MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ageitgey | 2025-09-21 10:24:27+00:00
> the website UX has become steadily worse

Not disagreeing, but the Amazon web UX has been famously terrible since like 1998. They basically invented the whole trend of building via A/B test result instead of via user-centric design. Nothing on the site has ever made any sense. Every item title is a paragraph description. The categories are basically useless. The filters are a mess of bad and incomplete data to the point of being useless. Many items have 2-3 duplicate listings that somehow have different shipping dates and descriptions, and you never know if you have found the "real" listing. But they sure sell a lot of stuff.
by emacsen | 2025-09-21 10:24:33+00:00
> Most of the time knives that are too sharp are much more dangerous than knives that are too blunt.

With a sharp knife, you cut through food very easily so you use very little force. You also use techniques that prevent you from getting hurt, such as the claw ( https://www.thekitchn.com/knife-skills-the-claw-75998 ).

But if someone has used a dull knife for most of their life, they may not have cultivated these skills and may hold their knife in an unsafe way and or use a lot of force when cutting.

For someone like that, a sharp knife could be a lot more dangerous, but if they're trained/using it properly, a sharp knife is a lot more safe as it reduces effort and chance of the knife slipping.
by distalx | 2025-09-21 10:25:00+00:00
I bought into that idea a month or two ago, that more control and detailed instructions would deliver a clean result. That just led me down a rabbit hole of endless prompt re-runs and optimization loops. Many time I thought I had the final, perfect prompt, the next iteration slightly worsened the output. And sometimes the output was the same.

The last 20-30% of precision is brutal. The time and tokens we burn trying to perfect a prompt is simply not an optimal use of engineering hours. The problem is simple: Companies prioritize profit over the optimal solution, and the initial sales pitch was about replacement then it changed now its all about speed. I'm not making a case against AI or LLMs; I'm saying the current workflow, a path of least resistance means we are inevitably progressing toward more technical debt and cleanup at our hands.
by deng | 2025-09-21 10:25:18+00:00
> This is obviously a lie without even testing it. STEP files do not have any sort of support for parametric features.

Yes, this is also confusing me to no end. How can they make such a claim? They even explicitly state that they generate a B-rep (boundary representation) output only, then in their roller example they say "as the output is parametric, dimensions can easily be adjusted." Erm, no? I'd rather model it again with the proper feature history tree and constraints instead of fiddling with a step file.
by rcxdude | 2025-09-21 10:25:59+00:00
>Note that all this anti-tamper protection is, in the end, an effort to protect users from others hacking their devices and gaining access to their apps. These measures do not help companies per-se, since user commands should ALWAYS be verified server-side.

This is the stated reason, but the behavior of it is anything but: if they really cared, they would fail massively outdated versions of android that have critical remotely exploitable vulnerabilities, but they do not. It is also much easier to tamper with a ROM slightly and have a version that passes these checks, compared to having a secure, up-to-date, maintainable ROM that passes.
by baq | 2025-09-21 10:27:12+00:00
Coding is something you can’t learn at the university, you have to do it yourself. Uni classes just make you do it.

Software engineering however is so vast there is very profound wisdom to be learned that you won’t discover much later in your career that would make your solutions so much better had you known them (dear undergrads, pay attention at systems 101, it’s worth it) and you also have an opportunity to learn subjects that would otherwise be very expensive to self-teach (eternally grateful for the fully equipped ethernet laboratory, it’s been almost two decades and the knowledge is still very relevant.)
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-09-21 10:28:37+00:00
I don't really have a single source for the 5 - 7 years, I've read it before and kept it in my mind, the article I linked was for the shrinking brand loyalty as I thought that might need more confirmation, that said

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/heres-how-often-americans-re...

which implies less than 5 years for 2/3s of Americans, although not sure what the average is.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that most people will own 10 cars in their lifetime but querying How many cars does the average person own in their lifetime gives me 8.

