MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by collingreen | 2025-09-13 15:49:02+00:00
I don't think the "free" in free market is supposed to mean no rules. I think the "free" is supposed to mean both sides of the transactions get to choose to participate or not which means they are pressured to "meet in the middle" and optimize for mutually beneficial deals. The idea is that this is going to provide better outcomes than trying to plan out what everyone makes and buys from the top.

Overregulation can reduce the effective freedom in a market (usually by increasing costs or reducing choice) but good regulation is there to shepherd this equilibrium of a fair deal between buyers and sellers by doing things like getting externalities priced in (if youre buying x you should pay the cost of x, not your neighbor); preventing monopolies, cartels, other price fixing / choice reducing things that makes one side of the market not have to meet in the middle; and adding standards or visibility so market participants can be more efficient and safe when choosing (instead of having to do things like research all of a company's supply chain and employees to decide if it's safe to eat there or to fly in their planes).

Some things get imposed onto the market intentionally like protection for unions (in theory an alternative/shortcut to grouping up into inefficient passthrough companies), tarrifs to give someone an advantage in what they can offer, subsidies to intentionally prevent the market from contracting to the current size of demand (like if the country wants to maintain a certain ability to produce food or doctors or certain goods), and government programs to effectively set a floor on the price of something (like interest rates so lending/borrowing will never be worse than a certain mark).

All these things are useful tools in a market of self motivated actors trying to maximize their own gain in the short term but, like all tools, they get abused and out maneuvered often so it's a constant game of cat and mouse to keep the system running.

Pros and cons all over the place; most things have a huge downside of vulnerability to truly bad actors having too much control (which is where the idea of democracy comes in but I have to stop myself I already word dumped).

tl;dr yes absolutely call it a free market until people are forced to participate too much
by catlifeonmars | 2025-09-13 15:49:25+00:00
So maybe the solution is to make all subproblems greenfield products?

By this I mean treat features as isolated plugins. I get that there are cross-cutting features that touch multiple pieces of functionality, and those probably need special treatment, but a large class of functionality can be developed in an isolated way with a common set of design tokens and APIs to tie them all together.

This might play better to coding agent strengths.

Full disclosure: this is very much an armchair view. I have all of 2 weeks of experience coding via agents (vs manually), but this thread is nerd sniping me into trying it myself.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-09-13 15:50:43+00:00
Please do not spread disinformation here:

- We do not know the motivation of the shooter, but charlie had violent enemies who claimed he wasn't fascist enough, just like he had enemies who claimed he was too fascist.

- We do not know the alignment of the shooter, but we have at least as much evidence that he was right-wing as we do that he was left-wing.

- There is not a consensus that condemnation for fascist rhetoric was false, but we do have a nonzero, nonmajority of people claiming there is.

- We do not know if charlie was "good" or "innocent", but I personally feel that this violence was a bad idea, and feel bad that his family is suffering through it. Also, he clearly had friends who are hurting, too.

I agree that we should tone down actions and rhetoric, and as explained above, the things in your post after the first sentence work against those aims. Better to just tell everybody on all sides to tone down their actions and tone down their rhetoric. I am on board with you there.

We do know that name-calling and calls for violence and propensity for violence (all things suspected of contributing to this action) are coming from right-wing voices at least as much as they are coming from left-wing voices. So let's start by not engaging in political violence (both assassins and ICE attacks), and see if we can find agreement on language.
by tcoff91 | 2025-09-13 15:50:58+00:00
This is a site mostly centered around startups and building products. I notice a common anti-mobile-app sentiment here, and the criticisms are valid, but I think that it’s important to keep in mind that for many apps having a mobile app is important to the success of your business because the vast majority of people prefer mobile apps to mobile websites.

Users want apps and it’s important not to assume that the majority of users will think like HN users. Even if your app is mostly just a webview wrapping your website, being in the App Store matters.
by jmclnx | 2025-09-13 15:51:05+00:00
IIRC, Trump wanted to get someone on Mars by 2030 or 2035 ? Well good luck with that.

Cutting funds like that have been doing, it will be lucky if NASA can send someone down the street to get milk :) I would think returning samples from Mars would be a big help on exploring Mars for potential settlements.

I guess they believe Thoughts and Prayers will be enough to explore Mars.
by latexr | 2025-09-13 15:51:15+00:00
I started to respond in earnest but then thought “this is a really strange question for HN, I’d be surprised if it isn’t flagged” and decided to double check your account.

This is clearly bait for something you’re developing and are obsessing over.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45164666

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45060118

Not even including your flagged submissions.

I don’t think your product is positive. It’s not like you’re using it to get out of dangerous situations, just to avoid minor discomfort. Which will only lead you to be even more uncomfortable with even minor things. That’s not good for your mental health or your ability to deal with the world.

