MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by imtringued | 2025-09-16 11:50:15+00:00
Hooks aren't magic syntax. The problem with hooks has nothing to do with syntax. The problem is that the React crowd has decided to overload the meaning of a term that has had a reasonably solid interpretation (at least in comparison to the React crowd).

"React Functional Components" have nothing to do with conventional functional programming. They inherently (intentionally?) violate the spirit of functional programming through hidden global variables, while pretending that it is still functional, when in reality they should be doing the opposite. They should be upfront about the hack that hooks are. They are not functional, they are merely functions. In all other respects they operate as if the function was a method inside a class and that all hook calls are with respect to an invisible "this" keyword that contains the component's context. Since hooks are not named (which would expose their inherently pseudo-OOP nature), they associate their state through a hidden incrementing counter. It's like you're sweeping all the OOP parts under the rug to pretend to be functional so you can be a cool functional hippie too.
by krapp | 2025-09-16 11:50:26+00:00
They intend to play a deadly game. And they've been ginning up the specter of a vast and dangerous left-wing conspiracy for a long time. Look at what QAnon's beliefs actually were, and their intersection with Evangelical Christian beliefs about the inherently satanic nature of secular and leftist ideology. Trump was accusing the media of being run by leftists coordinating with the DNC to steal the election from him in 2016. "The Nazis were really leftists","BLM was a leftist terrorist organization burning down entire cities","leftists tried to kill Trump once," etc. They've been laying the foundations for a road that only leads to one place. Hell, they were talking about a "cold civil war" back in the Obama days.

Just look at the reactions from the right and the government after the shooting[0]. Immediate calls for war and violence. The narrative was constructed and deployed everywhere, even on Hacker News - that this is the evil of "the left" [and trans people] on display. I'm not claiming it was a coordinated psyop on the part of the Trump administration or anything - I do believe the right sincerely considers the left to be vermin only wort crushing under their boot - but as many people have pointed out in other contexts, you don't always need a conspiracy, sometimes you just need a confluence of interests.

I only just learned about the "Horst Wessel effect" in relation to this[1] and it's chilling how much history is seeming to repeat itself here. The only question to me is how far Trump administration is able to take this? Simply harassing leftist organizations isn't that unusual - the US has been doing that since the end of World War 2. Right wing militias are going to keep killing "leftists," again, that's just America. I hope this administration just isn't organized enough to take us back to the 1940s instead of just the 1960s or 1950s.

Note that when I say "leftist" I implicitly include LGBTQ people, black people, immigrants, feminists, Jews and a lot of other groups that for some reason are "left coded" to the right. When the Overton Window shifts so far that the Democratic Party are considered Marxist by half the country, "the left" encompasses a hell of a lot of people.

[0]https://www.wired.com/story/far-right-reactions-charlie-kirk...

[1]https://forward.com/news/768607/horst-wessel-charlie-kirk-na...
by karolinepauls | 2025-09-16 11:50:44+00:00
Good riddance indeed. The last 30 years of software teaching basically trained developers to produce complexity for its own sake, while calling it engineering. I'm not sufficiently full of myself to link to my own writing (yet) but I'm full of myself enough to self-paraphrase:

1. Programmer A creates a class because they need to do create an entry point, a callback, an interface... basically anything since everything requires a class. Result: we have an class.

2. Programmer B sees a class and carelessly adds instance variables, turning the whole thing mutable. Result: we have an imperative ball of mud.

3. Another programmer adds implementation inheritance for code reuse (because instance variables made factoring out common code into a function impossible without refactoring to turn instance variables from step 2 into arguments). Result: we have an imperative ball of mud and a nightmare of arbitrary dynamic dispatch.

At some point reference cycles arise and grandchild objects hold references to their grandparents in order to produce... some flat dictionary later sent over the wire.

4. As more work is done over that bit of code, the situation only worsens. Refactoring is costly and tedious, so it doesn’t happen. Misery continues until code is removed, typically because it tends to accumulate inefficiencies around itself, forcing a rewrite.
by nedt | 2025-09-16 11:50:45+00:00
Biggest problem is with the approach of doing a revolution, while evolution is possible. Reactivity is mentioned in the article and examples are given with frameworks that would need a rewrite of anything you have in react and relearning everything for the team.

But it's really not needed - you can just use signals in react with the preact-signals package (works with preact and react and standalone) which has been created 3 years ago: https://preactjs.com/blog/introducing-signals It can even skip the virtual dom and diffing.

The issue is not React per se. Just look at what the ecosystem has to offer. You can also speed up your loading times by using preact. And if you don't like a compile step use a package like htm and tagged templates for a JSXish syntax. And then move your "store" outside of react with signals etc. There is enough innovation happening, no need to always look at the other side.
by motorest | 2025-09-16 11:50:45+00:00
> React isn’t just "winning by default" It's winning because at the core it's just JavaScript function composition. A component is a function, conditionals are `if (...) { ... } else { ... }`, loops are `map()`. JSX is just sugar for function calls.

