MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xp84 | 2025-10-04 16:16:42+00:00
What’s bad for usability is using icons on their own. Using icons with visible labels is the best practice among people who actually want their software to be usable.

And of course “bad for usability” becomes absolutely catastrophic for a11y.

For those who prioritize aesthetics over usability and use icons alone though, there are at least a dozen methods to make assistive tech read the names of your icon buttons. Something as simple as aria-label is one way.
by zahlman | 2025-10-04 16:17:04+00:00
Just FWIW, a trick that I'm planning to use for PAPER: first I make separate actual commands — `paper-foo`, `paper-bar` etc. that are each implemented as separate top-level scripts that can import only what they need. Later, the implementation of `paper foo` has the main `paper` script dynamically look up `paper-foo`. (Even a `subprocess.call` would work there but I'd like to avoid that overhead)
by supermatt | 2025-10-04 16:17:15+00:00
I’m not even suggesting people use their own did:web - for that very reason.

I am saying that Bluesky could have used a did:web that uses the plc domain with exactly the same effect.

As is all did:plc resolution is effectively hardcoded to https://plc.directory so what exactly does having its own method change (given they could decorate the docs with any additional functionality)?

I don’t think did:web is the way forward either, as any domain “ownership” is temporary - including plc.directory.

Even extending did:key (so the identity is actually owned by the user via a keypair) and providing a doc resolver (users could register with multiple “resolvers” including bluesky controlled ones) would at least mean an id not tied to a central authority - but they chose to use their own assigned method specific identifiers.

ATProto is great. PLC sucks.
by rtfeldman | 2025-10-04 16:17:49+00:00
When I wrote Elm in Action for Manning, I talked with them explicitly about the language being pre-1.0 and what would happen if there were breaking changes. The short answer was that it was something they dealt with all the time; if there were small changes, we could issue errata online, and if there were sufficiently large changes, we could do a second edition.

I did get an advance but I don't remember a clause about having to return any of it if I didn't earn it out. (I did earn it out, but I don't remember any expectation that I'd have to give them money back if I hadn't.) Also my memory was that it was more than $2k but it was about 10 years ago so I might be misremembering!
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-10-04 16:17:58+00:00
But Im saying something different than the person I was responding to. They said that the risk was due to company going bankrupt and therefore Nvidia losing its "investment" - read: the GPUs that it leased. Whereas Im saying that the risk is due to company going bankrupt, Nvidia getting its GPUs back, but now they have too many at hand than they can usefully deploy/sell. The two are risks triggered by the same event, but the former is about 1 order of magnitude greater than the latter. The former is lost capital, the latter is lost opportunity - read: return on the capital.
by pfdietz | 2025-10-04 16:18:13+00:00
Galactic colonization, carried to saturation, would detectably modify the appearance of a galaxy. So called "type 3 civilizations" would convert a significant fraction of starlight to lower grade heat, which would be radiated. Searches have been conducted for this signature, with the result that no more than 1 in 100,000 galaxies has such a civilization, and with the result being consistent with none.
by Leynos | 2025-10-04 16:18:14+00:00
Apologies for the second reply, but it also occurs to me that reinforcement learning is the new battleground. Look at the changes between o1, o3 and GPT-5 thinking. Sonnet 3.7, Sonnet 4, and Sonnet 4.5. And so forth.

I expect models will get larger again once everyone is doing their inference on B200s, but the RL training budget is where the insatiable appetite sits right now.
by echelon | 2025-10-04 16:18:18+00:00
Capitalism only works if there is lots of competition.

Monopolies gum up the system, reward the institutional capital rather than innovation capital, and prevent new entrants from de-ossifying and being the renewing forest fire.

We've been so lax on antitrust. Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon - they all need to be broken up. Our economy and our profession would be better for it.

Innovation should be a treadmill.

YC and a16z want this.
by acdha | 2025-10-04 16:18:35+00:00
Their customers pay them to be the front door to their websites. Customers want a way to reduce the massive traffic from AI crawling, to block malicious traffic, and to be compensated for access.

