MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by germandiago | 2025-10-05 16:16:39+00:00
This is the trade-off with macros and annotation/code-generation systems.

I tend to do obvious things whwn I use this kind of tools. In fact, I try to avoid macros.

Even if configurability is not important, I favor sinplification over reuse. In case I need reuse, I go for higher order functions if I can. Macro is the last bullet.

In some circumstances like Json or serialization maybe they can be slightly abused to mark fields and such. But whole code generation can take it so far and magic that it is not worth in many circumstances IMHO, thiugh every tool has its use cases, even macros and annotations.
by zakelfassi | 2025-10-05 16:16:45+00:00
1/ So far, you've made five comments about this throughout the thread. 2/ I've added an update at the top; pasting it here as well:

"My high school teacher in 2004 accused me of plagiarizing from Wikipedia because my research paper looked "too polished" for something typed on a keyboard instead of handwritten. Twenty years later, HN commenters see clean prose and assume LLM slop. Same discomfort, different decade, identical pattern: people resist leverage they haven't internalized yet.

I use AI tools the way I used spell-check, grammar tools, and search engines before them—as cognitive leverage, not cognitive replacement. The ideas are mine. The arguments are mine. The cultural references, personal stories, and synthesis across domains—all mine. If the output reads coherently, maybe that says more about expectations than about authenticity.

You can call it slop. Or you can engage with the ideas. One takes effort. The other takes a glance at a header image and a decision that polish equals automation. Your choice reveals more about your relationship to technology than mine."
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-05 16:17:14+00:00
Another thing is this effect: https://cognitivewonderland.substack.com/p/meta-knowledge-an...

People will claim a lot of things but if there is no external "ground truth" to test against, people tend to overclaim. They will tell you they can imagine a penny or the apple logo or whatever it is, but then fail these objective tests.

If you can pass or fail the aphantasia test simply by saying words that are up to introspection, it won't be a useful test. Most people under most circumstances simply say what their concept of a normal person is supposed to say.
by finaard | 2025-10-05 16:17:15+00:00
The two big problems are shitty mail clients, and people not knowing how to quote (which gets enabled by the shitty mail clients).

If someone gets CC'd later than typically because the discussion got to a point where the input is needed for the current question - and in a mail thread with proper quoting surprisingly often the quoted email is sufficient context for the added guy to jump in.

What makes a big mess out of things is the nested list of fully quoted emails with top answers at the bottom I now have to go through when getting added to figure out what the fuck they want from me.
by troupo | 2025-10-05 16:17:33+00:00
> That said, I wouldn't call this approach "imperative but functional". I would rather say functional core and thin imperative/procedural outer layer.

I call such languages "pragmatic programming languages" :) They don't care about theoretical pureness, they want to get stuff done. And often that stuff is thing like "stick logging into the middle of a function" or "fire off an event to an external system".
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-10-05 16:17:56+00:00
> Anyway, the ever-ongoing enshittification in the air-travel space is entirely to blame on the consumers -- the people could stop this nonsense at any time, but apparently they're fine with it, so...

How? I suppose the answer is to stop flying, I basically don't fly already, so that'd be fine with me but, if you are a flyer, in Canada we have Air Canada and Westjet if you're flying domestic. I suppose we could stop buying economy seats, but "premium" doubles the price.
by yieldcrv | 2025-10-05 16:19:07+00:00
> Do I have a point or is this just victim blaming?

A little bit of column A, a little bit of column B

so the nihilism is real and warranted, if they don't inherit at least a downpayment for a house from you while you are still alive, the jobs available - even for highly pedigreed people - don't provide the income for the downpayment, for the most part. they would need arbitrage with high paying work in a very low cost of living place, for a long time, or the same but coupled with a socioeconomic equal who also doesn't want any gaps in their high income employment.

many new-money parents want their children to prove... something... related to income and autonomy, which puts inheritance while living into "entitled handout" territory, instead of practical. while due to lifespan, any inheritance will only reach the child when the child is 60+ years old, where its impact to the utility and direction of their life is nullified, and it's just bean counting for the mere concept of "keeping money in the family" but doesn't give anyone a leg up in social status, partner selection, even where you own children's children go to school.

