MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bedman12345 | 2025-10-03 08:29:57+00:00
> And yet terms like "elegant" have no objective definition.

Why does that matter? You seem to really think one needs objective definitions? It should be clear that whether a definition is objective or not is subjective itself. The question is whether there is some shared experience. And most people agree on what’s simple and what isn’t. You can now argue that’s all cultural, but that’s also a rather ridiculous position. We all experience advanced math as more complicated than 2 word sentences and so on. And I’m arguing, using my experience and examples, that functional programming is unnecessarily complicated. Requiring objective measures either misses the point. It’s really not a reasonable ask.
by stahorn | 2025-10-03 08:30:01+00:00
The proper way to work with git: Commit like a madman on your private branch. Short messages, written in seconds, just to be able to remember what you were doing if you are interrupted and have to get back into your work later. If you have a CI pipeline, often you have to make small changes until it works, so no reason to bother with smart commit messages.

At some point, you will have something working that makes sense that clean up. Then use interactive rebase to create one or a few commits that "makes sense". What makes sense is one of these topics that could create a whole bike garage, but you and your team will have some agreement on it. One thing that I like is to keep pure refactorings by themselves. No one cares to review that you've changed typos in old variables names and things like that. If it's a separate commit, you can just skip over it.

Depending on if you are completely done or not, the resulting branch can be sent as a PR/MR. Make sure that all commits have a reason why the change was made. No reason to repeat what the code says or generate some AI slop message. Your knowledge of why a change was done in a certain way is the most valuable part.

Of course, this way of working fits my work, that is not cloud based in any way and with lots of legacy code. It creates git history that I would like to have if I have to take over old projects or if I have to run git bisect on an unfamiliar code base and figure out some obscure bug. You might have a completely different technology stack and business, where it makes sense to work in some other way with git.
by anilakar | 2025-10-03 08:30:44+00:00
> Also, the whole phone setup process needs to be delayed; having to go through it for an hour puts them off from even wanting to bother

This is also an issue with Android. When I changed phones a month ago, I ran into trouble with my Google account. The only internet connection I had was my cellular data plan and during the mandatory initial set-up I could not enable hotspot on the new phone to do online 2FA on the old device.
by marckrn | 2025-10-03 08:30:57+00:00
I used to work as a UI/UX designer when we bought our, now late, grandmother an iPad Air 2 so she could "stay connected." This was around the iOS 8 era, and helping her through the setup process turned out to be an eye-opening experience for me – and for my then-profession:

"Yes, yes, darling, I see all these cryptic hieroglyphs [icons] – but I don’t know what they mean. Am I supposed to? Where can I look them up?"

That was a long day.
by Supernaut | 2025-10-03 08:31:09+00:00
> its always been like this. That certain types of people do certain things and others are highly disinterested in it

I agree. I remember 1984, when all of my schoolyard peers had a home computer. It was only myself and one other guy that ever experimented with our systems' integrated BASIC. Everyone else exclusively used their computers for gaming. Unsurprisingly, the other programmer and I are the only two who subsequently made careers in IT.
by stroebs | 2025-10-03 08:31:43+00:00
Having grown up in South Africa, having a physical document to prove who you are, along with an identity number is just so normalised. When I moved to the UK later in life, I found it absolutely bizarre that there’s no mechanism to uniquely identify yourself to the government, or any other entity that deals with your personal/financial/health identity. It’s just a combination of name and address, which anyone can access with ease.

Digital identity is on the slightly more controlling side of this, but the article focuses entirely on the cynical perspective without considering the positives.
by krallistic | 2025-10-03 08:31:59+00:00
Various reasons

Some people just believe there is no innate knowledge or we dont need it if we just scale/learn better (in the direction of Bitter Lesson)

(ML) Academia is also heavily biased against it due to mainly two reasons: - Its harder to publish, since if you learn Task X with innate Knowledge, its not as general, so reviewer can claims its just (feature) engineering - Which hurts acceptance, so people always try to frame their work as general as possible - Historical reasons due to the conflict the symbolic community (which rely heavily on innate knowledge)
by bojan | 2025-10-03 08:32:21+00:00
While I agree with your point, don't underestimate how different the pronunciation is between languages, especially if you have an English monolingual on the other side of the counter that is not used to ever hearing anything other than English.

