normal person and didn't have the authority to start a valid religion.

> The church is very intellectually rich. If you engage with it in good faith and an open mind you have the smartest people of the past two thousand years

Respectfully disagree with both. The smartest people I know have figured out it's nonsense.

> And I can’t emphasize enough, the fruits of engaging with the church in good faith and asking God to help you are very, very real and literally the antidote to 99% of the problems that modern people are suffering from.

Here I think I can agree with you that the church is an antidote to 99% of the problems modern people are suffering from. Though I think there are other ways too.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_views_on_Jesus
by kragen | 2025-09-29 19:30:11+00:00
Probably correctly; things get flagged often not because they don't deserve attention but because the HN user base is incapable of discussing them in a civilized fashion. We'll see if this item turns out to be an exception, but I'm not especially optimistic.

(In this case it seems to have been buried but not flagged.)

ICE is not a person or corporation, so it cannot go bankrupt. If ICE is found liable, the US Treasury will pay the judgments. If the Treasury's debts are too heavy to pay, the US government can either raise taxes or, because those debts are almost entirely dollar-denominated, print money to pay them.

While governments can certainly cease operations because they are unable to pay their employees, it's messier and fuzzier than the process you seem to be imagining.

Markets consist of mostly expert bettors betting on future events. What would it look like if investors thought such a hyperinflationary cascade was likely? It might look like an all-time high dollar-denominated price on gold: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45417805
by iamleppert | 2025-09-29 19:30:42+00:00
Because many people don't think that murder is a bad thing. If it's done in the name of one's God, or to clear away an existing culture or people to make way for one who has been taught to believe they are superior to others, special, or deserving in some way.

People like to act like this has never happened before, but the fact is it happens all the time throughout history. We like to think we are evolved past that, but we are not and unlikely to ever be at this point. The true nature of man is destructive, selfish, xenophobic and cruel.

After Israel is done with Gaza, we'll create some holiday that has children dressing up as Palestinians for first grade theater. Palestinians will become like Native Americans: scarce and marginalized. Because of the religious, ethnic and racial homogeneity of the Israeli people, its likely to be far worse than what settlers did to the Native population at the time.

Most people just don't care. If more did, it wouldn't be happening in the first place. Or at least those who are in power don't care and see human life as disposable.
by hnlmorg | 2025-09-29 19:31:17+00:00
My point is if you don’t know what types you need, then you can’t be trusted to write the function to begin with. So you don’t actually save that much time in the end. typing out type names simply isn’t the time consuming part of prototyping.

But when it comes to refactoring, having type safety makes it very easy to use static analysis (typically the compiler) check for type-related bugs during that refactor.

I’ve spent a fair amount of years in a great many different PL paradigms and I’ve honestly never found loosely typed languages any fast for prototyping.

That all said, I will say that a lot of this also comes down to what you’re used to. If you’re used to thinking about data structures then your mind will go straight there when prototyping. If you’re not used to strictly typed languages, then you’ll find it a distraction.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-29 19:31:17+00:00
> Biden banned words like "illegal immigration", "assimilation", and even "women" in different departments/contexts

Source?

I see “illegal alien” being replaced by “undocumented noncitizen”, “assimilation” with “integration” [1]. That’s bullshit. But it isn’t a ban on a concept. (“Illegal immigration” does not appear to have been restricted.)

[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/19/988789487/immigration-agencie...
by johnisgood | 2025-09-29 19:31:19+00:00
Coding with a keyboard is a must for me.

Whether it is through the phone or PC, it does not matter much[1], just give me the keyboard! :D

[1] Actually it does matter for some things, like compilation time or performance of the program which I would do on a real computer, which I could do through SSH-ing on my phone to a PC.
by Implicated | 2025-09-29 19:31:37+00:00
tbh, I don't really understand it well enough to be able to give a response here. But here's a real prompt I just used on a project copy/pasted:

```

Something that seems to have been a consistent gotcha when working with llm's on this project is that there's no specific `placement` column on the table that holds the 'results' data. Our race_class_section_results table has it's rows created in placement order - so it's inferred via the order relative to other records in the same race_class_section. But this seems to complicate things quite a bit at times when we have a specific record/entry and want to know it's placement - we have to query the rest of them and/or include joins and other complications if we want to filter results by the placements, etc.

Can you take a look at how this is handled, both with the querying of existing data by views/livewire components/etc and how we're storing/creating the records via the import processes and give me a determination on whether you think it should be refactored to include a column on the database for `placement`? I think right now we've got 140,000 or so records on that table and it's got nearly 20 years worth of race records so I don't think we need to be too concerned with the performance of the table or added storage or anything. Think very hard, understand that this would be a rather major refactor of the codebase (I assume, since it's likely used/referenced in _many_ places - thankfully though that most of the complicated queries it would be found in would be easily identified by just doing a search of the codebase for the race_class_section_results table) and determine if that would be worth it for the ease of use/query simplification moving forward.

```

This comes with a rather developed CLAUDE.md that includes references to other .md documents that outline various important aspects of the application that should be brought into context when working in those areas.