(note: if you actually are not confident in your retirement income and end of life care costs, then you are not parent this applies to. for parents sitting on big wins in real estate and other capital, it does.)

but the financial reality doesn't really support this slower moving culture. the share of people in the US that are both homeowners and married by age 30 has fallen to nearly single digits percents. Aside from marriage being less attractive too, many delay everything related due to being preoccupied with meager work and financial instability.

now that being said, the thing you are more familiar with, hustle, does still work. pumping earnings into an investment property somewhere less expensive does still work, only suboptimal because they would still need to be paying rent in the higher cost of living area. what's different is that burnout is just not valued any more. hustle culture itself is not valued, its nothing to brag about and a silent path one might pursue. while experiences are valued. entire generations of people watched gen-x and boomers delay gratification and saw their bodies fail by the time they reached the finish line. its seen as a cautionary tale, not discipline.

so yes, lots of people overcorrect into a defeatist attitude, but the incentives support it. normal jobs won't get them anywhere, high paying jobs also won't get them anywhere, the training for high paying jobs doesn't guarantee a high paying job either.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-10-05 16:19:21+00:00
>Young people, for instance, increasingly say that political violence may be justified

This is gonna get downvoted for sure because HNs bias, but based on current events, it's only the left that does that.

Right-wingers may say hurtful words but don't seem too keen on murdering opponents for political reasons or disagreements. At least not yet.
by pron | 2025-10-05 16:19:31+00:00
I would first spend a good amount of time figuring out if you can't just keep it in Java, because it's not just the rewrite in C++ that's expensive, but a low-level language would make maintenance and evolution costlier forever.

If memory footprint is the issue, I would recommend watching this: https://youtu.be/mLNFVNXbw7I. A lot of people misunderstand memory consumption, and even in Java there are many options to try. There could definitely still be situations where a low-level language is the only choice, but it's not a decision to be taken lightly.
by blincoln | 2025-10-05 16:19:46+00:00
I'm also in Washington, and delivery times are inconsistent. Sometimes it's 1-2 days. Sometimes it's 3-5. There's no way to tell in advance which it will be.

I haven't ended up with any fraudulent items, but I have had packages "delivered" and "signed for" using my name that never arrived, with the telltale being that my packages go to a business address, and someone else signs for them.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-10-05 16:19:51+00:00
It would obviously be more work to bring home a mammoth than something smaller like a deer, but I don't think that that suggests anything much different about the complexity of society. At the end of the day it's just a bunch of hunters bringing home the bacon, perhaps fetching the women to help if there was a lot to bring back.

I'm reminded of the "Alone" TV series where one contestant shot an 800lb Ox with a bow and arrow and single-handedly butchered it and carried it back 2 miles to his camp (requiring about a dozen trips).
by kstrauser | 2025-10-05 16:19:56+00:00
The person in front of me slammed her seat back in a recent flight and it made me yelp in pain. I’m tall and my knees were nearly pressed against the seat before she pounced. I started bouncing my knees to try to get comfortable. The person’s kid turned and said “you’re shaking my mom’s seat.” “Yes. It’s mashing my legs.” “Could you stop?” “No. Tell her to straighten up.” “Oh.” She did, and I stopped.

I do get that she just wanted to relax a little. She wasn’t trying to be mean. But wow, how the awful design of that plane made her reasonable desire to rest in her seat physically painful for me.
by tethys | 2025-10-05 16:20:55+00:00
In addition, I can wholeheartedly recommend this video tutorial that guided me through setting up Coolify for the first time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taJlPG82Ucw

Been running this setup for about a year now, and it's the first time I am actually self-hosting and feeling fairly confident about it.
by oreally | 2025-10-05 16:21:04+00:00
it's not really lottery, that system has to involve growing a 'skill' such that one could possibly get 'good' and 'rewarded' at it, and that 'skill' doesn't need human approval, which will make it a true alternative to getting jobs. bonus points if one can scale it up.