Assuming car buying age is from 18 to 72, that gives 54 years of car buying, and 8 gives us 6.75 years per car if the average owns 8 cars. 5.4 years if the average owns 10 cars.
by ido | 2025-09-21 10:28:54+00:00
Do we really need to do this with each comment adding another rule and another reply from someone breaking it?

I live in Berlin with my wife and 2 kids (who were born lived their whole lives in Berlin). We all bike and take transit. Neither me nor my wife even have a driver's license. We're doing fine. We know plenty of other families with multiple kids in the same situation.
by zozbot234 | 2025-09-21 10:30:25+00:00
> I know the point of attention is to select the correct data and process that

In a way, the point of attention mechanisms is to bias the model towards long-range dependencies (as seen e.g. in language sentence structure) and away from the very short-term ones that a plain RNN would tend to focus on. LSTM is sort-of in the middle; it manages to persist information beyond the very short run (so "paying attention" to it in a very fuzzy sense) but not as long-term as attention does.
by franga2000 | 2025-09-21 10:30:41+00:00
I agree it should be in a VM and it would be great to put that in the documentation, but the reality usually is that your CI/CD tool will already have very elevated access to your infra. The people deploying using docker compose are usually not the kind of people that have tightly scoped deployment credentials. If someone can get into your CD system, they can almost certainly run arbitrary code on your production machines.
by m_fayer | 2025-09-21 10:33:02+00:00
I can imagine it often being the case that if you measure a concise moderately difficult task over half a day or a few days, coding by hand might be faster.

But I think, and this is just conjecture, that if you measure over a longer timespan, the ai assisted route will be consistently faster.

And for me, this is down to momentum and stamina. Paired with the ai, I’m much more forward looking, always anticipating the next architectural challenge and filling in upcoming knowledge and resource gaps. Without the ai, I would be expending much more energy on managing people and writing code myself. I would be much more stop-and-start as I pause, take stock, deal with human and team issues, and rebuild my capacity for difficult abstract thinking.

Paired with a good ai agent and if I consistently avoid the well known pitfalls of said agent, development feels like it has the pace of cross country skiing, a long pleasant steady and satisfying burn.
by joshstrange | 2025-09-21 10:33:35+00:00
I will preface this with: Apple is _far_ from perfect, sometimes they even fail the “good” bar and I have serious issues with the direction they are going on some products/software. However, I see them as the lessor of two evils. I understand you might not agree, that’s just the conclusion I’ve come to.

> Wrong. The vast majority of Apple fans don't care about Android.

This is my experience as well. I prefer Apple products but I have Android phones/tablets (test devices) and know there are aspects where Android is better.

That said, I have some friends who make it their life mission to mention any Apple/iPhone failing to me. I just don’t get it. I literally never bring it up, or if I bring up anything Apple related it’s just me excited about a new device I got, never in the context of “look how much better it is than Android”. Even then, I’ve learned to temper my excitement lest they see it as an opportunity to tell me all the problems/issues they have with it. I don’t follow Android news closely, I don’t share “gotcha’s” about the hardware/os, etc.

It reminds me this scene in Mad Men [0], I literally do not think about Android or Android users but I know a couple Android users who seem to obsess over Apple products/users in a way I cannot relate to and do not understand. I can bet any negative Apple news will be relayed to me by them, I literally could not care less about the Android ecosystem issues (of which I see many).

[0] https://youtu.be/LlOSdRMSG_k
by ageitgey | 2025-09-21 10:34:07+00:00
I bought some expensive camera gear from Amazon and had a terrible experience. The delivery person obviously stole the gear and kept making fake "delivery attempted" notifications at exactly midnight while I was at home night after night. Amazon eventually refunded me, but they made me wait weeks to get my money back despite years of being a customer and spending many thousands with them and never requesting other refunds.

So now I don't buy expensive camera gear from Amazon anymore. But why do I still shop there?