This prompt was made in planning mode - the LLM will then dig into the code/application to understand things and, if needed, ask questions and give options to weigh before return with a 'plan' on how to approach. I then iterate on that plan with it before eventually accepting a plan that it will then begin work on.
by brudgers | 2025-09-29 19:32:07+00:00
The birdwatching community is similar to a collecting community insofar as seeing a bird is like having it in your collection and going out to birdwatch is like hunting items to add to your collection.

Lists and records fill the role a physical collection plays in collecting hobbies.

The whole idea of conflating community and publicity or some documentation requirement seems a bit silly to me

Usually that simply means a community is not for you and the birdwatching hobby is not for me either…though I have driven a few hundred miles out of my way to see the California Condors at Vermillion Cliffs (I didn’t write it down).

On the other hand, not-for-me just means not for me to me. I can see why people do it and it is pleasant to ask them what they are looking at and congratulate them if they tell me it’s a lifer…

Anyway, birds fascinate me and I am blessed to live along the Pacific Flyway in a location with abundant wildlife and natural areas outside my door (it’s why I sometimes chat with birders). But it only took me one look at what the birdwatching community values to know it was not for me (same as most religions, political movements, ideologies, etc.).
by jaymzcampbell | 2025-09-29 19:32:08+00:00
It's not an answer to this, but tangentially related as we had a similar conversation at work very recently. Not many people know about Google and Apple's inactive account manager setup (https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en). If you've not already done this I'd highly recommend adding your spouse/kin/best mate etc as a contact. I set this up to transfer over access to my Google Drive to my wife if I've been inactive for some period. We have separate offline docs around keys and access, but if the worst happened, then eventually she'll get a message with instructions on decrypting and accessing the critical info she needs. A lot of my (tech savvy) co-workers had no idea this was a thing.
by f1shy | 2025-09-29 19:32:31+00:00
> Is it still that bad?

IMHO yes, if not worse.

Working now with some advanced devices from Xilinx (using very expensive top-line SoC. If you change version of the Vivado tools, you have to basically start again from 0 your project. Is a complicated mess because of matching of the OS in the ARM controller and the FPGA part…
by rickdeckard | 2025-09-29 19:32:53+00:00
I know everyone likes this story, but they frankly learnt much more about the western phone market several years before that, when everyone (Intel, Microsoft, Compaq, Sony, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange, Telefonica, O2, AT&T, then Google,...) educated HTC on how exactly they should build a phone for their markets.

HTC built up the required R&D and supplier-structure in China then, years before they put their own logo on the first device.

The remaining gap was the lack in experience on mobile platform/UX design and localization, something Microsoft wasn't very experienced themselves. But Google came to the rescue with Android, so Chinese vendors just had to study the UX on other devices and rebuild them in Android...
by nickpsecurity | 2025-09-29 19:33:51+00:00
I think it could be better titled "Don't Become an Academic Professional or Professional Scientist." They have good reasons for this.

Whereas, you can do science as a hobby in your spare time for free or up to your chosen budget. You can publish whatever you want on your web sites, social media, etc. You can often get advice or peer review from professional scientists by asking them. You might pay them for their time if you feel your work was worth it.
by constantcrying | 2025-09-29 19:34:15+00:00
This is just fake science, which invents a mystical force that makes people healthy when they interact with other people.

The causality is reversed. Unhealthy people socialize less, this explains every correlation result cited, it is a simple explanation, which doesn't need to invent some mystic force which turns people healthy, when they talk to other people.

Unless there is incredibly strong evidence that the reversed causation is wrong, no other explanation should be accepted over it.
by elxr | 2025-09-29 19:34:23+00:00
The entire reason tiktok got so popular is the younger generation (born in the mid 90s to early 2000s) normalizing sharing so much of their lives publicly.

It's given rise to a much richer form of social media and "personal brand" building when done well, IMO. Although I have noticed the tide starting to turn, with the amount of us-vs-them sentiment all over the internet lately.

Honestly, if I was a kid just discovering social media today, I'd be extremely guarded too.
by pembrook | 2025-09-29 19:34:40+00:00
You're critiquing OP for not playing with how the models currently work (bad at gathering context on their own). Sure, if you bend over backwards and hop on one foot, you can get them to do what you want.

OP is critiquing the model as a product vs. the marketing promises. The model should be smart enough to gather context about the project to implement features properly on their own, if they are ever going to 'write 90% of all code THIS YEAR' as people like the founder of Anthropic claim.
by viraptor | 2025-09-29 19:35:22+00:00
> Biden banned words like "illegal immigration", "assimilation",

Not really. It was a change to "undocumented noncitizen" instead of "illegal alien". There's a big difference between "let's use a better word" and "you can't use the word". They weren't even legal changes and some documents still have the old phrases.

> and even "women" in different departments/contexts.

Source?
by DebtDeflation | 2025-09-29 19:35:44+00:00
"How do I do XYZ in Python?"

ChatGPT: I've found the following Python books that contain explanations of how to complete that task. Which one would you like to purchase?"

"None. I just want an answer."

ChatGPT: Ok, perhaps you were looking to purchase a python. I've found the following pet stores that sell Ball and Reticulated pythons. Which one would you like to purchase?"