Especially the word "croissant" is tricky. Chances are they they only got "koffie" in your example sentence and had no idea what came before it.
by darkwater | 2025-10-03 08:34:48+00:00
Yes Catalans haver no problem with the "x" :) but it's just with the name that is mispronounced due to the Castillan overlap. I think that "caixa" with the "i" before the "x" makes it easier also for Castillans (although it's funny to hear them pronounce it). There is also the fact that both speakers have serious issues with words starting with "s" + consonant, so my theory is that "shavi" is also affected, while "chavi" is far easier.
by ta20240528 | 2025-10-03 08:35:30+00:00
Should everyone be required to use private banks to access e.g. foreign exchange?

The answer is yes: which is why banks are licensed and have ombudsmen. As are telcos.

No modern society is going to maintain a parallel government economy to serve the vanishingly small minority who live in fear of private companies.

Perhaps they should (IDK), but they won't.
by scott_w | 2025-10-03 08:35:30+00:00
From the UK and listening to people who don't have things like passports, it sounds like it'll make proving your right to work much easier for people, too. I've spoken to friends who have foreign relatives and they've also pointed out the problem the UK has which is:

1. To open a bank account you need an address

2. To rent somewhere (get an address), you need a bank account

3. See above

The same happens for children opening their first bank account. They get round this usually by having a parent vouch for you, however, this isn't much use to children with estranged/dead/abusive parents.

A system that is mandatory, acts as sufficient ID in all cases (proof of ID, proof of address, etc.) and is free for the recipient has the potential to make otherwise excluded peoples' lives easier.
by octo888 | 2025-10-03 08:36:05+00:00
> fully charged battery.

Yup. Look at train tickets in England. For now it's a convenience but you'll notice the law hasn't kept up with the push to have tickets on phones: the law still says you must produce on demand a ticket when requested. So if your battery runs out or your phone crashes or the app glitches or you've annoyed the "safety" department of Google/Apple... it's entirely your problem

A moody ticket inspector is under no obligation really to give you a few minutes to sort it out
by rnhmjoj | 2025-10-03 08:36:06+00:00
The voiceless alveolar lateral fricative[1] is another fun one. The only european languages that have it are Welsh and Icelandic where it's simply written "ll" and "hl". In some medieval texts it had a dedicated letter "Ỻ" or "ỻ".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_...
by justinclift | 2025-10-03 08:36:33+00:00
> I cannot bring myself to knowingly tie myself to a subscription-based piece of rentware.

Fusion360 isn't your only option. Several of the larger commercial CAD programs have various maker/hobbyist licences which are either free or low cost, and are suitable for exporting 3D models for 3D printing.

https://solidedge.siemens.com/en/solutions/users/hobbyists-a... → Free

https://www.solidworks.com/solution/solidworks-makers → US$48/yr presently
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-10-03 08:37:05+00:00
China is superlative in every way possible and many people don't really seem to get it.

It has several of the tallest mountains in the world—dozens over 7 km, and many of the eight-thousanders, given it borders the Himalayas and contains part of the Hindu Kush and most of the Tibetan Plateau. Given such immense mountains it also makes sense that there's a huge rain shadow behind them, and therefore China also contains both the Gobi and Taklimakan deserts.

It also has historic old cities that form the core of their modern glass and steel cities, with plenty of Chinese architecture to go around.

It also has 50 000 km of newly-built high speed rail with rolling stock that rips through all of those mountains and deserts at 350 km/h.
by energy123 | 2025-10-03 08:37:18+00:00
Case in point is actually the Netherlands, which is the country the GP is from. When the Nazis took over the Netherlands, they relied on the state's exceptional record keeping of individuals to hunt down the undesirables. Many people died that didn't have to die because the bad guys were enabled by the data systems built by the good guys.