This week, I ordered an obscure ESP32 system on a chip mounted on a 7" LCD screen for a custom project. I ordered it at 10pm and it was somehow delivered at 8:30am the next morning with "free" prime delivery. The price was cheap. My next best option would be an electronics specialist that would take a week to deliver it. Amazon just has a much better warehouse and delivery network for obscure parts. There's really no one else offering close to what they offer.
by kazen44 | 2025-09-21 10:34:55+00:00
I think this is also a specific difference between germanic education and english/us education.

Does the US not have something like a fachhochschule? A institute where peoeple are trained for specific fields/jobs? This systems seems to exist in most european countries that i know of, and it is specifically focussed on education related to a specific field or career. (this is also is there for different levels of practicality) for instance, you have also have schools for things like construction workers, hairdressers, etc etc.

University's are more seem as a very high level of education, but which does not train one for a specific job.
by anonzzzies | 2025-09-21 10:35:33+00:00
They used to be; I got my first master in that environment; academic rigor was the goal and purpose and my second one what it became after and is now; something to get a job with. The former was free and very hard the latter was loans, pressure but very easy. This happened in about 15 years in the Netherlands, between around 1990 and 2004; from excellent to shite as far as I am concerned. I was 'teaching' (assistant) and teaching for a bunch of those years and it really became quite shitty. My alma mater math & cs faculty is a joke now compared to the well deserved suffering of the 1990s rigor we had to endure. I wouldn't want to have lived the current fluff party. But sure, it's more practical as most we were taught was not practical and was not supposed to be; it was to teach us how to think.
by hypeatei | 2025-09-21 10:36:16+00:00
Fascism is characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.

Instead of getting emotional, please explain how what we're seeing now isn't moving in that direction.
by tgv | 2025-09-21 10:36:19+00:00
In contrast to many comments, I had a great time studying. Sure, the staff didn't have great teaching skills (classical prof with an unruly hairdo reading from the syllabus in a large hall), but after the first year, classes became smaller and teaching was --while not passionate-- certainly inspired in many cases. It was a period in which students could still pick an academic topic and write a (small) thesis for graduation, or do some internship and write a report about that. I had a supervisor who was into some of the newer stuff and gave me practically free reign with regular feedback.

That was in 80s. I stuck around, changed faculty (AI, cogsci, neuro), and saw university change. It became very financially oriented. The number of students kept rising, norms kept dropping (2nd year student asking: what does this symbol √ mean?), students participating in real research became rarer and rarer, even PhDs shifted towards more and more teaching, and 20 years later, the most influential member of a university's board was the one doing real estate, and an academic career was based on the amount of funding obtained.
by RayanROghabian | 2025-09-21 10:37:04+00:00
This code produces deterministic HMAC-SHA256 digests with domain separation (b"commitment:v1") using only the Python standard library. It allows:

• Sealing a message with a secret key using hmac.new()

• Verifying a message/key/commitment triplet with hmac.compare_digest()

• Randomized key generation via os.urandom(32)

It outputs a verifiable commitment that can later be checked against the original message and key. No third-party libraries or infrastructure required.
by mhuffman | 2025-09-21 10:37:34+00:00
>By the way this article is not just a rehash of Wikipedia like most stuff. Somebody did research.

Maybe. The seven sentences that are not paywall blocked didn't give any references and spent 1/4 of that talking about another more well-known ship.

Here is a blog post about the ship. It may or may not be better than the paywalled post.[0]

[0]https://yarmouthmuseums.wordpress.com/2021/06/15/the-hms-ame...
by rcxdude | 2025-09-21 10:39:12+00:00
The effect I have observed is that it's fairly good at tricking people who are latently capable of programming but have been intimidated by it. They will fall for the promise of not having to code, but then wind up having to reason and learn about the LLM's output and fix it themselves, but in the end they do wind up with something they would not have made otherwise. It's still not good or elegant code, but it's often the kind of very useful small hacky utility that would not be made otherwise.
Show HN: A Poem about C
by ironmagma | 2025-09-21 10:40:56+00:00
they can burn all the books

they can strike all the laws

they’ll try this and that

(what won’t they try?)

they’ll make us all run laundromats

they’ll poison the water

they’ll cut down the trees

they’ll starve all the otters

they’ll kill all the bees

but after all is said and done

they won’t have killed C
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-09-21 10:42:15+00:00
> It cuts literally everything just fine

My parents are the same and honestly the sharpness is fine for how they use their knives. I don’t know for yours but theirs don’t cut just fine at all. They barely cut. It’s ok if you actually have to think and push through each cuts but a complete no go for any serious cutting.

