MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jimkri | 2025-10-14 13:35:43+00:00
The push for Agentic models is because people aren't working or they are failing to complete what they are contractually obligated to.

I'm working with a client who has APEX code with 0% test coverage. The last consultant company deployed APEX without any test classes. That is a failure on the Salesforce partner, since you need test classes if you want to update any APEX code, and it leaves the client with more work and more costs.

I used AI to write 100% test coverage in less than 1 hour. I had to give it direction because the first implementation was not to the Salesforce Dev Test Standards. So I downloaded the SFDC Developer PDF guides on APEX and gave it to AI Studio, and was able to write the test classes correctly.

Agents will do what they are programmed and prompted to do, and this is really why corporations are moving in that direction.
by bluGill | 2025-10-14 13:35:51+00:00
As an older folk, I perceive 50 year old tools as likely worn out and in desperate need of replacement. However often nobody makes the tool anymore and so we are willing to spend a lot to maintain them instead. (I drive a 25 year old car - this is only possible because I can get a rebuilt transmission, but my maintenance costs over the last 10 years would have bought much newer/nicer used car, and I'm getting close to where I could buy a new car)

The other possibility is the tool isn't used much and modern accountants would never allow you to buy it in the first place because of all the cash tied up. (that is the work the tool did over those 50 years wasn't enough to pay for the cost of the tool and the space to store it)
by triceratops | 2025-10-14 13:35:53+00:00
> Actually, normal people can do the borrowing thing

But it's way riskier.

> At least if your broker offers decent margin rates

I guarantee you no retail broker will give you the rates Elon's broker gives him.

> you sell boxes

I have to guess you mean "box spreads". This is an advanced strategy and again more likely used by HNW people.
by rini17 | 2025-10-14 13:35:54+00:00
KDE user since version 2. Fell in love with KMail. Even upgraded my RAM from 16 to 48MB to run it smoothly lol.

Stopped used it at version 4, the new kdepim was atrocious. But now it's usable again. Probably my largest peeve is how there's advanced desktop search/semantic engine but it has no own interface as if the devs were ashamed of it, search results only appear when you type something in menu. And if you google nepomuk/baloo most ppl just ask how to turn it off.
by JohnFen | 2025-10-14 13:36:11+00:00
> Tell me how this exempts linux systems, the distro authors, and every app developer for said operating systems.

There's nothing to exempt. If the OS is preinstalled on a device, this will require the device to ask the user's age during initialization. That's all.

> So, an IT director might have to certify that all sysadmins and developers are over 18?

I see nothing in the law that even hints at this.

> And what if a child has access to email or other service run on that system. Tomorrow, I'll give some thought to wi-fi and other routers.

I also see nothing in the law that addresses this.
by lossolo | 2025-10-14 13:36:29+00:00
You're not saying "governments have interests" (which we can agree is obvious), youre saying the public principles invoked are contingent on whether they advance those interests and get swapped out the moment they don't. That's not a banal "laws protect interests", it's a claim about which interests and when the rhetoric changes.

"Window dressing" from the cited comment isn't about the existence of law, it's about the story told to legitimate a choice already made on interest grounds. When a principle helps the home coalition's position, it's foregrounded, when it threatens it, it's narrowed, reinterpreted, suspended etc. The principle is the sales pitch and the selection and timing are about power.

Countries push openness most intensely in sectors where their firms can penetrate foreign markets (finance in the 1990s, software/IP heavy goods in the 2000s etc). Because openness abroad protects their capital, openness at home is celebrated until it starts eroding strategic capacity. Then come security reviews, export controls, local content rules, subsidies etc and everything is wrapped in principled language.

> Internal competition and level playing fields are promoted as they pressure companies to improve their competitiveness.

Until internal competition threatens a national champion in a strategic race. Then we let consolidation happen (or subsidize it) and call it "industrial policy". We laud the disciplining function of foreign competition until the foreign rival is big enough to discipline us, then it's "unfair trade", "security risk", "systemic rivalry" etc

For decades, openness to China was "win win globalization". As China's capability rose, the same flows (capital, tech, data etc) got relabeled as channels of leverage. Now we create controls, seizures/forced restructurings and targeted decoupling justified by a different principle than yesterday's.

So basically your "policy serves interests" is a truism that ignores the commenter's claim about how principles are instrumentalized. I mean free markets, antitrust, IP, security, sovereignty etc aren't a tight contradiction free doctrine. States pick the item that best advances leverage at that moment and explain it with whatever noble language fits. It's a realistic description of how advanced economies behave when the balance of advantage shifts.
by opticfluorine | 2025-10-14 13:36:45+00:00
Minor nit, Joule-Thomson is not just the ideal gas law - it is a separate thermodynamic effect entirely. Case in point, for certain gases the change in temperature due to Joule-Thomson has the opposite sign that you would predict from the ideal gas law alone.