> It will be a perfect dictatorship that can never be toppled, it can only get worse.

This might be the asymptotic steady state, due to the absorbing nature (in a Markov state sense) of future dictatorships. You only have to enter the state once, then you get stuck in that state. But democracy has to be ever vigilant, and it cannot fail even once. There is an unfortunate offense-defense asymmetry there.
by scott_w | 2025-10-03 08:37:24+00:00
> Every dystopian film or movie starts with some tyrannical society and a resistance movement. Now imagine you made resistance impossible, which is what perfect law enforcement will do.

I dunno, the Nazis did a fucking good job without Digital ID. They weren't overthrown by a resistance movement, they were crushed by the combined might of the Allied and Soviet armies.
by netdevphoenix | 2025-10-03 08:38:47+00:00
Is there any emphasis on critical thinking? As in being able to assess the pros and cons of a particular point of view? I noticed that you listed certain topics under the label "distractions". Do you believe those topics are not worth exploring critically in school? Regardless of your answer, why do you think the school avoids those subjects? Are they not linked to key history moments in the US and the world in general?

It also seems like the lessons are centrally planned, there doesn't seem to be any flexibility or adaption to students abilities which seems being antiquated unless you are only recruiting high achieving students or quietly kicking out low achievers.

I noticed that most if not all of the achievements you listed seem very STEMy or businessy. Is there any focus on the arts? Any support for artistic skills (ie. dancing, drama, vocal, instrumental, writing), social sciences or biological sciences? Do they learn work and communicate in a team and work through team challenges?

If the schools are so good why do you think they haven't allowed or sought any independent verification of the academic performance of the students at the school? It sounds like the scientific thing to do for a presumably sciencey oriented school.
by dns_snek | 2025-10-03 08:39:05+00:00
What's the point? If the encryption is weak enough to be broken by the average owner it's weak enough to be broken by anyone.

I think this is primarily a UX issue, encryption should be strong but users should be "forced" to create backups of their keys, with options to store the full key in a safe place themselves, or to distribute parts of their key to trusted people using Shamir's secret sharing.

In other words don't weaken encryption, allow users to weaken their key storage after informing them about the trade-offs, if they so desire.
by scott_w | 2025-10-03 08:39:12+00:00
> When the Nazis took over the Netherlands, they relied on the state's exceptional record keeping of individuals to hunt down the undesirables. Many people died that didn't have to die because the bad guys were enabled by the data systems built by the good guys.

In many cases, they looked at the census records; something that most western nations have today anyway.

Let's be real: if your government decides to slaughter an entire class of people in its own borders, there's nothing you as a citizen can do except flee and hope to get out without being caught (or sent back).
by agnishom | 2025-10-03 08:39:23+00:00
The main concern here is that it will create a narrow bridge (i.e, the digital ID system) between people and various services and opportunities which will make it an easy target for people who wish to wield power against someone.

Perhaps your digital ID is needed to open a bank account, get a phone number, sign up for insurance, etc. Now, suppose some fascist government comes into power. They could start cancelling the digital ID's of people or groups they do not like or are bigotted against. These people start losing access to critical infrastructure.

Now, this could already happen, even with imperfect paper IDs, of course. But by making everything digital, we are reducing societal resilience towards such kind of hostility.
by m000 | 2025-10-03 08:39:33+00:00
Isn't that an acknowledgement that the UX is essentially worse than a PC?

On a PC, are you inclined to show your mom how the terminal works or to install Xcode? You don't because these components are not forced onto you, or may not even be installed. They are out of sight until you ask for them.

OTOH on the iPhone, instead of starting with barebones functionality and allowing you to enable the parts that are relevant to you, building your own UX, they try to make you fully buy into the Apple ecosystem. This is essentially the result of the "batteries included" design philosophy of the iPhone (which is good!) when combined with Apple aggressive marketing policies.
by boryana-ux | 2025-10-03 08:39:56+00:00
SEEKING WORK in UX & UI | Europe | Remote

Hi, I’m Boryana — a Senior Freelance UX & Product Designer with 6+ years of experience helping global companies and startups craft intuitive, growth-driven digital products. I’m currently open for new projects (fractional or part-time).