"Aaaaaarrrrrrrggggghhhhhhh"
by georgehopkin | 2025-09-29 19:35:54+00:00
Political misinformation or disinformation was the key reason for some US couples’ recent divorces or romantic breakups, according to a study by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Emily Van Duyn, a professor of communication at the university, conducted in-depth interviews with 28 people who had recently ended a relationship with a partner whose political ideology did not match their own. Many of the participants mentioned that their media choices were responsible for the political differences that ultimately caused the relationships to end.
by collingreen | 2025-09-29 19:36:03+00:00
It did die.

One way to look at it is do you want zero or do you want pennies on the dollar for it?

Is it crappy? Yeah. Doubly so if being abused by the founder. There is a version of this that is just the best of two bad options though.

It leaves a bad taste in my mouth when the founder doesn't share the same pain as the investors and the employees but such is life and it's hard to draw a line anyway, especially for someone super rich and with star power like her.
by cloverich | 2025-09-29 19:36:32+00:00
Merged PRs. We typically plan out our work, break up into e.g. JIRA tasks, then when we create PR's _very generally_ they should be tied to actual JIRA tickets i.e. pre-planned work. A ticket is usually a requested feature or bug (as reported by an actual user). So my PR rate, or perhaps less controversially my JIRA close rate, is around 3x higher for the last few months. That's also reflected more generally in my feedback productivity wise (i.e. people that are looking at the project as a whole rather than e.g. how many commits I've made). I exclude from 3x side projects and CLI tools, which are weird to quantify - they are typically things that would usually have been ideas in my head I never did at all. I guess I also generally exclude refactoring although I do that more. For example I had claude fix a bug that was dogging our typescript compilation. I couldn't figure out what was so slow about it (>60s to compile). Turned out it was a specific recursive type pulled in by a specific version of a library mixed by usage from one file! It actually took it a while to figure it out, it kept proposing solutions and I had to re-direct it a bunch, using mostly just intuition as opposed to experience. e.g. "No, re-run the diagnostics and look at the debug output, give me three examples of area / commands you could look at and how" and then I'd pick one. I just did that task on the side, I'd go back and look at it output once every day or two, then prompt it with something else, then just go do my usual tasks as though that didn't exist. That type of work given our pace / deadlines / etc, might never have gotten done at least not anytime soon. But I do stuff like that all the time now, I just don't often measure it.

Is that helpful?
by mrexroad | 2025-09-29 19:37:01+00:00
> Mobil might add the particles to their premium Mobile 1 synthetic motor oil product to find counterfeit products in certain markets. By opening a bottle of oil purchased off the shelf they can hit it with ~620nm && ~580nm and if it does not respond correctly

Interesting. I haven’t heard they had additives in the oil to detect counterfeits. I assume the fluorescing behaves differently at 620nm and 580nm? I recall they had issues with counterfeits in some countries and have made attempts to combat it with packaging (e.g. specific letters on label fluorescing under UV, and currently their Scantrust app [0] validation tool). I’d be interested to know how it behaves, as having the oil itself fluoresce when not labeled as such might be annoying when using UV dyes for monitoring leaks. For example, I like to run LiquiMoly’s molygen every few changes to monitor changes in seeping on one of my older cars, but it is only helpful when i run the oil w/ dye after non-dyed oil.

[0] https://www.mobil.com/en/sap/our-products/mobil-anti-counter...
by burnt-resistor | 2025-09-29 19:37:14+00:00
Step 1. Take out a giant loan.

Step 2. Buy a company on credit.

Step 3. Stick company with the loan used to buy it.

Step 4. RIF, cut costs, reduce quality, break contracts, and discontinue goods and services.

Step 5. Sell everything of value.

Step 6. Send that company into bankruptcy.

Step 7. Rinse, lather, and repeat.
by stocksinsmocks | 2025-09-29 19:37:58+00:00
New prompts in the same session are dangerous because the undesired output (including nonsense reasoning) is getting put back into the context. Unless you’re brainstorming and need the dialogue to build up toward some solution, you are much better off removing anything that is not essential to the problem. If the last attempt was wrong, clear the context, feed in the spec, what information it must have like an error log and source, and write your instructions.
by jsheard | 2025-09-29 19:38:00+00:00
Every so often I check back on ChatGPTs product search powers, and every time it cites garbage blogspam articles that praise every product hoping you'll click their affiliate links.

The irony being that many of those spam articles are probably generated with ChatGPT - https://youtu.be/WLfAf8oHrMo?t=86
by onion2k | 2025-09-29 19:38:16+00:00
I get it, but the alternative is what?

Don't publish the videos unless you have a good reason to. There is no upside to just throwing everything you record on the internet. People don't watch the videos, your channel is degraded by having tons of garbage on it, and people in the videos don't want to be online like that.

If you stop pretending that a random video is somehow going to 'go viral' or make you famous, the entire problem just evaporates.

If you want to publish videos put the effort into making good ones that people will actually watch, which means raising the bar by (in part) finding people who want to be in them. Videos of random people doing pretty mundane things like their hobbies won't turn you into the next YouTube star.