This has interesting applications. For example, you can exploit this with dilute metal vapor in an expanding helium gas to cool the metal vapor to very low temperature - the Joule-Thomson expansion of helium increases the helium's temperature by converting the energy of the intermolecular forces into heat. This draws out energy from the metal vapor. If done in a vacuum chamber, then in the region before the shockwave formed by the helium, the supercooled metal atoms will form small van der Waals clusters that can be spectroscopically probed in the jet. This was an interesting area of study back in the 80s that advanced our understanding of van der Waals forces.
by thristian | 2025-10-14 13:36:46+00:00
Pretty much, yeah! The difference is that in Python the function that calculates a single value looks like:

foo(x)

...while the function that calculates a batch of values looks like:

[foo(x) for x in somelist]

Meanwhile in Lil (and I'd guess APL and K), the one function works in both situations.

You can get some nice speed-ups in Python by pushing iteration into a list comprehension, because it's more specialised in the byte-code than a for loop. It's a lot easier in Lil, since it often Just Works.
by rjzzleep | 2025-10-14 13:36:59+00:00
It benefits the US just fine. Just like Germany moving it's production facilities to the US after dismantling its own energy infrastructure suites the US just fine. As witnessed by BASF shutting down German production, while scaling up US production.

At least short term it does. Long term however, hollow shells of allies drag you down, whereas strong allies are more beneficial.

But I still remember the US stating they will not tolerate Germany if they dare to vote against them in the UN security council back when they were talking about destroying Libya[1]. Back then I thought Germany couldn't fall any lower with such a weak foreign minister, but here we are.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/18/libya-...
by chipotle_coyote | 2025-10-14 13:37:24+00:00
I don't think I'm planning to go open source, although I have to get through the whole "have an actual application to start letting people beta test" stage first. Even if it's a commercial program my thought is "pay a single price once, not a subscription," and probably under $100.

Arc Studio looks like it's a screenwriting program, which is a different animal, though. Have you tried out Fade In (https://www.fadeinpro.com), which is a $79 one-time fee? I haven't used it, I confess, but I hear great things about it. (I used the even cheaper Highland Pro for my one try at screenwriting so far, but that was a learning exercise.)
by alpine01 | 2025-10-14 13:38:43+00:00
There's a now famous Harvard lecture video on YouTube of Zuckerberg earlier in the Facebook days, where he walks through the issues they hit early on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFFs9UgOAlE

I watched it ages ago, but I seem to remember one thing that I liked was that each time they changed the architecture, it was to solve a problem they had, or were beginning to have. They seemed to be staying away from pre-optimization and instead took the approach of tackling problems as they had as they appeared, rather than imagining problems long before/if they occurred.

It's a bit like the "perfect is the enemy of done" concept - you could spend 2-3x the time making it much more scalable, but that might have an opportunity cost which weakens you somewhere else or makes it harder/more expensive to maintain and support.

Take it with a pinch of salt, but I thought it seemed like quite a good level-headed approach to choosing how to spend time/money early on, when there's a lot of financial/time constraints.
by bobdvb | 2025-10-14 13:40:12+00:00
In streaming your website is typically totally divorced from your media serving. Media serving is just a question of cloud storage and pointing at an hls/dash manifest in that object store. Once it starts playing the website itself does almost nothing. Live streaming adds more complexity but it's still not much of a website problem.

Maintaining the media lifecycle, receiving, transcoding, making it available and removing it, is the big task but that's not real-time, it's batch/event processing at best efforts.

The biggest challenges with streaming are maintaining the content catalogue, which aren't just a few million records but rich metadata about the lifecycle and content relationships. Then user management and payments tends to also have a significant overhead, especially when you're talking about international payment processing.
by trollbridge | 2025-10-14 13:40:52+00:00
My local factories are mostly union, and they rely heavily on the union to help fill empty openings. They also set up booths at local job fairs and have a poster board with current openings (typically electricians and pipe fitters, sometimes line workers or machinists). The jobs also have benefits and vacation and sick time off. Everybody I know who works there is always trying to get as many overtime shifts as they can, especially the weekend and holiday ones which are double or 2.5X time. Electricians are IBEW, pipefitters are pipefitters’ union, rest are UAW even though it has nothing to do with cars.

General advice is if you’re down on your luck and need a job, you can go there and be at $25 an hour in a few months (step pay increases are mandated by the union). It’s not for everyone but it certainly has less turnover than the local McDonald’s which starts and stays around $14.