My focus: user-centered design, conversion optimisation, and seamless product experiences — from idea to polished interface.

Let’s connect if you’re looking for a strategic design partner to push your product forward.

www.boryanachervilova.com
by sph | 2025-10-03 08:40:02+00:00
I love RSS. I literally just bought an app on itch.io, and to my surprise the devlog page for it, which lists all the new updates, supports RSS. I love when it happens. [1]

RSS didn't stick for me until:

1. I decided to quit most social media, so without RSS I would miss stuff I actually care about.

2. I unsubscribed to all news sites. RSS fatigue is a thing. Don't subscribe to sites that make money the more they post. I used to subscribe to Phoronix, the top HN frontpage articles, OSNews, LWN, etc.: bad idea, you don't want to wake up to 50 unread posts per day and get overwhelmed. Now I mostly follow personal blogs, and I have one new post per day to read. Much more manageable and higher signal-to-noise ratio.

3. https://fetchrss.com/ is genius for everything else that doesn't support RSS. It allows to turn any website into an RSS feed, and the free plan is generous enough for my needs.

I pay for Feedbin, and it's great.

---

1: I wish Firefox still showed an RSS feed icon when a page has one. These days I have to "view-source" and search for feed or atom or rss to tell.
by toolslive | 2025-10-03 08:40:31+00:00
nil novi sub soli.

- Intel faced a "cheating compiler" controversy when SPEC, the benchmark standard-setter, invalidated over 2,600 benchmark results for Intel Xeon processors in early 2024. ( https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/spec-invalid... )

- microsoft doing similar things (java benchmarks, C compiler benchmarks)

- and everybody cheating on AI benchmarks (https://www.thestack.technology/ai-benchmarking-scandal-were...)
by ffsm8 | 2025-10-03 08:40:59+00:00
I think you're missing context.

He's saying that he likely has an MCP connected to jira on the LLM he's developing with.

Hence the prompt will have already referenced the jira ticket, which will include the why - and if not, you've got a different issue. Now the LLM will only need something like "before committing, check the jira ticket we're working on and create a commit message ...

But whether you actually want that is a different story. You're off the opinion it's useful, I'd say it's rarely doing to be valuable, because requirements change, making this point in time rational mostly interesting in an academic sense, but not actually valuable for the development you're doing

It depends on a ton of factors, and at least I'd put very little stock in the validity of the commit message that it might as well not exist. (And this is from the perspective of human written ones, not AI)
by Mashimo | 2025-10-03 08:41:04+00:00
They can definitely track when and where you log in.

I can't say if there are backdoors in place for them to log in, and if that is (currently) legal.

Hospitals and libraries are government run, I would assume even if they had their own login, they could manage to snoop the data, no?

These are all online service. So it's not even a wallet argument. But we recently got digital drivers license, which can be used in the "real" world. That is one card less you need to carry around. Only in DK and only for DK citizens though.
by m000 | 2025-10-03 08:41:36+00:00
From a quick read in TFA and the comments, it is interesting that nobody questions iPhone as the right device for seniors. It is pretty much unquestionably presented as the only device option, even though it is pretty obvious that a lot of seniors are just not interested into its features.

I'm not sure where this can be pinpointed. Monoculture? Mimicry? FOMO?
by Jnr | 2025-10-03 08:42:00+00:00
They only recently (a year ago) released v1 of FreeCAD.

