MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Mystery-Machine | 2025-10-18 15:51:09+00:00
Ruby is beautiful.

It's weird, and different and therefore a bit repulsive (at least to me it was) at first. But, once you learn it, it's so easy to read it and to understand what's going on.*

* Side-note: Sometimes variables or methods look the same as parenthesis () are optional. So, yes, there's more things that can look like magic or be interpreted in multiple ways, but more times than not, it helps to understand the code faster, because `clients` and `clients()` (variable or method) doesn't matter if all it does is "get clients" and you just need to assume what's stored/returned from that expression. Also "get clients" can be easily memoized in the method implementation so it gets as close as possible to being an actual variable.
by constantcrying | 2025-10-18 15:51:26+00:00
They are built on ancient technology and need an enormous array of hacks to emulate basic features, which are trivial to do in any modern GUI.

User experience is inconsistent with features varying wildly between terminals, creating a frustrating user experience. It is also making customization difficult. E.g. in a TUI IDE you can not have font settings. Short cuts are also terminal dependent, an IDE can only use those shortcuts the terminal isn't using itself.

Something as basic as color is extremely hard to do right on a terminal. Where in a normal GUI you can give any element a simple RGB color, you can not replicate that across TUIs. The same goes for text styling, the terminal decides what an italic font it wants to use and the IDE can not modify this.

They are also very limited in graphical ability. Many features users expect in a GUI can not be replicated or can only be replicated poorly. E.g. modern data science IDEs feature inline graphics, such as plots. This is (almost) not replicable on a Terminal. If you are using profiler you might want to plot, preferably with live data. Why arbitrarily limit what an IDE can do to some character grid?

The terminal is just a very poor graphical abstraction. It arbitrarily limits what an IDE can do. Can you tell me why anybody would seriously try to use a terminal as an IDE? Terminals UIs are more complex, because they need to handle the bizarre underlying terminal, they are often less responsive, since they rely on the terminal to be responsive. There might be some very marginal improvement in resource usage, do you think that is even relevant compared to the much increased dev experience of a normal GUI?

There absolutely is no real advantage of TUIs. And generally I have found people obsessing over them to be mostly less tech literate and wanting to "show off" how cool their computer skills are. All serious developers I have ever known used graphical dev tools.
by robotresearcher | 2025-10-18 15:51:39+00:00
When did I say that the chess program was different to a toaster? I don’t believe it is, so it’s not a thing I’m likely to say.

I don’t think the word ‘understand’ has a meaning that can apply in these situations. I’m not saying the toaster or the chess program understands anything, except in the limited sense that some people might describe them that way, and some won’t. In both cases that concept is entirely in the head of the describer and not in the operation of the device.

I think the claimed inconsistency is in views you ascribe to me, and not those I hold. ‘Understand’ is a category error with respect to these devices. They neither do or don’t. Understanding is something an observer attributes for their own reasons and entails nothing for the subject.
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-18 15:51:51+00:00
It is an issue of national sovereignty because the UK is trying to force foreign civilians to enforce their laws outside of their jurisdiction for free, by way of bullying, threats, and illegal fines.

What the UK does within their own borders is their business. They don't have any right to force foreign entities to censor themselves or tl block UK citizens, as if that's even a technically feasible request.

The UK's free speech situation is bad, yes, but that's not the problem we're talking about here. The matter at hand is the UK trying to censor free speech by foreign citizens outside the UK and is using illegal threats to do so.
by dboreham | 2025-10-18 15:52:13+00:00
Sad news. Perhaps the last connection to OG physics. I was fortunate to meet Dr Yang a few times. Surreal to hear him describe working for Fermi and Oppenheimer and his reaction on hearing about the Hiroshima detonation.

Some of his work: http://home.ustc.edu.cn/~lxsphys/2021-3-18/The%20conceptual%...

And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang%E2%80%93Mills_theory
by layer8 | 2025-10-18 15:53:02+00:00
It’s a good question to what complexity (volume) the approach scales, but dialog boxes can get you quite far, and menus are fundamentally “just” a tree like keyboard shortcuts are.