It’s a huge waste of time because it prevents any kind of fast work but they don’t know how to safely work with a knife anyway so they don’t notice. My father immediately cut himself the only time I actually sharpened so I stopped trying.

Anyway an ultrasonic knife seems like a cool idea. The technology is common in industrial setting for cutting. I think it’s cool to bring it to a kitchen knife even if it always remains a gimmick.
by keiferski | 2025-09-21 10:43:01+00:00
There are schools like this, called various things like “technical schools” or “vocational schools.” But they tend to be looked down upon by the American middle class and higher; e.g., the average parent wants their kid to go to college, any college, over a vocational school. In other words, vocational schools are (unfortunately) associated with people that don’t do well in traditional school.

From what I understand Germany is much less classist in this regard.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-21 10:43:22+00:00
Same applies to Zig, which without something comparable to how UNIX, OS X, Windows SDK, iOS, Docker, among others have forced industry adoption of specific languages, Zig will have as much industry adoption as those languages, just another D or C3.

Maybe Oracle could make it unavoidable on JVM, instead of keeping to use C and C++ on the runtime.
by spyckie2 | 2025-09-21 10:43:59+00:00
In the comments it reveals this guy is using the sharpener wrong by doing way too many pulls with too much pressure.

The cheap ikea one is fine, it will not wear out your blade. 2-3 pulls at very light pressure, no need to learn how to use a whetstone properly, perfect UX for those who don’t typically sharpen knives.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-21 10:44:29+00:00
Looks general purpose to me. What purposes couldn't you use Zig for? A general-purpose programming language isn't necessarily good for every purpose but it can be used. For example both Java and C are general purpose languages. Should you write an OS kernel in Java? Maybe that's unwise but people did. Should you write a web browser in C? Again unwise but people did.

Some languages aren't like this. You can't write an OS kernel in WUFFS for example and that's on purpose, that's not what WUFFS is for.
by strken | 2025-09-21 10:44:42+00:00
You can have two SUVs, a heated garage, and also ride a bike or take the train to work. You can get a reasonable second hand bike for under $100 here and probably in most of the US, it's not like you need to sacrifice the garage heating to afford one.

I get that density and banning cars are hostile to driving an SUV everywhere, but bike infrastructure and public transport aren't. If anything they take traffic off the road and speed up the morning commute of drivers, so they enable a better experience for drivers too.
by taminka | 2025-09-21 10:45:01+00:00
> Yes, hidden control flow I mean something like exceptions, RAII or Rust's Dispose. So more a comparison to other languages than C.

C has macros, which is the ultimate form of hidden control flow, where a symbol can expand to any arbitrary code... also hidden allocations and functions that can error, which you could argue isn't traditionally understood as hidden control flow, but it's still nice to know when stuff is allocated and/or can create an error
by dist-epoch | 2025-09-21 10:45:10+00:00
Cool sister article on their site, the other side, using AI to cleanup AI slop:

> How Senior Engineers Clean Up Code and Scale Products with AI

> Partnering with us means investing in quality, not just speed. We leverage AI to accelerate development and testing,

https://donado.co/en/articles/2025-08-02-prototype-to-mvp/
by agentcoops | 2025-09-21 10:46:22+00:00
I understand both your historical question and the more concrete practical one. Separating reading comprehension as a skill from all the other discrete functions of a language is very straight-forward [1] and, in fact, there are some good analog resources for this.

For French: Dandberg and Tatham, French for Reading

For German: Jannach, German for Reading Knowledge

I've used both and swear they're magic, especially if you're trying to learn to read in a scientific domain that you're already a specialist in (versus literature).