Take daytrading for example, of the 99% who fail are they all gamblers or are they just tolerating enough failures until they get a positive expectancy?

> however, in actuality gambling systems are almost all designed to just extract money from people. Not function as a wealth redistribution system.

Yea what I'm talking about isn't exactly a gambling system which will try to screw you over the instant you get some momentum of out a positive expectancy system.
by biomcgary | 2025-10-05 16:22:24+00:00
I think you are getting at the need for tiered layers of abstraction and constraint. Simultaneously considering all possible ways to solve a problem doesn't work for humans or the LLMs derived from our use of language. The repeated use of Domain Specific Languages (DSL) in the context of a general purpose programming language gets at this same need to constrain solution spaces within a reasonable boundary.

Once we have quantum LLMs, the need for intermediate abstraction layers might change, but that's very [insert magic here].
by raincole | 2025-10-05 16:22:40+00:00
Reading books is good for your brain. Even just fiction [0].

But I do think people often approach this issue wrong. Especially, as demonstrated by the OP article:

> “Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet,” Horowitch wrote.

It's a wrong question to ask why people can't focus on a sonnet.

The real question is: why do the students who are not interested in literature choose to major English? What societal and economical incentives drove them to do that?

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4733342/
by tpmoney | 2025-10-05 16:22:40+00:00
> People hate liquid glass, at least the majority.

The reality is, people hate change period. The flat UI that everyone is now pining for was pretty roundly hated when it debuted too. And the reaction to the original OS X interfaces with its "lickable" buttons was also pretty full of hate and anger. And in every one of those cases, some of the complaints were valid, and Apple in some of those cases walked the changes back or adjusted them. But a large UI change also just comes with a lot of hate in general because everything is different.

There are plenty of parts about the new liquid glass UIs that are fine. They may not be your preferred aesthetic choice, but the flat UI or the heavy skeumorphic UI of days of old wasn't everyone's preferred aesthetic choice either. Personally I've found myself recently looking for KDE themes that bring back late 90's platinum/beOS/Next style "drawn 3D" UIs (which is a terrible term for it, but I don't have a better word at hand for what I'm thinking of). Liquid Glass will be refined, improved and sanded down into something people are fine with and in 10 more years when Apple releases a new UI we'll have this same discussion again.
by atoav | 2025-10-05 16:23:56+00:00
Mailcow is pretty good actually. Setup on a virtual hetzner server took me half an hour, as it is a pretty simple docker container. What took a little longer was migrating my mails over, and setting all the needed DNS records (SPF and the likes).

I had a small blacklisting issue in the beginning that could be resolved within 24 hours, since then it works flawlessly.
by contingencies | 2025-10-05 16:24:04+00:00
Theoretically, yes. However, in practice, no. One of the great wins of packetization is that your infrastructure becomes generic in the sense that it is application-independent, allowing all subsequent improvements in eg. compression protocols to be applied retroactively. Therefore, if you would apply for example a variable bit rate, modern CODEC to the voice streams it's likely you would fit substantially more than a naïve set of voice channels on the raw PRI. The main costs are not in overhead, but enhanced session setup and round-trip latency and increased processing overheads at the edges. However, modern electronics offer embedded solutions making this ~free and a few ms are tolerable. IIRC voice is fine at <200ms latency, more or less, though less is obviously better.

The philosophical battle was centralist vs decentralised, for-purpose vs generic infrastructure, single-mode vs. multi-mode network applications, circuit-switched guaranteed QoS vs. best-effort packets, waterfall vs. iterative development and investment. Packets won for general purpose networking, because the nature of physics and bureaucracy meant the cost and time savings for operators and users were substantial.
by lunar-whitey | 2025-10-05 16:24:59+00:00
There is also the matter that the American political leadership managed to maintain some level of economic prosperity for the white working class in the intervening decades. Now that is collapsing, and the old narratives have returned.