Emacs has Elisp commands first, then keyboard shortcuts for them, then maybe (not as a rule) menu items, and rarely dialog boxes. The Turbo Vision approach, from its design philosophy, has menus and dialogs first, then keyboard shortcuts for them.

One approach isn’t strictly better than the other, nor are they mutually exclusive. Ideally you’d always have both. My disagreement is with the “I think Emacs still does all of this” above. Emacs is substantially different in its emphasis, presentation, and its use of dialogs.
by 9029 | 2025-10-18 15:54:29+00:00
Update on power draw for anyone interested: measured with a cheap AC power meter, I get 2.8-4.2W idle with occasional jump to up to 8W on my M720q with i5-8400T, 16GB ram and a single nvme drive. This is on Debian 13 with ASPM enabled for everything and a few containers running (home assistant, esphome, bookstack, tailscale). According to powertop stats on C-states, it's mostly in package C9 and core C10.
by simonw | 2025-10-18 15:54:32+00:00
What would "unbiased" even mean for a blog like mine?

I don't particularly try to be unbiased because I don't think that's an achievable goal. What I aim for instead is honesty and truthfulness. I try very hard not to put false information out into the world, and when I do that I work hard to retract it - here's a recent example: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/gemini-25-computer-use-...

I'm also take care to disclose things that could potentially influence my coverage, even if I don't personally think they influenced what I wrote.

What matters most to me is that I have an audience who finds me credible and trusts me not to mislead them, either accidentally or on purpose.

That's why I'm defensive against accusations of being a paid shill, which crop up on almost a weekly basis at this point.
by gls2ro | 2025-10-18 15:55:14+00:00
Let me ask you a different question:

Would they be where they are today if there weren't been built at that moment with Ruby?

Both these questions are hard to answer without connecting the dots, looking backward.

Github was started in 2007, Shopify in 2006, Gitlab in 2011, Whop in 2021

It takes a long time approximately for a company to get out of the medium zone and go really big. So the only answer for this is we don't really know.

For any programming language you can find similar stories.

I tried to answer this question 6 years ago by analysing company data from YCombinator and TechStars: https://github.com/lucianghinda/programming-languages-in-sta...

Here is some data I found back then in 2019:

- Ruby companies raised 13 Billion dollars

- Python companies raised 11 billion dollars

- Java companies raised 1.5 billion dollars

- PHP companies raised 1.4 billion dollars

- Go companies raised 1.3 billion dollars

- Node.js companies raised 800 million dollars

Of course this data is 6 years old and it was based on the initial programming language and also it is about funding amount and not revenue.

I did not had time these days to update the data there.
by more_corn | 2025-10-18 15:55:24+00:00
I can’t believe we’re talking about agents. 1) agents are autonomous actors 2) llms are terrible at achieving consistent outcomes based on rules 3) with current technology AI agents will produce inconsistent and unreliable results.

Therefore turning autonomous actors based on LLMs loose is a recipe for disaster.

It won’t take a decade. That’s an arbitrary statement based on a big unknown. It will take an entirely new technology. One we haven’t invented yet, one I can’t even imagine. One that is consistently accurate and reliable in ways NO EXISTING AI PRODUCT HAS EVER BEEN.
by hansmayer | 2025-10-18 15:55:25+00:00
Well, if we do, those would be very different dictionaries indeed. Do you not know "forecast" is a synonym to "prediction" ? I was going to qualify this with a "practically", but then it turns out according to Mirriam-Webster, prediction is literally a synonym of "forecast". So explain again, what exactly is your "dictionary definition" for "prediction" again? Unless it's guessing, but then, anyone can then make "predictions" like that.

(If we stick to Mirriam-Webster again, here is what I found : to calculate or predict (some future event or condition) usually as a result of study and analysis of available pertinent data - i.e. - basically what I already told you a "prediction" is).
by theptip | 2025-10-18 15:55:31+00:00
Fully autonomous agents are marketing fluff right now, but there is like $10T of TAM from promoting most knowledge workers to a manager and automating the boring 80% of their work, and this doesn’t require this full autonomy.