It’s not even a necessary product at all. If you’re OK with terminating a conversation because you’ve gotten a call, you could just as easily say “oh, shoot, I’m really sorry but I just realised I was supposed to have called <whoever> and I didn’t. Sorry, we’ll have to pick this up another time, I need to call them right now.”

Without any judgement, I recommend you consider therapy instead of developing an app. You’ll be much happier if you learn to deal with the discomfort naturally and understand it’s OK, as opposed to doing anything you can to get away from it.
by griffzhowl | 2025-09-13 15:51:20+00:00
No one was made leader by the discord server. They made a suggestion, but it's only because that suggestion was accepted by the military leadership, who were de facto in control of the country, that she's been made prime minister.

Obviously, she will lose legitimacy as an interim leader if she doesn't swiftly organise free and fair elections for a legitimate prime minister. The fact that she's acceptable both to the young protestors and to the military leadership suggests she's a safe pair of hands for this role.

What outcome would you have preferred to see, given the circumstances?
by thomassmith65 | 2025-09-13 15:52:07+00:00
While this is an engaging essay, it's premature to claim that social media is dying. The state of social media has been awful for years, and yet billions stuck around. There probably is no depth low enough that the majority of users would abandon it.

The essay also neglects what is possibly the largest part of a solution: systems to guarantee authenticity of users and user claims...

A social media user shouldn't have to wonder if the brain surgeon giving them medical tips actually is a high school dropout, or the fellow Parisian sounding the alarm on French politics actually is a 12 year old Quebecer, or the new fan DM'ing them about their music actually is the same psychopath who online-stalked them two years ago, etc.

Social media isn't going to die. It badly needs a mechanism for users to filter out bad information.
by alasarmas | 2025-09-13 15:52:15+00:00
It has been documented that human image moderators exist and that some have been deeply traumatized by their work. I have zero doubts that the datasets of content and metadata created by human image moderators are being bought and sold, literally trafficking in human suffering. Can you point to a comprehensive effort by the tech majors to create a freely-licensed dataset of violent content and metadata to prevent duplication of human suffering?
by southernplaces7 | 2025-09-13 15:52:23+00:00
A boon for the very thing you describe was the Black Death of the 14th century. The colossal depopulation of Europe increased the de facto bargaining power of peasants to the point where they could competitively seek out better labor wages and land concessions in places well outside their previous manor. Thus, many peasants did exactly this, to the point where the noble elites and monarchies of Europe tried to enforce tougher regulations and laws against free movement, wage increases and even conspicuous displays of prosperity by the increasingly wealthy peasant classes of society (many of who were also turning to mercantile ventures to further diversify their income.

As is usually the case with government social and economic dictates that attempt controls against the practical social and economic reality of the world around them, these laws slowly but inexorable failed, leading to the steady erosion of feudalism throughout Europe (though not everywhere at similar times, and in some places this repressive system lingered for centuries longer, ie: Russia, Sicily, etc)

If anything, for all its grim deadliness, the Black Death was oddly beneficial to the future social and economic flourishing of Europe, starting with the rise of the Renaissance, and leading from there to so many other things, for better or worse for the rest of the world.
by mikepavone | 2025-09-13 15:52:27+00:00
> This is not how nuclear works. Nuclear sets a low price that corresponds to its cost, then lets more expensive marginal energy sources set the final price.

This may be an accurate description for fully-depreciated nuclear plants, but it doesn't reflect the economics of new-build nuclear at all. You have to consider both operating and capital costs. Nuclear plants are cheap to operate once built, but those operations have to pay off the capital costs. If the load factor is low, then each unit of generated power has to bear a higher portion of the capital costs. If your capital costs are very high, then you either need a very high load factor or very high spot prices to bear those costs.

> Nuclear can by the way be modulated +20%\-20%

Net demand on CAISO can go from about 2 MW to 30 MW in the summer. 20 MW of that ramp occurs over just 3 hours. I'm sure you can build nuclear plants that ramp that fast, but you need a lot more than the range you're mentioning here. Regardless, I'm not making an argument about the physics of nuclear power plants, just the economics. Expensive plants generally need high load factors to pay off the capital costs.

> nuclear generation in France can go from 25GW to 45GW during a day.

Most of France's nuclear plants are old and thus fully depreciated. The only one built recently (Flamanville Unit 3), is a good example of the bad cost trend in nuclear. While this was a bit cheaper than Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in the US on a dollars per nameplate capacity basis, at 19 billion euro it's still very expensive (and also way over budget).