Once you've sort of "learned the game" it isn't very hard to do a similar process for other languages on your own. Then, my main recommendation is to take a text you're deeply familiar with in your native language or English that exists in X other language and just go ahead and start reading it with a dictionary. It starts slow, but progress is very very fast if you stick with it, especially compared to learning to speak or even just listen to a language.

For life reasons, I've found myself having to learn Danish, so I'll let you know if I figure out any good resources for Scandinavian languages.

[1] The only downside I've encountered is trying to later learn to speak a language I had been reading for a while where overcoming the sort of "fictitious phonetics" that existed in my head proved problematic.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-09-21 10:47:51+00:00
My usage of Amazon evaporated as it lost its benefits over AliExpress:

- The Amazon product catalog is essentially AliExpress at this point. Endless WIXUBI product slop.

- Free shipping thresholds went up

- Amazon shipping times became longer

- AliExpress managed to drastically speed up their shipping

If they don't ship much faster, cost three times as much (especially once you add the shipping cost), can't guarantee higher quality - why would I buy from them rather than going to the source?

If I need reliable quality (e.g. stuff that comes into contact with food) or want it fast, I'm paying the retail premium (which isn't as bad nowadays as it used to be).
by popoflojo | 2025-09-21 10:47:57+00:00
Ultrasonic cutting board. "Are you tired of spending $1800 on a whole set of ultrasonic knives only to have them break every time your Brother in law throws them in a bowl of soapy water after a dinner party? Well know you don't have to. Image buying 6 cheap knives at a garage sale and turning them into chefs quality knives instantly, without even touching a sharpener!"
by blacklion | 2025-09-21 10:49:31+00:00
Yes and now.

Technically yes: there is iPhone 13 Mini and in Android world there is 2 or 3 Unihertz models and some "no-name" Chinese Aliexpress brands (Cubot has some small model, AFAIR, and there is several even more no-name offers).

Realistically no. All these Android models are underspecced. Old cores (8+ years old), small screen resolutions (small in PPI, not like small as screen proportion to big ones), small amount of RAM and storage (latest Uniherz is happy exception in this area, but not in the others), very bad cameras, very short OS update period (if ever).

iPhone 13 mini is Ok-ish (my wife uses one): camera is still very poor, but all other is usable.

Android is worse. If all you need are phone calls, and messaging with Telegram/Whatsapp/Signal it is Ok. But if you need good camera, good browsing experience (many open tabs) or something specific you are out of luck. Even Google Maps could be sluggish. Plus zero-days in old Android versions.

Good cameras is my pet peeve: good ones go only to flagship models and maybe sub-flagship ones (like, flagship and sub-flagship can be differentiated by addition of tele-module, which is most useful for me).
by arrowsmith | 2025-09-21 10:49:41+00:00
Reiki healers and homeopaths are listed under code 3214, "Complementary health associate professionals".

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/skilled-worker-vi...

And I only picked those two because they were particularly egregious. The list is full of jobs for which it's absurd to suggest we need to fill from abroad: are we really suffering for a lack of recruitment consultants? Human resources officers? Can no-one can find a homegrown Brit who's able to work as a restaurant manager?

As for the salary threshold, you're right: the basic threshold is £41k, although it can be as low as £25k (not £33.4k) in some circumstances: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/skilled-worker-vi...

I'd argue that £41k is still too low. It's barely above the median UK salary - we can't find anyone in the top ~50% of people who can do these jobs? And it doesn't even make you a net contributor (from what I can tell that threshold is around £50-55k, although for many of these "skilled" workers it's much higher as they bring dependents.) Nevertheless I'll accept a partial L.

Regarding English, maybe I'm wrong about the precise requirements, but I've worked with software professionals in London, here on a skilled worker visa, with whom I was barely able to communicate, so clearly we're doing something wrong.

In any case, my thesis still stands: there have not been "very high" criteria to migrate to the UK recently, in fact quite the opposite, and if you don't believe this then I suggest you go outside and look around.