The white working class and professional managerial class are in fact largely aligned in their zero sum assessments of the current situation. They differ principally on the nature of the solutions. No one on the left has the courage to acknowledge this, much less attack it.
by ednite | 2025-10-05 16:25:03+00:00
Nicely said. Do you mind if I quote you in a future piece? You are right. My perfectionism held me back at first. AI gave me a quick way “in,” which turned out to be helpful in its own way because it gave me the push i needed. It gave me confidence not to stress over grammar or sentence structure, little things that used to slow me down, but I always make sure its output, reflects my own thoughts.

That’s really the point of this piece: whatever you get from AI, make sure it aligns with your own thinking instead of just surrendering to it. I came to write this piece because I’ve noticed I question it less than I did in the beginning, and that’s where I have to be careful.

Thank you for your comment.
by trimethylpurine | 2025-10-05 16:25:24+00:00
>"The United States was founded by people defying unjust tax laws."

It is not the duty of every American to establish their own tax laws and form their own confederacy of themselves and do whatever they feel like. You're comparing the establishment of a government to the duty of a citizen. I think you can see how that makes no sense, right?

MLK was a non-violent pacifist, and his march was legal. Overly restrictive permitting laws violate the first amendment and he made that clear by exercising his civil liberties, lawfully, in the face of disagreement and unlawful arrest.

Gandhi was arrested by an opposition government. He broke none of his nation's laws.

Mandela fought a war. He participated in revolution. Are we all supposed to lead revolutions? Every week a new AR-15 carrying psychopath should shoot people up that he disagrees with? - Obviously not.

Disagreeing peacefully with unjust laws is a protected right. But violence and lawlessness is absolutely not a duty. It's not even advisable.

And promoting it as such is completely senseless in a country where peaceful discourse is a protected right. You already won! You have a peaceful way to make a difference! Why would you break laws to make a statement when you can already make a statement without risking a prison sentence?

None of the people you've listed had that option.

I'm very much horrified that a clearly educated person could arrive at such a misguided and dangerous conclusion.
by tim333 | 2025-10-05 16:26:42+00:00
My guess:

Altman figures AI will be a big deal and constrained by avaiable compute.

If he locks in all the available compute and related finance before the competition then he's locked in as the #1 AI company.

I'm not sure 20x or 5x or 40x matters, nor revenue expectations, so much as being ahead of the competition.
by smoe | 2025-10-05 16:27:17+00:00
I’d argue that those kinds of automated tools are much more important much earlier in a project than they used to be.

Personally, I can deal with quite a lot of jank and a lack of tests or other quality control tools in the early stages, but LLMs get lost so quickly. It’s like onboarding someone new to the codebase every hour or so.

You want to put them into a feedback loop with something or someone that isn’t you.
by Towaway69 | 2025-10-05 16:27:42+00:00
I’m kind of seeing a visual approach to programming as a programming language agnostic way of coding.

For that, I a big fan of flow based programming as the agnostic part. For the implementation, I’m thinking of Node-Red which is a visual implementation of flow based programming.

To become programming language agnostic, I’ve started on the Erlang-Red project which takes the frontend of Node Red and bolts it onto an Erlang backend.

Eventually the visual flow code will be programming languages independent.
by orionsbelt | 2025-10-05 16:27:45+00:00
I don’t know what Steve was thinking, but the desire to try alternatives is not necessarily just woo based thinking. Chemo and surgery are not just a walk in the park. I’ve seen people do chemo and surgery and then just die anyways, having basically tortured themselves with chemo and surgery before death. Cancer sucks and there are sometimes no great answers. I have a really low opinion of grifters that falsely advertise that they can definitively cure cancer with alternative medicine, but I respect any individual’s choice to take the path they are most comfortable with with their own body.
by Proofread0592 | 2025-10-05 16:27:56+00:00
I'm not an artist but I am decent with the pen tool, and for graphic design stuff I typically use AI art to give me a thing I can trace in illustrator with the pen tool, and fix any errors or imperfections I deem worthy of fixing.