Karpathy’s definition of “agent” here is really AGI (probably somewhere between expert and virtuoso AGI https://arxiv.org/html/2311.02462v2). In my taxonomy you can have non-AGI short-task-timeframe agents. Eg in the METR evals, I think it’s meaningful to talk about agent tasks if you set the thing loose for 4-8h human-time tasks.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-10-18 15:56:03+00:00
This of course depend completely on how you define "vibe" coding.

Assisted coding has been incredibly useful. I have been using Claude Code daily.

But if you let it take over completely without review and let it write whole features... which I take to be the meaning of "vibe" in some people's definitions... you're in for a world of long-term pain.
by marshfram | 2025-10-18 15:56:09+00:00
There are no world models in biology. Idea Johnson-Laird is being promoted in AI as a solution is sado-masochistic. The brain doesn't compress info about our world, it ecologically relates to it. It doesn't compress, it never has to. How these folk science ideas of the brain entered engineering from cog-sci mistaken complexes and how they remain in power is pretty suspect.
by floxy | 2025-10-18 15:56:22+00:00
https://coltura.org/electric-car-battery-life/

I have been married for more than 20 year, have 4 children (3 teen-aged drivers), and two electric vehicles. I paid less than $25,000 out-the-door (including sales tax, etc.) for my brand new 2025 SV+ Nissan Leaf. Where I live in Washington state, gas is >$4/gal and electricity is less than $0.08/kWh. I get better than 4 miles/kWh. After 250,000 miles, a vehicle averaging 40 miles/gallon will have spent $25,000 in gasoline (at $4/gal). With my electric rates, electric "fuel" costs for the same 250,000 miles will be $5,000. So a $20,000 difference in fuel costs.

Looks like it is ~$8k for a 62 kWh Nissan Leaf battery:

https://vivnevs.com/products/62kwh-nissan-leaf-battery-pack-...

Every EV sold in the U.S. gets a federally mandated transferable battery warranty of 8 years/100,000 miles. Buying new or very lightly used and getting rid of it before the warranty expires is an option for those with infant-mortality battery anxiety. We are not in the early adopter phase with EVs anymore, so it is less of risky-new-thing-that-doesn't-pan-out. It is OK to be a late adopter. But it is a much nicer of an experience. And no oil-changes or going to the gas station (I wouldn't recommend getting an EV if you can't charge overnight at home). Have you ever test driven an EV? EVs pretty much sell themselves, once you get behind the wheel.
by ufmace | 2025-10-18 15:56:25+00:00
I did say that those aspects of Ruby would start to be painful at that scale, not that it was totally unusable. Clearly it's usable, and there's certainly less scale-able things than Ruby on Rails out there serving big production traffic today. But I wouldn't recommend switching an app that big in some other language over to Ruby, and at least as many companies have moved off of Rails monoliths when they outgrew them, like AirBnB for example.
by constantcrying | 2025-10-18 15:56:39+00:00
Neovim instantly becomes a superior piece of software if you use any of the GUI frontends. If you use neovim inside a terminal you are just straight up using an inferior product, with less features and more problems. The terminal version is most likely slower as well as you now also have the entire legacy terminal overhead.

>I think what TUIs get right is that they are optimized for use by the keyboard.

Neovim is just as much a GUI as a TUI. You can even use it as a backend for VSCode. Nothing about the keyboard controls have anything to do with this.
by BirAdam | 2025-10-18 15:56:59+00:00
Nearly half of the country views the other almost half as fascist. The half viewed as fascist views the other as socialist/communist. The two have lost the ability to effectively communicate with one another. The spending on the military is bankrupting the country, and within a decade debt service will consume 100% of tax revenues. The monetary expansion is causing inflation, and lowering interest rates will worsen this. At the same time, idiotic trade policy levying tariffs is making things even more expensive. Rising political tension with a simultaneous diminution in economic conditions is the breeding ground for extremism. We already see the two halves struggling to get anything done in congress, so amelioration of these conditions is unlikely. How long does the most well armed society in history tolerate this?