Blender 2.5 came out ~15 years ago, and as I was learning Blender in 2010/2011 it did not feel nearly as good as it does now. I believe that something similar could happen with FreeCAD, as I tried it some years ago and it was unusable in my opinion, but now I can work with it without any major issues. And the more attention they get, the better it will become.
by coolfox | 2025-10-03 08:43:07+00:00
but, to be fair, simply calling the sampler random is what gives people the impression like what OP is complaining about. which isn't entirely accurate, it's actually fairly bounded.

this plays back into my original comment, which you have to understand to know that the sampler, for all its "randomness" should only be seeing and picking from a variety of correct answers, i.e. the sample pool should only have all the acceptable answers to "randomly" pick from. so when there are bad or nonsensical answers that are different every time, it's not because the models are too random, it's because they're dumb and need more training. tweaking your architecture isn't going to fully prevent that.
by Muromec | 2025-10-03 08:44:11+00:00
If you start with the premise that the government is hostile by default, it logically follows they will get some capability they didn't have before or increase the one they had. You will have less chance to fall through the cracks and the friction you get from not having the convenient thing is a proof that the beast is at least partially crippled.

It's very often that government has a capability to retroactively assemble a very detailed information about a specific person, but doesn't have a capability to proactively screen the whole population and implement policy.

Illegal immigration is a good example of it -- when somebody is already sitting in a van it's possible to figure out whether they are a citizen or not and maybe even find pictures of watermelons on their phone. It's however impossible to selectively block phone numbers and bank accounts of all the people who are present in the country without government authorization.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-03 08:45:04+00:00
Sounds like skill, as opposed to talent.

Alignment is a good term, but it seems fairly simple: do we want to do something?

I had a wonderful English teacher, in 6th grade. He had us read The Hobbit, and other fantasy books, as opposed to the usual “classic” literature.

It made all the difference, and I’ve been a voracious reader, all my life. Other factors also came into play, but I credit Mr. Martin, for helping me to become interested in reading.

In seventh grade, I had Mrs. Broadbent, and she forced us to read “classic literature.” It was awful, after my sixth grade experience.

Wanting to do stuff has always been important to me. And encouraging people to want to do stuff is a vital aspect of training and managing.
by quitit | 2025-10-03 08:45:22+00:00
While the set up can be easier, I think there's a few self-inflicted problems at play here:

First: Giving a senior with aptitude or dexterity hindrances is already a mistake. Even if they are set up they're going to be having trouble with much harder to use apps such as banking, ticketing and government apps which seemingly delight themselves in publishing rubbish.

Second: iPhones have assistive access modes which preserve core phone functions while addressing accessibility impairment: https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/

Third: The apple stores are help centres. Not only do they provide free guided setup (and help with forgotten passwords), but they also provide free training on how to use different functions of the phone, both in person or online.

Fourth: At any age we already know that some people use and understand technology better than others. (It's interesting to watch different people set up touch-id, some will resist reading any instructions provided on the screen over their own intuition for how the set up should work.) Grouping a room of seniors together to set up a phone is like getting kids from school years 1 through 10 together and expecting them all to perform equally.

Finally: Like giving a car to a teenager, one must take some responsibility in dumping such a product on a person who might not be able to handle it. Seniors are still autonomous and will look for help if you're not providing it - scammers enjoy "helping" seniors part with their money this way.
by buildfocus | 2025-10-03 08:45:28+00:00
For Spain at least, most banks have foreigner accounts you can open with a passport, and convert into a normal account once you have local id later. It's a mildly unusual setup (and a bit confusing when you're new) but it's pretty widely available and it's not a significant blocker. There's plenty of other challenges and structural disadvantages as an immigrant, but this one at least isn't too bad.

If anything, there's really a big advantage to it for the banks - most locals already have banking, immigrants are the one market where you can get new customers without having to push them past the effort/laziness of switching from their existing setup.
by archdang | 2025-10-03 08:45:58+00:00
We see here an example of a useless idiot.

Point 1, nonsense: Allies fed Germans during WW2, the US fed Iraqis and Afghans during their wars and occupations. Point 2, nonsense: The Rafah crossing has been intermittently open, and Egypt has allowed aid in coordination with the UN. Israel has bombed the Rafah crossing multiple times since October 7th. Point 3, whataboutism. Sudan and Yemen are in the news in my circles weekly and there's care for all these horrible events.