France also has high rates of curtailment, which is not necessarily a huge problem for them since so much of their generation is already carbon-free, but it does suggest they're already hitting the limits of their ability to ramp production up and down. Whether this is an engineering problem or something to do with the structure of their electricity market is a bit unclear to me

> New small modular reactors promise great improvements, as they can be pre-built in factories, require limited maintenance, lower risk, and as a result much lower cost per MW.

This has been the promise for years, but so far the low costs have yet to materialize and they are estimated to have a higher LCOE than traditional plants. Currently only 2 are actually operational, a demonstration plant in China and a floating power plant using adapted ice-breaker reactors in Russia. There are a few more in the pipeline, but they are all at least a couple years out from actually producing power.
by bheadmaster | 2025-09-13 15:52:40+00:00
In my experience, the problem of Java is the lack of standardized tooling.

To build an average Java software, you have to install a specific version of JDK, download a specific build system (Ant, Maven, Gradle, Bazel), hope everything works out on the first try - and if not, debug the most-likely-XML spec file searching for invalid dependency that's printed out on the 1000-line error output...

What Java is desperately missing is something like Python's `uv`.

---

Sibling comment mentioned that debugging Java itself is also a nightmare, which reminds me of the many Spring Boot projects I've had to debug. Stack traces containing 90% of boilerplate code layers, and annotations throwing me from one corner of the codebase to another like a ragdoll...

Admittedly, that's not inherently the problem of Java, but rather the problem of Spring. However, Spring is very likely to be found in enterprise projects.
by eszed | 2025-09-13 15:52:52+00:00
I will only buy "antique" furniture, for precisely this reason. When we were looking for a house, I prioritized homes built before 1933 (when asbestos materials became widely used). We bought a house built in 1929, and the materials and workmanship are phenomenally good. It wasn't like a custom build or anything, either: the surrounding three blocks were built at the same time by the same developer, and they were originally owned by working-class families. It's just, as you say, everything has got worse.
by Cyph0n | 2025-09-13 15:53:32+00:00
I have never seriously used a BEAM language (Elixir/Erlang/Gleam), but for me, it’s the opposite: the most attractive part of Gleam is that it runs on BEAM :)

My reservations at this point are mostly around maturity of the language, the stdlib, and the library ecosystem; although I haven’t been following progress too closely.
by shakna | 2025-09-13 15:53:35+00:00
Maybe not how you were brought up, and people argue... But Watson & Watson, back in '87, described ref counting as "An efficient garbage collection scheme for parallel computer architectures".

Even the dragon book refers to ref counting as a form of garbage collection.

Line 2 of Ref counting's Wikipedia page refers to garbage collection.

People have argued since the invention in 1960, but... Ref counting is one form of GC. [0] It might not be a tracing GC, but it is GC.

[0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/367487.367501
by conradkay | 2025-09-13 15:53:47+00:00
Good article from 2023, not much data though if that's what you're looking for:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intell...

unwalled: https://archive.ph/Z6t35

Generally seems similar today just on a bigger Scale. And much more focus on coding

Here in the US DataAnnotation seems to be the most marketed company offering these jobs
by layer8 | 2025-09-13 15:54:08+00:00
An important skill for software developers is the ability to reason about what the effects of their coce will be, over all possible conditions and inputs, as opposed to trial and error limited to specific inputs, or (as is the case with non-deterministic LLMs) limited to single executions. This skill is independent of whether you are coding in assembly or are using higher-level languages and tooling. Using LLMs exactly doesn’t train that skill, because the effective unpredictability of their results largely prevents any but the most vague logical reasoning about the connection between the prompt and the specific output.
by BoxFour | 2025-09-13 15:55:22+00:00
This is an odd thing to say given the events of the past few days and even last couple years:

“Nor 1960's America, where Mr. Oswald could buy a rifle and 4X scope by mail order, then get a job in a convenient book depository”

Your broader argument still holds that those in power often don’t tend to view isolated threats from the public as truly existential threats (until they do, like we just saw in Nepal).

But it’s a bit hard to agree that even in America things are truly that much different.
by muglug | 2025-09-13 15:55:50+00:00
It's cool that it's part of the PHP foundation, but it's not all that complex.

FrankenPHP has >100 contributors, including 3 very frequent ones, and about 17k lines of Go.

Mago has 11 contributors, with just 1 very frequent one, and about 135k lines of Rust.
by xpe | 2025-09-13 15:55:56+00:00
I agree. Corporations excel at finding ways to disperse authority and accountability to do illegal things, sometimes intentionally, sometimes simply by letting the natural corporate incentives play out -- "oh, look, this department didn't fully understand the situation"... to which the follow up question is "Ok, but _who_ designed the departments? They seem pretty good at maximizing profit, so why can't they also manage to comply with the law?"
by richardfulop | 2025-09-13 15:58:09+00:00
I feel like many opinion pieces on AI coding are written from the perspective of highly experienced software engineers, often from a kind of ivory tower. (even that study they cite was based on “16 experienced open-source developers.”)