I agree with JSX, and function components are nice, but React is most definitely not just function composition. Hooks add state and introduce life cycle events that take components way beyond stateless territory, to the point that it would be far easier to reason about them if they were class components with properties and decorators and handlers invocable through inversion of control.
by mdemare | 2025-09-16 11:50:46+00:00
Until the day when I can right-click on a folder and create a folder inside that folder, I'll consider the Finder inferior to the Windows 98 explorer. Come on, that's an absolute basic feature!

The right-click context menu of a folder has 15 items! Most of them I've never used! Colors, tags, quick actions, compress, make alias? But no "New Folder"?

But I moved to the mac, in 2005, because of the unix terminal. I had been using Cygwin for years, but an OS that had it included, natively? On good hardware? Yes, please.

I'm never moving back to Windows (ads in the OS??). To switch to linux it would take great hardware with 100% support. Not holding my breath, but it might happen one day.
by ehnto | 2025-09-16 11:50:55+00:00
It is also, in my humble but informed opinion, where you will find the least security concious programs, just because of the breadth of it's use and myriad of deployments.

It's the new pragmatic choice for web apps and so it's everyone is using it, from battle hardened teams to total noobs to people who just don't give a shit. It reminds me of Wordpress from 10 years ago, when it was the goto platform for cheap new websites.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-09-16 11:51:05+00:00
Sadly that is factually correct and none of the links in your reply actually supports your point.

The rule about the zero article doesn't list the case of a noun after an imperative.

The first link is about the subject, not the object and the third is about negative imperative. Why are you posting links about completely unrelated things?

Once again, using a noun without an article this way is gramaticaly incorrect.
Show HN: I'm Building an Alternative to Shopify
by astronautmonkey | 2025-09-16 11:51:16+00:00
Hi HN! I'm working on an AI e-commerce store builder that is an alternative to Shopify.

After talking to hundreds of merchants, I heard the same thing over and over again: e-commerce stores are expensive to build, tough to manage, and require a lot of customization to be successful. Shopify is a good starting point but requires a lot of work to get your first sales. There's even a whole industry of expensive service providers that help merchants navigate the Shopify ecosystem.

I built the Agora Store Builder to solve this problem and give merchants a single platform to easily build and distribute their store. Users can build, manage, and deploy a custom e-commerce store via chat. And everything is optimized to help stores succeed: store analytics, payment integrations, order tracking, domain management, code access, and more.

Here are some key specs:

1. The vibe coding interface is powered by V0. We manage previews and deployments with Vercel with a lot of middleware to manage integrations, state, products, checkout, and orders. We provide a Products and Orders database built in. No external data source required to set up. The Products database has a similar structure as Shopify with parent products, variants, and stock management.

2. Using the same crawlers we've built for our search engine, we've enabled a "Import Shopify store" and "Import WooCommerce store" option from the home page. You can enter any existing e-commerce store and we'll automatically import the product data to save you time switching over to Agora.

3. We've built a native integration with Stripe to manage in-store payments and merchant payouts. We also have a Zapier app to enable merchants to connect incoming orders to the tools they already use like ShipStation, DHL, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and more.

There's a few things on our immediate roadmap: improve the initial loading speed, introduce more design variety, and add full stack apps that are easy to install (e.g. adding customer reviews to a store).

I'd love your feedback!
Ask HN: Generalists, when do you say "I know enough" about any particular topic?
by AbstractH24 | 2025-09-16 11:51:18+00:00
The idea is generalists know a lot about everything and when to pass it off to a subject matter expert.

In 2025, with everything in tech changing by the minute, I’m realizing I need to set boundaries about how deep I go on any particular topic. But I’m unsure how. Particularly if I don’t want to get left behind as things continue to evolve.

Curious how other folks approach this?
by modao526 | 2025-09-16 11:51:31+00:00
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https://trafficchecker.org/
by mcsniff | 2025-09-16 11:51:40+00:00
Still no dark mode, it's almost as embarrassing as HN not having dark mode. Yeah I said it, again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34263628

In the time it took to write this self-congratulatory post, they could have used the AI they push down everyone's throats to add dark mode to the mobile app.
by orwin | 2025-09-16 11:52:11+00:00
> I find it funny people still find the UN legitimate. They still haven't criticised Hamas attack

I find it funny that you have to lie so much. They did, it's easy to find. My father is from a Christian orphanage in east Jerusalem. My grandmother hosted sisters and priests from Israel who worked in schools, hospice and orphanage all over the two countries. UN school programs there had a lot of issues, but being religious (Hamas was a religious group before being a terrorist one) or close to Hamas wasn't one (having no heating in schools during winter and having to sometime amputate toes from 10 year old was probably the biggest issue that I remember).
by diggan | 2025-09-16 11:52:35+00:00
Probably signatures could alleviate most of these issues, as each publish would require the author to actually sign the artifact, and setup properly with hardware keys, this sort of malware couldn't spread. The NPM CI tokens that don't require 2fa kind of makes it less useful though.