Unions should do a better job of marketing to employers that they can supply a trained work force. For example the IBEW here always has a full book of apprentices. An employer can get a qualified electrician along with an apprentice basically guaranteed.
by wrsh07 | 2025-10-14 13:40:53+00:00
I would love to give a quick primer on how I'm using agents:

I'll usually have a main line of work I'm focused on. I'll describe the current behavior and desired changes (need to plumb this var through these functions to use here). "Gpt 5 thinking high" is pretty precise, so if you clearly indicate what you want it usually does exactly what I request. (If this isn't happening for you, make sure you don't have other context in your codebase that confuses it)

While it's working, I'll often be able to prompt another line of work, usually requesting explicitly it not make changes but not switching to ask mode. It will do most of the work to figure out what changes would need to be made and it summarizes them helpfully which allows me to correct it if it's wrong. You can repeat this for as long as the existing models are busy

Types of prompts that work well:

Questions: "what's the function or component for doing X", where else do we do this pattern?

Bug prompts (anything that would take you <2h to fix should be promptable in a single prompt, note you'll get slightly different responses even with the same prompt, so if at first you don't succeed you might explain what went wrong, ask it to improve your prompt, and then try again from scratch. People don't reset context often enough)

Larger scale architecture / plans - this I would recommend switching to plan mode and spending some time going back and forth. Often it will get confused so take your progress (ideally as an .md file) and bring it to a new conversation to keep iterating.

You can even have it suggest jira tickets etc

Understanding different models is important: Claude 4.5 (and most Claude models since 3.5) really want to do stuff. And if you leave them unchecked they'll usually do way more than you asked. And if they perceive themselves to be blocked on a failing test they might delete it or change it to be useless. That said, they're really extraordinary models when you want a quick prototype fleshed out where you don't make all of the decisions. Gpt 5 thinking high is my personal favorite (codex 5 thinking high is also very good in the codex plugin in vscode). Create new context often.
by tmtvl | 2025-10-14 13:41:35+00:00
On paper KDE's system is more elegant and practical than GNOME's. In practice the keyboard shortcut management via exporting and importing is rather unwieldy. Then again, if you want to go deep into setting up your shortcuts to something properly usable, it's a fair bit more convenient with KDE, where all your shortcuts are in a single place, than with GNOME, where you have to look in all the gconf categories and it's a right pain to find conflicts.
by randycupertino | 2025-10-14 13:42:04+00:00
> The move is part of new CEO Doustdar’s initiative aimed at saving about $1.3 billion annually by the end of 2026. The cost-cutting bid involves laying off 9,000 employees, or about 11% of the company’s global workforce.

Also part of a larger trend of boiopharma pulling away from cell therapy development. The science seems to work but too expensive to operationalize and manufacture just to customize bespoke treatment for every patient, not sustainable financially.
by edm0nd | 2025-10-14 13:42:07+00:00
>You can’t socialize losses and privatize gains.

Companies do this all the time though.

For example, here in Louisiana the utility companies do this. After a major hurricane, Entergy will fix and upgrade tons of infrastructure and then get to tack on a +$15.00/m on to your utility bill for the next 5 to 10 years to recoup the costs all while they are making millions in profits each year.

Why pay for it themselves when they can just force the public to do it.
by nicoburns | 2025-10-14 13:42:07+00:00
I've seen similar with Firebase. Luckily I took over as tech lead at this company, so I was able to migrate us to Postgres. Amusingly, as well as being more reliable, the Postgres version (on a single small database instance) was also much faster than the previous Firebase-based version (due to it enabling JOINs in the database rather than in application code).
by mooreds | 2025-10-14 13:42:29+00:00
You need to meet folks where they are at, and most folks do need $$$ coming in the door. Even if they are living at home, there is still opportunity cost. Other options:

- go raise money

- consult while you are bootstrapping, use that money to pay people

- go offshore (you can pay people much less, usually)

- let people work 1/2 time on your project and consult the other half (I did this)

What kind of equity were you offering? If you are expecting people to work without pay, you are looking for co-founders. So I'd expect the equity to be double digit percentages.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-10-14 13:42:45+00:00
One can argue about the causes -- and no doubt there are many, the biggest IMO being that WW2 was so horrific that Europeans were willing to do anything to prevent it again -- but there's no disputing that the last 75 years of peace in Europe is unprecedented in its long history of near-continuous inter-state warfare for the past ~2000 years (since "Pax Romana").
by Sean-Der | 2025-10-14 13:42:54+00:00
My experience with D&D was on the computer. I didn’t have friends that would play with me. I didn’t feel constrained by having computer driving the story. Games like Baldurs Gate pulled away from unhappy things happening otherwise.

id software had a profit motive right? As a kid it didn’t occur to me. I just nagged my parents to pay for Doom/Heretic.

I also have done everything to encourage/empower DIY. My hope is that users that are curious can learn more/build it themselves.

> Normally once a toy is bought, infinite time can be spent with it with no further financial transaction

I can’t think of any case where that is true. Books/toys all get worn and may need to be replaced. I have bought my son the same toy forklift three times because it breaks and he really loves it.