That leaves Cloudflare well positioned to implement a pay-for-access check along with all of the existing bot services they offer. AI crawling goes from a threat to a win if I can serve OpenAI a demand to pay for each request. Bot abuse goes down if traffic isn’t free. Businesses like journalism become stable again if readers pay for content rather than relying on advertisers to subsidize it.
by monster_truck | 2025-10-04 16:18:55+00:00
While not explicitly illegal, I was building out part of a product for an international company with a massive userbase (hundreds of millions) and discovered a slight issue: their api required no authentication, had no rate limiting, and an easily discoverable request format. Anyone could make a simple request with a handful of digits and get a complete history of that product, revealing very intimate details about the users in every aspect of their lives.

I don't get nervous easily but it made my stomach turn, my palms started sweating. I told my boss, we told our boss, who went and pulled the CEO out of a meeting. I was given signed documentation on company letterhead that stated I raised the issue and also detailed how our company had informed the customer, along with a modest cash bonus and they bought me most of the furniture in my house (no taxes!)

The company came back to us and said "we know, we built it like that on purpose". Incredulous but reassured that both myself and my employer were not facing any liability, I finished the product and it shipped. Predictably this was exploited within a few years and made national news when it was used against prominent political figures.

There are still no legal mechanisms in place to enforce any kind of security for this class of product.
by brookst | 2025-10-04 16:19:35+00:00
The world isn’t that conspiratorial.

The designers on Liquid Glass are proud of it, and also disappointed that some of the design system did not make it into v1.0 code, so the reality is less legible than the designs indicated.

There is no designer in the world making bad designs as part of some conspiracy to enable their employer to launch improved designs several years later. There’s no company that operates that way.
by ivape | 2025-10-04 16:19:36+00:00
I can’t say it will remain a black art because the tech itself creates new paradigms constantly. An LLM can be fine tuned with context engineering examples, similar to Chain Of Thought tuning, and that’s how we get a reasoning loop. With enough fine tuning, we could get a similar context loop, in which case those keeping things hidden will be washed away with new paradigms.

Even if someone fine tuned an LLM with this type of data, Deepseek has shown that they can just use a teacher-student strategy to steal from whatever model you trained (exfiltrate your value-add, which is how they stole from OpenAI). Stealing is already a thing in this space, so don’t be shocked if over time you see a lot more protectionism (protectionism is something we already see geopolitically on the hardware front).

I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I can confidently say that if humans are involved at this stage, there will absolutely be some level of information siloing, and stealing.

——

But to directly answer your question:

”… instead of becoming something with standard practices that work well for most use cases?”

In no uncertain terms, the answer is because of money.
by materiallie | 2025-10-04 16:19:59+00:00
Zig certainly has a lot of interesting features and good ideas, but I honestly don't see the point of starting a major project with it. With alternatives like Rust and Swift, memory safety is simply table stakes these days.

Yes, I know Zig does a lot of things to help the programmer avoid mistakes. But the last time I looked, it was still possible to make mistakes.

The only time I would pick something like C, C++, or Rust is if I am planning to build a multi-million line, performance sensitive project. In which case, I want total memory safety. For most "good enough" use cases, garbage collectors work fine and I wouldn't bother with a system's programming language at all.

That leaves me a little bit confused about the value proposition of Zig. I suppose it's a "better C". But like I said, for serious industry projects starting in 2025, memory safety is just tablestakes these days.

This isn't meant to be a criticism of Zig or all of the hard work put into the language. I'm all for interesting projects. And certainly there are a lot of interesting ideas in Zig. I'm just not going to use them until they're present in a memory safe language.