Any country can swiftly become a failed a state when ruled by someone idiotic enough. The question for the USA is whether or not it can survive the current pressures it faces. There a social, political, economic, and geopolitical pressures on the country at the same time. Thinking that the USA could become a failed state isn’t far fetched at all.

“Collapse happens slowly at first, and then all at once”
by russdill | 2025-10-18 15:57:29+00:00
There are people that come to it from the direction of AI because they think they know something about consciousness. That's certainly putting the conclusion first.

But there are also physicists who come at the problem from the direction of physics. We know the standard model is incomplete, but we also know it covers everyone we experience with exquisite precision. Unless there is a black hole or temperatures on par with the big bang going on within our brain, the standard model will tell you what you need to know
by k310 | 2025-10-18 15:57:39+00:00
Just some anecdotes.

1. When a teacher (no doubt others as well) says "It doesn't work," that means "It doesn't work the way I want it to." and that's perfectly valid. People have a job to do, and twisting the job to fit the software's allowances, doesn't always work, though countless people changed their workflow to meet whatever "Office" allowed, in particular using a spreadsheet as a database.

2. There is a huge difference between efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency, for the sake of this argument, is getting things done right and on time, but your work may not fly (been there, done that) so effectiveness is coming up with something and being able to "sell" it, usually internally.

I recommend learning "sales 101" in terms of the basic psychology of selling and understanding needs and addressing them (even when you have to decode an unclear needs statement). I learned a lot transitioning from engineer to "sales engineer", and read a lot, so I can't recommend a short list right now.

Basics.

A. Go to where your customer is.

B. It's "Yes, AND", not "Yes, BUT"
by CamperBob2 | 2025-10-18 15:58:13+00:00
LLMs clearly think. They don't have a sense of object permanence, at least not yet, but they absolutely, indisputably use pretrained information to learn and reason about the transient context they're working with at the moment.

Otherwise they couldn't solve math problems that aren't simple rephrasings of problems they were trained on, and they obviously can do that. If you give a multi-step undergraduate level math problem to the human operator of a Chinese room, he won't get very far, while an LLM can.

So that leads to the question: given that they were trained on nothing but language, and given that they can reason to some extent, where did that ability come from if it didn't emerge from latent structure in the training material itself? Language plus processing is sufficient to produce genuine intelligence, or at least something indistinguishable from it. I don't know about you, but I didn't see that coming.
by kijin | 2025-10-18 15:58:38+00:00
Some of these things happen because people try to come up with a single clever query that does everything at once and returns a perfect spreadsheet.

Translating status codes into English or some other natural language? That's better done in the application, not the database. Maybe even leave it to the frontend if you have one. As a rule of thumb, any transformation that does not affect which rows are returned can be applied in another layer after those rows have been returned. Just because you know SQL doesn't mean you have to do everything in SQL.

Deeply nested subqueries? You might want to split that up into simpler queries. There's nothing shameful about throwing three stones to kill three birds, as long as you don't fall into the 1+N pattern. Whoever has to maintain your code will thank you for not trying to be too clever.

Also, a series of simple queries often run faster than a single large query, because there's a limit to how well the query planner can optimize an excessively complicated statement. With proper use of transactions, you shouldn't have to worry about the data changing under your feet as you make these queries.
by Mystery-Machine | 2025-10-18 15:58:55+00:00
This sounds like a really innovative idea. I haven't seen a dedicated place for "collection of useful procs", but one emerging pattern is to use `app/services` and then have a bunch of single-responsibility service classes that each have call or perform method and then you use the service when you need some shared functionality. It's like a proc, but instead it's a class with `#call` method.
by vacuity | 2025-10-18 15:58:56+00:00
Although this is somewhat true, I think the bigger issue is expecting Linux to support all these use cases. Even if Linus accepted all use cases, it's a different story to maintain a kernel/OS that supports them all. The story from an engineering standpoint is just too unwieldy. A general-purpose OS can only go so far to optimize countless special-purpose uses.
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-18 15:59:09+00:00
I don't know if you know this, but when you put a website online there isn't a big switch that says "TURN ON TO SERVE TO UK"

When a resource exists on the internet, it is available to everyone. That's how the internet works. There is no mechanism by which to exclude any given country. You can try to geolocate the IP for every individual visitor, but that's a ridiculous burden for website operators and it also doesn't even work.

