MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by seanhunter | 2025-10-18 20:06:14+00:00
I can’t take any article like this seriously if it doesn’t lead with the #1 sql antipattern which kills performance all the time - doing things row-by-row instead of understanding that databases operate on relations, so you need to do operations over whole relations.

Very often I have seen this problem buried in code design and it always sucks. Sometimes an orm obscures this but the basic antipattern looks like

Select some stuff For each row in stuff: … do some important things … Select a thing to do with this row … maybe do some other things …

Early on in my career an old-hand sql guru said to me “any time you are doing sql in a loop, you are probably doing it wrong”.

The non-sucky version of the code above is

Select some stuff, joining on all the things you need for the rows because databases are great For each row in stuff: … do some important things … … maybe do some other things …
by joelthelion | 2025-10-18 20:06:27+00:00
You're focusing on aducanumab but since them other similar drugs have been approved with similar results.

I any case the debate is not on whether the drugs have an impact on the disease (which they do, unequivocally), but on whether the risk/benefit ratio is good enough (on which I'm also not sold, but that's not the question in our discussion).
by buster | 2025-10-18 20:06:54+00:00
Event Sourcing seems like massive overkill for the stated problem. The core requirement is simple: "show account balance at any point in time" for regulatory compliance.

What specific audit requirements existed beyond point-in-time balance queries? The author dismisses alternatives as "less business-focused" but doesn't justify why temporal tables or structured audit logs couldn't satisfy the actual compliance need.

The performance issues were predictable: 2-5 seconds for balance calculations, requiring complex snapshot strategies to get down to 50-200ms. This entire complexity could have been avoided with a traditional audit trail approach.

The business context analogy to accounting ledgers is telling - but accounting systems don't replay every transaction to calculate current balances. They use running totals with audit trails, which is exactly what temporal tables provide.

Event Sourcing is elegant from a technical perspective, but here it's solving a problem that simpler, proven approaches handle just fine. The regulatory requirement was for historical balance visibility, not event replay capabilities.
by manquer | 2025-10-18 20:07:38+00:00
I actually went to the Apple Store last spring with battery upgrade in mind, but Apple Store in Burlingame told me it will take 3-5 business days to do the change.

I didn't have a spare laptop to work with at that time for a week so i held of[1]. This is probably a reason for lot of people opting out of upgrades.

After the M4 came there was hype for the new screen which performs better in sunlight and M1->M4 seemed worth it plus vRAM which is certainly handy.

[1]The screen was also deteriorating - no physical issues just wasn't as bright as it was new) and they said I should replace that too. The economics a new Air worth of money on a older laptop with just 1-2 years primary use life left is shaky.
by rednafi | 2025-10-18 20:09:26+00:00
I love reading about and occasionally tinkering with older text editors like vim, emacs, ed, acme, ex, nedit, and as such.

For actual work, though, I’ve been using VS Code exclusively since its inception. Electron might be a bloated mess, but spending time on alternatives doesn’t feel worth it. Maybe that’s because I didn’t grow up in the golden era of computing and can’t make the vim workflow stick no matter how hard I try.

I’m pretty sure twenty years from now, this generation of developers will get blurry-eyed reminiscing about how fast and feature-packed VS Code was, and how Microsoft built the best GUI text editor of its time.

As for TUI editors, I love micro because it has mouse support and doesn’t make you memorize a spellbook just to move around.
by hansmayer | 2025-10-18 20:09:39+00:00
On dictionaries: you're the one who insisted on dictionaries, only to produce wikipedia links instead :)

Now how is it bias? Well, it's in your own answer. You are literally claiming things based on what you believe them to be, not based on what they likely are. For the latter, we'd need a longer timespan and more usage data. So you fiddled with it a bit in a timespan of a week or so and based on this tiny sample, came to a conclusion, that as you specify is your belief, but not really hard data. That is quintessentially what a bias is. Or to borrow from Mirriam-Webster again: an inclination of temperament or outlook especially : a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgment : prejudice
by ddxv | 2025-10-18 20:09:39+00:00
I've built myself a few problems that I haven't fixed yet:

Many materialized views that rely on materialized views. When one at the bottom, or a table, needs a changed all views need to be dropped and recreated.

Using a warm standby for production. I love having a read only production database, but since it's not the primary, it always feels like it's on the losing end of the system. Recently upgraded to Postgres 18 and forgot that means I need to rm rf the standby and pg_basebackup to rebuild... That wasn't fun.
by sheepscreek | 2025-10-18 20:09:54+00:00
In my case at least, it’s very good at following all instructions to the T. Claude 4.0 (haven’t used it much since 4.5 came out) would often miss some key things in my instructions. The output is very high quality as well. Many things (even complex coding tasks) work well in one shot.