> Is it desirable to build a world where kids spend more time with this category of toy over others

I would rather see my kids play with this technology than consumption only (videos). Other play is better then doing Santa role play, but this isn’t close to be worse at all.
by floor2 | 2025-10-14 13:43:00+00:00
> Am I wrong?

As a naturally curious person, who reads a lot and looks up a lot of things, I've learned to be cautious when talking to regular people.

While considering buying a house I did extensive research about fires. To do my job, I often read about computer security, data exfiltration, hackers and ransomware.

If I watch a WWI documentary, I'll end up reading about mustard gas and trench foot and how to aim artillery afterwards. If I read a sci-fi novel about a lab leak virus, I'll end up researching how real virus safety works and about bioterrorism. If I listen to a podcast about psychedelic-assisted therapy, I'll end up researching how drugs work and how they were discovered.

If I'm ever accused of a crime, of almost any variety or circumstance, I'm sure that prosecutors would be able to find suspicious searches related to it in my history. And then leaked out to the press or mentioned to the jury as just a vague "suspect had searches related to..."

The average juror, or the average person who's just scrolling past a headline, could pretty trivially be convinced that my search history is nefarious for almost any accusation.
by zevon | 2025-10-14 13:43:16+00:00
Interesting blog post. A few thoughts on smartphones, presence and whatnot:

- I've lusted over the fantasy of having a pocket knowledge machine / tricorder-like thing since long before PDAs and later smartphones. Okay, still no full tricorder, but boy, are smartphones ever useful. I really like having a pocket GPS, music/audiobook player, translation device, library, basic sensor package, gaming machine, backup for my most important data, password/document manager and general purpose computing device in my pocket.

- I was a child before the web was a thing but I very much grew up on computers and the web and I have seen and/or experienced all sorts of addictive, gamified and otherwise nasty things those technologies brought with it (or enabled). I'm rather happy to have a bit of context from a time before those technologies and I'm also happy about having grown out of most of my computer-related bad habits and behaviours before the web and those technologies were what they are today.

- I made a decision to get off most social media with the exception of a few forum-like things at the point where I felt that it was no longer mostly about expanding real-world connections. Must have been around 10-12 years ago, I think.

- In my personal definition of "social media", I've included most messengers and certainly the way many people seem to use them. This abstinence can cause quite a bit of social friction and peer-pressure and I'm not entirely sure if I could (or would want to) "resist" had I not first grown up without any messenger and later with (occasionally excessive use of) IRC, ICQ and many that came after.

- If I feel the need to publish something, I'll do it via some long-term channel (blog, newspaper, journal, conference, ...).

- Even without being on social media, it's still relatively easy to keep up with current (app-/web-)culture enough to not get laughed out the room or viewed as a hopeless old fart by younger people (which is important to me because I work with them pretty much daily).

- Even without being on social media, it's still quite easy to keep up with the news and important developments in whatever field might interest you.

- Often, I read "my government / bank / other organization made me have an app / a smartphone". In those cases, I often ask myself it it's a matter of convenience or if those voices come from some context that really does not have any other options. Because I really hope there are no countries where you can't get/use any bank account without an app and I even more sincerely hope that most countries make it illegal to require mobile apps (or even internet access) for any important government service as the only option.
Ask HN: What does your project research and planning process look like?
by marko-djuric | 2025-10-14 13:43:45+00:00
If your motivation is to build something functional but also to learn something new - to get the most out of the whole endeavor - you probably don’t want to be doing the same thing for decades, but rather to keep learning and experimenting with new ideas and technologies.

What does your process of digging through the internet, searching for and analyzing similar existing projects and solutions, gathering information, considering alternatives, and making reasonable trade-offs look like?

This process begins long before a single line of code is written, continues throughout the development phase, and doesn’t stop even after you have a working version. Skipping serious analysis of existing solutions regularly leads to reinventing the wheel.

This is actually the hardest and most important part of the work — bringing order to chaos, separating the signal from the noise, to ultimately produce something concrete and useful. When the research phase is done well, implementation becomes a quick and straightforward task.

What are your go-to research and planning routines and strategies for success, and also what are the common mistakes and pitfalls in this process that you or others often repeat?
by xpe | 2025-10-14 13:44:08+00:00
I can see what both of the above commenters are saying. Here is my synthesis:

In the US, the powers-that-be are often content to let markets, popular forces, and regulation shape foreign companies. In China (I'm no expert, please weigh in [1]) it seems that the CCP is very motivated to make foreign firms serve its industrial agenda while staying under Party control. That usually means insisting on Chinese ownership stakes or joint‑venture structures, so the state always has a foothold in the business.

In this way, politicians of both countries do find ways to "get what they want" from a foreign business -- even if they go about doing it differently.

[1] I'm not ignorant of geopolitics; I do read about China, but focusing on it is not part of my job nor education.