I am actually a bit surprised by the popularity of Zig on this website, given the strong dislike towards Go. From my perspective, both languages are very similar, from the perspective that they decided to "unsolve already solved problems". Meaning, we know how to guarantee memory safety. Multiple programming languages have implemented this in a variety of ways. Why would I use a new language that takes a problem a language like Rust, Java, or Swift already solved for me, and takes away features (memory safety) that I already have?
by KoolKat23 | 2025-10-04 16:20:16+00:00
I think this is not really the case, people see through that type of LLM use immediately (busywork). This is demonstrated in the fact that top-down implementations aren't working despite use amongst employees thriving.

People doing their jobs know how to use it effectively. Just because corporates aren't capturing that value for themselves doesn't mean it's low quality. It's being used in a way that is perhaps reflected as an improvement in the actual employees standing, and could be bridging existing outdated work processes. Often an employee is powerless to change these processes and KPI's are notoriously narrow in scope.

Hallucinations happen less frequently these days, and people are aware of the pitfalls so account for this. Literally in my own example above it means I have more time to actually check my own work (and it's work) and it also points out factors I might have missed as a human (this has absolutely happened multiple times already).
by PaulKeeble | 2025-10-04 16:20:47+00:00
Ada has some really good ideas which its a shame never took off or got used outside of the safety critical community that mostly used it. The ability to make number types that were limited in their range is really useful for certain classes of bugs. Spark Ada was a relatively easy substandard to learn and apply to start to develop software that was SIL 4 compliant.

I can't help but feel that we just went through a huge period of growth at all costs and now there is a desire to return, after 30-years of anything goes, to trying to make software that is safer again. Would be nice to start to build languages based on all the safety learnings over the decades to build some better languages, the good ideas keep getting lost in obscure languages and forgotten about.
by bwfan123 | 2025-10-04 16:21:16+00:00
Same could be said of the covid-darlings - zoom, pelaton etc. They got bid up assuming the present to continue into the future. That is the nature of the markets. Same story with fake meat companies. Across time you will find this pattern - 3d printing etc, all ushering some new faddish technology. Also, explains the investments into openai as a hedge against capex slowdown, so there is a captive customer.
by pfdietz | 2025-10-04 16:21:32+00:00
> why does Venus have so much carbon dioxide?

Venus doesn't have liquid water, which is needed for the reaction of silicates with CO2 ("weathering"). Without that reaction, CO2 just accumulates in the atmosphere. Most of the carbon on Earth (and there's a lot) is locked up in rocks.

There's also a biological effect. Here on Earth, silica in the ocean is scrubbed out by microorganisms that create silica shells; these tiny shells fall out into sediments, where (in deep ocean) they eventually form a kind of biogenic rock called "chert". Elsewhere, typically in shallow water, carbonate rocks are formed from the remains of other kinds of animals. Without these effects, the dissolved silicon concentration in seawater would be orders of magnitude higher, and the silica would react to form clays. This reaction would acidify the ocean and prevent carbonate formation.

Just such "reverse weathering" has been hypothesized to occur after the Permian-Triassic boundary, where CO2 levels stayed elevated for 5 million years. The extinction event was so severe it disrupted chert formation (a "chert gap").
by Swizec | 2025-10-04 16:22:11+00:00
> we are doomed to repeat mistakes or reinvent the wheel because nobody ever reads the existing research, nobody learns from the past

We do. There’s dozens of us!

Here’s the thing though, the number of programmers in the world has been doubling every 5 years or so for the past few decades. If you have been doing this for 5 years, you have more experience than half the industry. It’s a young field and information only propagates so fast. You too have the power to help it spread.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-10-04 16:22:42+00:00
That's fine, it's also not recognized by the FSF, DFSG, any BSD, or anyone else credible. Mostly because those "beneficial and spiritually open licenses" are in fact not beneficial or spiritually open, existing specifically to limit what users can do and cripple the community's ability to do anything the original vendor doesn't like or that might undercut their ability to make money.
by jorvi | 2025-10-04 16:22:47+00:00
Those riced setups look great on screenshots but they usually have terrible visual distinction, the colors work badly with Night Light (orange filter), and they carefully select applications that can be themed or fit the theme.