For extremely complex multi-step problems though - it may need some help in breaking the tasks down to more manageable chunks. But will eventually ace it. As an example, I had good success with a project that involved:

- Rewriting all internals in a dotnet/C# application to use Apache Arrow types for data through the entire pipeline - Adapting the architecture to be streaming first instead of working through entire data in each stage - Designing and implementing a complex system that creates many different projections of the data based on everything that has read in the stream so far and create multiple outputs based on that, in parallel as the stream is being read in real-time - Recreating a prototype of the entire project in Rust
by crazygringo | 2025-10-18 20:10:40+00:00
Not sure what you mean.

If you have a table of customers and someone of them don't have addresses, it's standard to leave the address fields NULL. If some of them don't belong to a company, it's standard to leave the company_id field NULL.

This is literally what NULL is for. It's a special value precisely because missing data or a N/A field is so common.

If you're suggesting mandatory additional has_address and has_customer_id fields, I would disagree. You'd be reinventing a database tool that already exists precisely for that purpose.
by btown | 2025-10-18 20:11:14+00:00
Does this exist for larger/more informal dependency relationships within a function body in other programming languages?

For instance, if I highlight a parameter or variable foo, can I see not only all usages of foo itself, but usages of any variable that was derived from foo?

While borrow usage makes this foolproof, this type of visualization would be tremendously useful for even other types of code.

(As for Flowistry, I can see this being vital for anyone trying to maintain e.g. https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/main/components/layout/f... - perhaps the most daunting single file in a modern codebase I've ever seen! And yes, that's a 400-line function.)
by OutOfHere | 2025-10-18 20:12:12+00:00
Even 80 mg of benfotiamine a day is too potent for me, giving me anxiety. 40 mg is more tolerable. I do take plenty of magnesium, zinc, and P5P. Be careful taking the basic non-P5P form of B6 because it risks causing serious neuropathy in the long term. Benfotiamine is more for managing damage from high glucose. I acknowledge your experience, but if your nerve damage is not from metabolic concerns, I am skeptical.

Why not use lipothiamine or occasionally sulbutiamine instead for this purpose?
by ricardobeat | 2025-10-18 20:13:51+00:00
In the european school holiday season, gas stations can also build up long queues, it's not exclusively an EV problem, though slow charging cars can compound the issue. Most people travel by plane or train anyway [1].

Every EV route planner already assumes you'll only charge to 80% (and won't discharge below 10%), because that's the range where you can charge at high speeds. In practice, when compared to a combustion engine, a 2x 15m stop trip becomes a 3x 15m stop, or 2x 20m stop trip

It's not a big deal especially if your average stop is much longer than that. Or if you have a car with battery swapping, which only takes 3 minutes from 0% to 90%.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
by mrcjkb | 2025-10-18 20:14:14+00:00
> presumably because that's what Cargo does.

Nope. We chose TOML as the default for various reasons:

- Simplicity. There are use cases for a turing complete configuration language. Lux is not one of them.

- Ergonomics. The ability to edit it using the CLI (technically, that could be possible with Lua too, but it would be a lot more complex and not a very pleasant UX).

> which, I don't know if that's the right call?

The reason we currently support importing a Lua extra.rockspec is ease of migration for complex projects, e.g. with platform-specific overrides (not yet supported by the TOML spec).
by AlotOfReading | 2025-10-18 20:14:36+00:00
One of the points I'm trying to communicate is that there are skilled people in most parts of the world. They're less common outside SV, but that doesn't matter unless you're trying to hire at big tech campus scale. So you focus your much smaller efforts on recruiting those people with a good environment, give them the tools to produce work they're proud of. If you pay what they'll be happy with, it's almost always going to be vastly less than big tech pays.

That even works in the bay area, which is how places like Oxide keep fantastically skilled people despite paying below market rate.

Is it the easiest way to hire? No, but I never said it was.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-18 20:17:41+00:00
It shouldn't change the mean though, with enough data.

In gaming, people often play against others closer to their skill, so you have to take that into account.

But with the comics, they're being chosen randomly so there's no bias like that to correct for.

Also people's assessment of the comparison comic is so noisy, knowing its rating probably won't help that much.

Uncertainty is key for deciding on the top ranking, but you can just use the standard formula for that.
by dusted | 2025-10-18 20:18:16+00:00
The issues mentioned in the article is generally applicable. While modern software does manage to make life marginally easier and simpler in some very specific ways, they generally manage to do so while also looking like absolute garbage, consuming hundreds of megabytes of memory to do tasks requiring kilobytes while burning through multiple orders of magnitude the amount of instructions actually needed to do the work.