But for people who aren’t seasoned coders, these tools are incredibly valuable. I have some coding experience myself, but it’s never been my profession (I’m a visual artist). Now, I can accomplish in an afternoon what would otherwise take me days. Two months ago I left my job to work solo on my video game, and even though my budget is limited, I still make sure to keep Claude and ChatGPT. Also, being able to write something on my phone at 1 a.m. when I can’t sleep, send it to Codex, and then test it first thing in the morning at my computer feels pretty magical. It also takes away the worry of “what if this isn’t the best way to do it?” since refactoring parts of my codebase is now so easy. It helps not just with writing code, but also with removing the fear that might otherwise keep me from sitting down and getting the work done.

That said, I understand that much of the criticism is really aimed at the marketing hype around these tools and the broader “this will replace the engineers at your company” narrative.
by tcoff91 | 2025-09-13 15:58:33+00:00
You need the BEAM because operating systems we have available do not have the properties of the BEAM.

OS processes are far to heavy and slow to start, and the scheduler doesn’t work the way erlang needs it to. The BEAM solves those issues amongst others.

Also you need the BEAM for hot swapping code at runtime without taking the system offline.
by jackson_mile | 2025-09-13 15:58:38+00:00
Hi HN,

I wanted to share a project I've been building to solve a problem I've personally faced.

As an indie dev and tabletop gamer, I've always found creating custom 3D character models to be a major hurdle. The learning curve for tools like Blender or ZBrush is steep, and while recent text-to-3D AI is promising, the results often aren't quite ready for a game engine or 3D printer without significant cleanup.

My goal with this project was to build a simple web tool that could take a detailed text prompt and generate a usable 3D asset. You can export models as OBJ/FBX for game development or as STL for printing miniatures.

The name is a bit of a nod to the core idea: "Nano" for the aim of achieving precise detail, and "Banana" for the goal of making the process as straightforward as possible.

It's still early, and the quality can definitely be hit-or-miss depending on the prompt. I'm launching it as a paid tool from the get-go, hoping to build it sustainably. I'm here to be transparent about that and would genuinely appreciate any feedback on the concept, the output quality, or anything else. I'll be in the comments to answer questions.
by uyzstvqs | 2025-09-13 15:58:48+00:00
___This post is misleading___

The article was posted in January of this year. The "next administration" refers to the now-current Trump-Vance administration, which at that point was still incoming.

For those interested in the topic, please follow the official first-party source here: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-sample-return/
by muglug | 2025-09-13 15:59:54+00:00
> The PHP Foundation has raised over 2 million USD in contribution and has over 500K in their balance

This is great, but it is still dwarfed by the amount Microsoft has spent on TypeScript and also by the amount Stripe has spent on Sorbet.

500k is roughly comparable to the amount my previous company spent (grudgingly) to keep me employed and working on PHP tooling for a couple of years.
by uninformedprior | 2025-09-13 15:59:57+00:00
If you need to learn how to learn then you don't know how to learn. How can you learn to learn if you don't know how to learn?

Jokes aside I'm really into learning science and make youtube videos covering learning and learning papers + an ipad app. I keep a running list of my favorite learn-to-learn resources here:

https://www.ahmni.app/blog/learn-to-learn-resource-list

If I had to recommend only one resource it would be: The ABCs of How We Learn: 26 Scientifically Proven Approaches, How They Work, and When to Use Them by Schwartz
by rwmj | 2025-09-13 16:00:20+00:00
It's worth reading Palmer's reply, which is a correct response: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/mhng-655602B8-F102-4B0F-AF4A-4A...

(Palmer is a super-smart and nice guy who I have worked with, and IMHO didn't deserve this little rant from Linus, but he made a mistake, owned up to it, and didn't make a fuss.)
by perrygeo | 2025-09-13 16:00:47+00:00
I would say durable systems are what run the world. The code making up the components are not necessarily durable! Just like living cells die off but maintain the consistent identity of the overall organism, software systems often deal with an endless churn of dependencies and components without changing their overall functionality.

If you have a system of a dozen components with well defined interfaces, you could imagine an LLM rewriting and redeploying each component one at a time, without changing the observable properties of the system.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-13 16:00:48+00:00
> I'm extremely skeptical on claims of people having past 100 years of age.

People do live past 100.

Look at a chart of how old people are when they die and you’ll see a consistent distribution with a downward curve. There really are people in the tail of that curve.

There is no hard cutoff in the body that can precisely track time passed over 36,500 days and then shut it all down.