Once you step outside the facade it'll look disjointed. Applications won't have blur. They'll have square blur corners with rounded window corners. Icons will look glitchy with blur. Etc.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-04 16:22:59+00:00
> I find that strong typing often obviates the need for unit tests.

Can you expand? Because my experience is they are totally orthogonal.

For me, unit testing is to ensure the function's algorithm is correct. You verify add(2, 3) == 5 and add(1, 2, 3) == 6 and add(2, Null) == Null.

But you don't generally write unit tests that tests how a function behaves when you pass an unexpected type. Nobody in my experience is testing add("a", FooObject) for a function only meant to take ints or floats, to make sure it only takes ints or floats.

So they solve entirely different problems: strong typing ensures a caller provides compatible data, while unit tests ensure a callee produces correct results (not just correctly typed results) from that data. You want both, ideally.
by parpfish | 2025-10-04 16:23:01+00:00
This piece of advice:

> Remember you can still add in that complication tomorrow

is directly undermiend later with:

> When should you create stuff just in case? > ... > 1. There is a reasonable chance it will be useful later > 2. It will be difficult to add in later > 3. It won't meanginfully slow down the meeting of more likely requirements

whenever i've pushed to overengineer its because i've developed a strung hunch that points 1 and 2 are true and i'm being defensive about my time and effort next week.

and if you're not allowed to push back because of 1 and 2 it's a sign of some sort of organizational problems where product folks sit at the top of the hierarchy and hand down dictates to builders without consulting with builders as equal partners.
by OutOfHere | 2025-10-04 16:23:05+00:00
Firstly you have no hard evidence. People like you often make up that bad faith assertion to attack authors unfairly.

Secondly, almost all content is going to be produced in part with assistance from AI tools, not necessarily to write the content, but at least to discover and understand source materials for it. Would you say that a search engine was used? AI is the new search engine too.

Your assertion that using AI makes content worse is a false one. Many use it to make their content better.

Also, you originally perpetuated a false dichotomy. Content is typically going to be produced in collaboration with AI.

Instead of using your lazy attack, if you actually see a real issue with some content, why not just document any issue with the content in good faith with the mindset that the content were written by a human?

Consider what you are fighting. Do you think your fight has a future where your side will come out victorious such that humans write content without AI?
by nucleative | 2025-10-04 16:23:40+00:00
I'm not so sure about this.

First were the models. Then the APIs. Then the cost efficiencies. Right now the tooling and automated workflows. Next will be a frantic effort to "AI-Everything". A lot of things won't make the cut, but absolutely many tasks, whole jobs, and perhaps entire subsets of industries will flip over.

For example you might say no AI can write a completely tested, secure, fully functional mobile app with one prompt (yet). But look at the advancements in Cline, Claude code, MCPs, code execution environments, and other tooling in just the last 6 months.

The whole monkeys typewriters shakespeare thing starts to become viable.
by xp84 | 2025-10-04 16:24:30+00:00
> the number of people manually overriding fonts isn't even a rounding error. It's not even a rounding error's rounding error

This is very obviously true. And given the fact that 100% of mainstream websites and 99.99% of non-mainstream ones use font declarations other than “serif”, “sans-serif”, or “monospace,” it is absolutely unsurprising that no one (but us super nerds) bothers to set this setting that every website will override.

And indeed, the near-universal usage of web fonts today has taken us even farther into the territory where a web property specifies the precise appearance, leaving no decisions to the user agent. If it weren’t for responsive layouts being standard, the Web would have more in common with a PDF than the early HTML web where users might have a reason to use user stylesheets and specify their preferred fonts.
by makeitdouble | 2025-10-04 16:25:44+00:00
But then the function x data mapping isn't 1 to 1 in most cases, which is often why inheritance is used.

IMHO sperating data formats and functions works decently enough, interface/protocol/duck typing are more elegant than OO classes.