Ofcom is trying to censor the entire global internet. If they want to censor the UK internet, they have much, much better tools.

They're trying to enforce extrajudicial law by way of threats and bullying instead of actually taking proactive steps to "protect" UK citizens from dangerous memes.

Ofcom has the right to censor the internet within the UK. They do not have the right to an opinion about what private entities do in other countries.
by shermantanktop | 2025-10-18 15:59:22+00:00
I struggle to understand what the author actually wants, aside from nostalgia about a specific look and feel that he imprinted on. And perhaps the simplicity of having few features.

I would have appreciated a breakdown of what specific individual features those crummy old ides are offering.

I suspect the one the author wants most is a time machine to go be 12yo again, but software can’t do that. Yet.
by Lichtso | 2025-10-18 16:00:00+00:00
> "a³-bcd ≤ 0" formula

These are the coefficients of the implicit curve, finding them can be done once upfront.

For integral quadratic bezier curves that is trivial as they are constant, see: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/fsXcDj

For rational cubic bezier curves it is more involved, see: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ttVfzh

And for the full complexity of dealing with self intersecting loops and cusps see: https://github.com/Lichtso/contrast_renderer/blob/main/src/f...

> The winding number logic is usually super involved, especially when multiple sub-shapes start overlap and subtracting each other. Is this covered or orthogonal to what you are talking about?

Orthogonal: The implicit curve only tells you if you are inside or outside (the sign of the SDF), so that is technically sufficient, but usually you want more things: Some kind of anti-aliasing, composite shapes of more than one bezier curve and boolean operators for masking / clipping. Using the stencil buffer for counting the winding number allows to do all of that very easily without tessellation or decomposition at path intersections.

> Can you elaborate on it or provide resources?

If you are interested in the theory behind implicit curve rendering and how to handle the edge cases of cubic bezier curves checkout these papers:

Loop, Charles, and Jim Blinn. "Resolution independent curve rendering using programmable graphics hardware." https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

BARROWCLOUGH, Oliver JD. "A basis for the implicit representation of planar rational cubic Bézier curves." https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.08669
by rbanffy | 2025-10-18 16:00:00+00:00
VB was the GUI equivalent of Dataflex - you could design the screen and it would automagically create the data structures under it. I also remember, from the same period, Mantis (from Cincom Systems) that did the same for 3270 terminals and IBM mainframes.

I often say Deteflex is Ruby on Rails for the VT100.
by jll29 | 2025-10-18 16:00:15+00:00
Yes, me too, I was expecting either Smalltalk or LISP machine GUIs.

Having said that, some old TUIs were clearer and faster even on weaker hardware. This should be a lesson for us today. Color transitions and animated icons flying over the desktop are NOT what I need, but speed, clarity, and discoverability of more rarely used functionality are vital.
by alganet | 2025-10-18 16:00:24+00:00
I interpret the post as the author trying to convey a message of self-worth.

From where I am, I can't possibly know if that's a genuine message with valuable advice, or some self-justification he's making about himself, or some trick (of which there are many related to messages of self-worth).

He acknowledge hints of these possibilities by saying that attention provides "a message to ourselves and others". That is a fascinating brain leak right there.

In a more real assessment of reality, the truth is that I don't have much control over my attention. Might as well just let it flow and see what I can do with whatever comes from the interaction, no worries.

Does that imply the risk of falling into an attention trap? Definitely. Anyone that says he is not subject to that risk is lying.
by 6r17 | 2025-10-18 16:00:49+00:00
Yes I do - for example ; any American that wishes to make a company in Europe will need to have a European voucher which is the owner of the service - so the money doesn't flow out of the country trough some UberMornonization app with $millions to ultimately do colonization.

There is 0 reason for us to let american suck away important infrastructure tools, benefits that goes with it, or even benefit from tax exemption trough the best company framework there can possibly exist.

I still haven't got an answer here - why is TikTok US owned ?