Yes, Visual Basic was indeed the pinnacle, and today, it is QT, for what it's worth. But no, let's go write HTML and CSS, and when the Stockholm syndrome gets us bad enough, why not some React or Angular to get the party of pain going again ?
by Molitor5901 | 2025-10-18 20:18:56+00:00
I sat through a briefing last week about quantum encryption and the threat that quantum computing poses to encryption in use today. It was stressed that nation states are hoovering up encrypted data now in order to decrypt later with quantum computing. Much the same way America decrypted old soviet encrypted data. I wonder if it will take as long and if anyone will still be alive to make use of that data.
by JoelMcCracken | 2025-10-18 20:20:21+00:00
Yeah that’s fair. In many ways the spacemacs/doom model is more akin to what you describe, with a lot of caveats; it’s not a total rework of all key bindings. In emacs novice affordances are usually an afterthought, not part of the core design and community norms.

Of course, I must say there is a trade off here: you can design for novices or for advanced users, but very often not both.
by manquer | 2025-10-18 20:20:32+00:00
I have been monitoring temperatures closely with mac-stats https://mac-stats.com/ over the last few months.

It typically runs around 110-130 for CPU and the battery is 85-90 on light usage like say browser or slack.

However if i run a full compile of the repo or just about anything a bit compute intensive CPU jumps easily to 170-200 range regularly and battery to 120.

I am now frequently running the fans higher manually to cool it down[1]

I think Apple is optimizing for being quiet over battery and laptop life and have kept the fans low speed even if it would benefit the hardware to speed them up earlier under load.

[1] This is not because I can the temps all the time in the top bar. The palm rests do become noticeably hotter and bit uncomfortable than the noise would be.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-10-18 20:20:46+00:00
Books are among the smallest (complete) media I own. Even a single album weighs in heavier than all but my largest books, and even with the largest those only just barely exceed the smallest of albums. They're easy to store, I won't later want a "higher resolution" book. Easy to organize (and it will only become easier... I expect technology/software that will allow better indexing in the near future). The books I keep now can become my family's library, shared and copied as my family becomes larger and more distant in the future. Immune from DRM or copyright regulations, invisible to anti-piracy efforts, and ever growing.

They don't even print the books I'd want on the kinds of paper that would last more than 20 years, and I can't afford the sort of museum-level-preservation effort it would require to take advantage of that supposing they did.
by godelski | 2025-10-18 20:21:28+00:00
> Y'know what else is not falsifiable? "That AI doesn't understand what it's doing".

Which is why people are saying we need to put in more work to define this term. Which is the whole point of this conversation.

> seriously considered quacks like a duck argument has been won by the AIs and no-one cares.

And have you ever considered that it's because people are refining their definitions?

Often when people find that their initial beliefs are wrong or not precise enough then they update their beliefs. You seem to be calling this a flaw. It's not like the definitions are dramatically changing, they're refining. There's a big difference
by dns_snek | 2025-10-18 20:22:34+00:00
"Success rate" is a useless metric unless we have a shared definition of what success means. Either we have a categorically different idea of what constitutes a "complicated" task or we have categorically different standards of minimum viable quality.

Current SOTA agents are great at gluing together pre-made components but they break down as soon as I try to treat them like mid-level developers by asking them to implement a cross-cutting feature in an idiomatic way. Without junior-level hand-holding it far too often generates a half-broken implementation that looks right at first glance, supported by about 3 dozen tests, most of which are just useless bloat that doesn't test the right things.

Sometimes it starts looping on failing tests until it eventually gives up, confidently concluding that the implementation is complete with production-quality code, with whopping 90% test success rate (fabricating a lazy explanation for why the failing tests are outside of its control).

Even when the code does work and the tests pass it's poorly designed and poorly structured. There's very little attention paid to future maintainability, even with planning ahead of time.

GPT-5, Claude 4.5 Sonnet, it's all the same. "Thinking" or no thinking.
by simonw | 2025-10-18 20:22:49+00:00
I assumed bias was meant to mean I'm biased towards Anthropic, or to reflect some other unfair semi-hidden agenda that influences my writing.

I do have a relevant bias here I guess: I'm biased towards the pattern of granting an LLM the ability to execute commands in a Unix-style environment. I've been a huge fan of that approach ever since ChatGPT Code Interpreter launched in early 2023 and I'm excited that skills further solidifies why that pattern is such a good bet.
by great_wubwub | 2025-10-18 20:22:55+00:00
> No product is even remotely for the consumer anymore, they’re all just minimal pretenses to try and advertise you and extract more of your attention and money.

This is a beautiful sentence.

I would add that under modern-day aggressive hyper-capitalism all attention can be translated to money, so it's all just products whose job is to get you to buy more products.
by steveklabnik | 2025-10-18 20:22:56+00:00
Yes, it's not literally libc on windows, but the point is that directly calling syscalls is not supported, you have to call through the platform's library for doing so.

On some systems, this is just not a supported configuration (like what you're talking about with Windows) and on some, they go further, and actually try and prevent you from doing so, even in assembly.)
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-18 20:24:22+00:00
>Honestly, don't ever buy bestsellers. They're all bad and everything in them is wrong. Things become bestsellers because they find an audience beyond people who are smart or shrewd.