As a real world image, a barcode scanner could be applied to anything that has a barcode, regardless of what that thing is. And I'd wager 99% of what we're trying to do fits that mold. When authentifying a user, the things that matter will be wether it's a legitimate call, and whether the user is valid. Forcing that logic I to classes or filtering by use type quicky becomes noise IMHO.
by devmor | 2025-10-04 16:26:12+00:00
The way gateways and networks handle auth are not the same thing and it gets really muddy and confusing, honestly.

If you’ve already tokenized the card on a gateway for a particular merchant, for example, they may allow you to keep pushing multiple charges while on their end still using the original network auth from the first tokenization - which ends up being entirely opaque to you, the client of the gateway.

Essentially you don’t have to care what the card network rules are, just how your gateway presents functionality to you.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-04 16:26:33+00:00
> But it was reportedly used 10 years ago by Google's captcha.

It sucks so bad. If I solve the captchas by moving the mouse too quickly, Google asks me to try again. If I'm deliberately slow and erratic with my movements as I click on pictures, it almost always lets me through on the first click. Been manually A/B testing this for years and remains true today.
by jrockway | 2025-10-04 16:26:45+00:00
Yeah, NFL games are kind of crazy. I missed a MNF game recently and saw it on YouTube the next evening (and somehow I hadn't spoiled the score for myself). It was less than 2 hours without a single play or comment edited out. Aired live, it was closer to 3:30. Literally 1/3 commercials. It's a little excessive.
by logicchains | 2025-10-04 16:28:27+00:00
It's much easier to write ultra low latency code in Zig because doing so requires using local bump-a-pointer allocators, and the whole Zig standard library is built around that (everything that allocates must take the allocator as a param). Rust on the other hand doesn't make custom allocators easy to use, partially because proving they're safe to the borrow checker is tricky.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-04 16:29:36+00:00
> Why not publish the changes too?

Because you are being adversarial and trying to trick people.

> if you read up about DID, it tells you how to know who they are

But it doesn't tell you're they're not a spammer. I don't see anything about reputation.

> in case you’re interested

But that's the point. You're interested in legitimate upvotes to try to find useful content. You're not interested in spam upvotes. In a decentralized world, how does anyone tell the difference?
by commandar | 2025-10-04 16:29:50+00:00
Tangentially related, one of the more interesting projects I've seen in the 3D printing space recently is Prunt. It's a printer control board and firmware, with the latter being developed in Ada.

https://prunt3d.com/

https://github.com/Prunt3D/prunt

It's kind of an esoteric choice, but struck me as "ya know, that's really not a bad fit in concept."
by ninkendo | 2025-10-04 16:29:57+00:00
The actual computation speed isn't as important nowadays but it doesn't really change the conclusion with respect to whether they're underutilized.

Because the main reason for the price premiums in AI-class GPUs are the gobs of insanely fast memory, and that is very much not underutilized. AI companies grab GPUs with as much memory (at the fastest memory bandwidth) as possible and underclock the GPU to save on power. Linus Tech Tips had a great video about the H200 that touched on this this week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNumJwHpXIA
by xp84 | 2025-10-04 16:30:11+00:00
The branding people have definitely won this war here. I agree with you, but the answer to your final question is, sadly these days, never the user or the supposed owner of the hardware. I think it’s pretty easy to argue today that when you boot a computer or phone, it belongs to Apple or Microsoft or Google. When you open a website or “app,“ the computer temporarily belongs to its developer. The fact that even browsers don’t have a built-in, simple-to-configure option to toggle persistent cookies on or off per website, opt-in, of course, is all the evidence you need of that for the web. None of this is OK with me, but it’s the world we have now.
by madaxe_again | 2025-10-04 16:30:17+00:00
Not even remotely. In LLM land, the progress seems slow the past few years, but a lot has happened under the hood.

Elsewhere in AI however progress has been enormous, and many projects are only now reaching the point where they are starting to have valuable outputs. Take video gen for instance - it simply did not exist outside of research labs a few years ago, and now it’s getting to the point where it’s actually useful - and that’s just a very visible example, never mind the models being applied to everything from plasma physics to kidney disease.