Clojars (run by volunteers AFAIK) been doing signatures since forever, not sure why it's so difficult for Microsoft to follow their own yearly proclamation of "security is our top concern".
by palmfacehn | 2025-09-16 11:52:38+00:00
Apparently Maven has 61.9M indexed packages. As Java has a decent standard lib, mini libs like leftpad are not contributing to this count. NPM has 3.1M packages. Many are trivially simple. Those stats would suggest that NPM has disproportionately more issues than other services.

I would argue that is only one of the many issues with the JS/TS/NPM ecosystem. Many of the other problems have been normalized. The constant security issues are highly visible.
by poetaster | 2025-09-16 11:53:03+00:00
I'm a very happy Sailfish OS user, since 2016, before that Meego, Maemo (Nokia N900, N9). I do have an android phone for one App (Deutsche Post) which I use only when I need to ship stuff. Running on a Gigaset (made in Germany, 4KmA battery) I generally get two days of usage, 1 day if I'm stuck on Mastodon.

From being able to do SDL2 stuff (Godot 3.5 for instance) with a wayland compositor to just not having f'ked UI, I'm happy. The challenge of getting more apps is certainly a challenge. But that's good, gives me lots to do.

Linux on Mobile has already long been here to stay.
by praptak | 2025-09-16 11:53:27+00:00
I was curious about the rep movsb, so I tried to compare this with how a compiler would copy a known small size chunk of memory. It seems pretty complicated. I didn't manage to make a compiler generate the `rep movsb` idiom but I managed to find out some interesting stuff:

- small, known size moves are stitched from a fixed number of mov instructions, sometimes overlapped. For example 21 bytes is qword (8 bytes) + xmmword (16 bytes), overlapped.

- char-copying loops like "a++ = b++ c times" with c not known at compile time are either realized as simple increase, compare, conditional jump, or, at higher optimization, a monster that has like 10 branches to use anything from xmmword to byte depending on the amount of data

- big, known size moves (> 256 bytes) just generate a call to memcpy
by Theodores | 2025-09-16 11:53:39+00:00
Not sure why your comment was not received well by everyone here, however, that Dijkstra quote is definitely pertinent.

I believe that anyone can make something complicated and only the few can make something simple. This statement can be read the one way, I don't mean that anyone can make a lunar lander or an atom bomb, what I mean is that over-complicating something is something anyone can do.

At university I discovered another aspect of making things simple. We had one assignment to design a multi-storey car park. The purpose was to demonstrate the use of diagramming, and I handed in a single A3 sheet of paper, whilst all of my coursemates handed in sixty page bound documents. I felt that I was taking a bit of a risk but I was happy with elegant simplicity.

When we got our assignments back, everyone else had a mark and lots of red lettering. I just had a singular tick. I bravely plucked up courage to ask what the tick meant. Our lecturer told me that I had a perfect mark and that I was the only one to understand the assignment.

Since I was not confident in what I was doing, it required a lot of strength to resist the groupthink of the course. I could have folded to crib someone else's solution to turn in my own sixty page monstrosity.

Getting back to web development, I have frequently found myself working with colleagues that go for complexity because 'anyone can make something complicated' and because they lack the confidence to escape the groupthink that goes with doing so.
by Aherontas | 2025-09-16 11:53:45+00:00
It just builds a ChatGPT like UI that has Agents to serve you either latest news on a specific tech topic (via fetching them via MCP Servers for: Brave Browser, Hackernews and Github for trending repos or repos fetched in the response). It also supports giving you back general knowledge answers. The whole purpose of the repo is to be a general example of how Agents speak with Agents and how to pair them with MCP servers and why we need MCP Servers(for example better run all calculations not in LLM because they hallucinate, but via code and then give the answer back to the LLM). I hope it clarifies what it does now.
Ask HN: Reddit banned my account with no explanation, why?
by monneyboi | 2025-09-16 11:54:09+00:00
Reddit suspended my account without explanation, and I'm hoping someone here might have a connection who could help.

Roughly 2 weeks ago I created an account using my real name, real photo, and linked to my LinkedIn and GitHub. I was primarily active on r/ClaudeCode helping newcomers debug their code. Commented on maybe two news stories. That was the extent of my activity.

Then my account was suspended.