I would imagine this kind of tool would allow someone who is not gifted at art (e.g. how do I translate a 2d sprite I made into a forward facing running animation?) the same kind of thing: a pathway to potentially "trace" the generated image, making it better than the original and removing any undesired aspects.
by Jensson | 2025-10-05 16:28:04+00:00
The most reasonable to me is that megafauna come and wreck your farms, so you have to hunt them to extinction before farming is viable. Humans can stop a horse from eating their crops, but stopping an elephant or mammoth is not easy at all, and we see that humans hunted those to extinction right before they started agriculture.

There used to be elephants and mammoths all over the world, but almost all places where humans developed agriculture they had already killed all of them.
Ask HN: How can I use my laptop without monitors?
by bix6 | 2025-10-05 16:28:05+00:00
I feel chained to my big monitor and want to use my laptop at places besides my desk but I can never get real work done without the monitor. I have a 13 inch MacBook and love it. The 15 inch feels bulky and doesn’t add meaningful real estate. I use tiled windows and multiple desktops. But still if I need to do anything besides single page/app work, which is rare, I feel the need for my monitor. Has anyone found any worthwhile solutions?
by LexiMax | 2025-10-05 16:28:11+00:00
> Try hailing a cab at midnight in the middle of Mexico before declaring the US to be ultimately lawless.

I've been to Portland, does that count?

> I hope you'll change your mind before that happens.

I don't think you do. I think that you fantasize about throwing your political opponents in prison, and uttering a veiled threat cloaked in empathetic language makes you feel powerful and clever.

In any case, I'm not sure what you took away from my response, but survival isn't a bad thing - at least not for the individual. It's clarifying, putting one in the proper mindset from collaborative to transactional and opportunistic.

Of course, systemic myopia and brain drain can hurt an organization worse than any direct action could ever aspire to, but organizations run by violent thugs aren't known for known for advancement based on competence as opposed to loyalty.
by potatolicious | 2025-10-05 16:28:23+00:00
It's a good tool for optimizing around local maxima and is (generally) incapable of propelling you through a major product gap to the next (and hopefully greater) maxima.

But IMO the industry dogma is to use it for everything, particularly around greenfield development and new product areas that are pre-PMF.

Importantly also is that in many organizations A/B testing has become a crutch to avoid understanding the underlying system being measured.

Conversion rate rises by 5% if the button is green. Why? But rather than using experimentation as a tool for structured understanding many organizations devolve to "just test every change".

The practical outcome is that product teams commit elementary errors because they fail to understand why their products are successful, and product velocity slows as teams prove unable/unwilling to make any decisions without pushing something to prod.
by the_af | 2025-10-05 16:28:37+00:00
I think people don't object to making money as much as being underhanded about it (trying to bootstrap from zero to money while not making it clear you're currently at zero) and also using AI slop (or slop of any kind) to quickly generate content.

People would respect this more if it was content lovingly generated for years, and then the author went "hey, maybe I can promote this on HN?". But artificially promoting worthless, slop content, is going to generate this reaction.
by Marsymars | 2025-10-05 16:28:54+00:00
I’m stuck flying with Westjet for many routes because I’m Calgary-based and the inconvenience of non-direct flights is almost always greater than the inconvenience of poor seating/service/whatever - but Porter Airlines is expanding and is my first choice if I can fly direct with them.

(Or Air North - very limited service, but my favourite North American airline. Great service, they’ll pre-prep meals for you if you have dietary restrictions, their economy snack is a lovely warmed-up cookie, and they serve local beer and coffee from the Yukon.)