Reddit's own documentation states that you get a message explaining why you were banned. I did not get anything. I got a "We had a server error..." banner at the top, and a missing avatar. No explanation. No notifications. I submitted a ban appeal... no response. Tried their customer support form... also silence.

If anyone here knows someone at Reddit who could look into this, I'd appreciate the connection. Not angry, just confused and would like to get back to helping juniors.

Account in question: reddit.com/u/johanschuijt

Any help would be appreciated.
by wtbdbrrr | 2025-09-16 11:54:37+00:00
This is a "wild" hypothesis. A scifi WIP.

The desires of certain character types culminate in leadership. Those with this character type who have actual visions that fit withing the symbiotic nature of our reality were about as wanted among their peers as alphas were wanted in human tribes where betas felt treated unfairly and thus ganged up on alphas and their offspring, then establishing fraudulent hierarchies alienated from individual competence, which was compensated by collectively established complexity that served to maintain and uphold the fraudulent hierarchies.

Over time, in IT, engineering and science, this lead to narrower and narrower fields of possibilities, aka probabilities that certain behavioral locks and refused directions and angles will be unlocked (after emerging).

Business psychology, marketing, sales, and culture and psychology are entangled and "envelop" instead of developing. It appears like an evolution but it's an alienation, a contiguous/continuous self-imposed, self-reinforcing isolation from and within a symbiotic, open system.

The complexity forces the reduction of productive points of friction in order to create atomic points of contact with the parent system that minimize even productive and constructive influence. This then enforces rules of self-preservation instead and dictates dogmas of engagement with the rest of the world.

It's the obfuscation of the oldest Ponzi scheme which prefers isolation in singularity rather than a symbiotic evolution. The first who makes it to the patent office vs FOSS. Factory farming for a fancier dinner table. Who cares how much is thrown away, how much energy is wasted and how any of that impacts the chemical cycles of a symbiotic system that kept optimizing for exactly that for billions of years--by design, via self-organization, not necessarily as a hard-coded yield. The world wide web feels similar, btw.

Again, it's a WIP. (I just whipped those paragraphs up, but there's an imaginary pin board with a lot of sticky notes ...)
by burnt-resistor | 2025-09-16 11:54:46+00:00
Ugh. It's almost as bad as verbose documentation by people who can't grok concision, but it's worse because it's inflicted on many more people more times.

Furthermore, it's helpful to have other skeuomorphic, iconic, color, and/or other affordances that don't detract that do not require language to aid not-native speakers and those with disabilities.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-09-16 11:54:47+00:00
True, but it seems that the system of federal government is now showing it's weakness - a single point of failure that can easily be abused and broken by someone determined to do so. It seems that Trump is intent on systematically destroying the government, department by department, whether by incompetence and/or design. The constitution does not appear well suited to handle this challenge, and the republicans anyways don't appear inclined to hold their man in check to abide by the division of powers that the constitution lays out.

Maybe it's time for the individual states to assert control and challenge the federal assumption of powers that are not constitutionally given to them.
by krapp | 2025-09-16 11:54:57+00:00
Too many Americans have been indoctrinated into believing tyranny and fascism are impossible in the US because of their "well-armed militia," and that theirs is the only truly free society in the world. It's going to take a lot of hard shocks to break that delusion.

And let's be honest...too many Americans would be perfectly happy if certain demographics were put up against the wall.
by jrs235 | 2025-09-16 11:55:30+00:00
It might be a bit lengthy and a UI challenge on smaller screens/interfaces but I hate pronouns and unnecessary thinking, I'd prefer Current User Documents (or Current User's Documents) and All Documents. Sometimes I might be logged in as my personal user, sometimes as Admin, sometimes as one of my children. "Your Documents" or "My Documents" makes me hit the brakes in whatever I was trying to do/look for to figure out "who am I" [logged in as].

Edit: Actually it should be "[Username]'s Documents" not "Current User's Documents" otherwise I have to stop to remember who I'm logged in as...
by madeofpalk | 2025-09-16 11:55:34+00:00
I would like to see more usage of NPM/Github Actions provenance statements https://www.npmjs.com/package/sigstore#provenance through the ecosystem

> The NPM CI tokens that don't require 2fa kind of makes it less useful though

Use OIDC to publish packages instead of having tokens around that can be stolen or leaked https://docs.npmjs.com/trusted-publishers
by killerstorm | 2025-09-16 11:56:31+00:00
Object-capability model / capability-based security.

Do not let code to have access to things it's not supposed to access.

It's actually that simple. If you implemented a function which formats a string, it should not have access to `readFile`, for example.

Retrofitting it into JS isn't possible, though, as language is way too dynamic - self-modifying code, reflection, etc, means there's no isolation between modules.

In a language which is less dynamic it might be as easy as making a white-list for imports.