In the context of technical/political pieces, perhaps. But I have some reservations with even that limited scope

1. It's fine to target a more general audience if it gets them interested in a subject to begin with. Some inaccuracies help give context to learning before you break them. e.g. Saying "you can't subtract 3 from 2" in early learning, before later learning about the negative number space.

2. How many books of this nature even make best seller? Most stuff tends to be fiction or biographical so there's not much "wrong" there. Political stuff will be there as well, but is ultimately subjective.
by drewbitt | 2025-10-18 20:25:40+00:00
I know you say "Each country have different lab panels. So individual biomarkers are listed instead of panel names.", but it would be nice to have 'the optimal guide' of labs to run to get all of this as cheaply or as combined as possible. I likely can't use this tool as I don't have all these lab results. In the US it would be at least a CBC with differential, a CMP, lipid panel, A1c, GGT, hsCRP, Vitamin D and a couple more.
by dunham | 2025-10-18 20:25:46+00:00
mdfind is the command line interface to macos "Spotlight", which is the global file index. So it can do things like full text search in addition to matching metadata values or size bigger than X.

I don't know windows well enough to know the equivalent. But I think there is an index on windows, and powershell may be able to poke at it.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-18 20:27:21+00:00
> If diverting planes becomes a big enough problem for ordinary businesspeople and not just prominent opponents of certain dictators, I'm sure someone will build an app that helps us plan flights accordingly. Traveling from the US to France and need to avoid UK airspace? Sure, let's take a quick layover in Spain. Have you done any of the following things in the last x years? OK, we'll make a big detour around China this time.

There are two major problems with this.

The first is that you don't actually know which countries you have to avoid. There isn't going to be an app that can walk you through every law in every country.

And the second is that you're not the one flying the plane. You thought you were going to Charles de Gaulle but the weather in Paris is worse than expected or some drunk driver crashed the gate and drove out onto the runway and they're diverting all the planes, so after you're already in the air you find out you're actually going to Heathrow.

> Don't let slippery slope arguments take you into the dystopian future quicker than the world itself seems to be willing to

They already do stuff like this. The fact that they do it is now being used as a justification for doing it more and elsewhere. You can watch people telling you that slippery slope is a fallacy as they're greasing the hill.
by MurizS | 2025-10-18 20:29:00+00:00
I think what you're referring to is also known as Stigler's law of eponymy [1], which is interestingly self-referential and ironic in its own naming. There's also the related "Matthew effect" [2] in the sciences.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler's_law_of_eponymy

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect
by tpmoney | 2025-10-18 20:29:14+00:00
The same way a tailor understands stitches even if a sewing machine creates most of the stitches a tailor will ever stitch. Because understanding code is tangential to writing it. Which isn’t to say that writing it doesn’t help solidify knowledge and certainly plenty of people learn by doing and there may even be skills that atrophy as a result of not writing code in the same way that skills for writing assembly have atrophied with the use of higher level languages. But ultimately it is possible to understand some code without having written most of it by hand.
by mandeepj | 2025-10-18 20:30:55+00:00
> So many people I know download PDFs and never, ever read them. I truly believe reading is one of the best things you can do. If you find you're not reading then the PDFs aren't working for you.

I think if you can convert them into audio, then they'd have a better chance of getting consumed while doing an activity like cooking, working out, or walking. I find it hard now to find dedicated time for just reading a book.
by rhetocj23 | 2025-10-18 20:31:49+00:00
It does seem pretty clear that an individual who possess super high quality human capital, paired with something like an LLM (provided the LLM is good enough relative to the individual) can be a powerful combination.

The issues are:

1) There isnt enough supply of those individuals 2) Such an LLM of that kind doesnt exist (at least not in consistent nature) 3) The amount invested into what is going on will not yield returns commensurate to the required rate of return

Interestingly enough, I believe Andrej Karpathy is also focusing on education (levelling up the supply of human capital) - I came to the above conclusion about a month ago. And it 'feels' right to me.
by lucaslazarus | 2025-10-18 20:33:12+00:00
This is so relatable, though it has a strange downside. I've had tinnitus for as long as I can remember and always thought I was some superhuman child who could hear electricity. Didn't actually realize it was tinnitus until I heard it at the top of a mountain I was hiking in remote New Mexico a few years ago. I probably got it from chronic sinusitis as a child, but I'm still not sure what to make of it.
by spudlyo | 2025-10-18 20:33:24+00:00
I would like to take this even further, I'd like to see what it's like to not consume any intellectual property encumbered media of any sort, so either public domain or CC licensed materials. I can, and do this easily enough with books, but for video it seems impossible. Of course, one could make the argument that would mean I'd be unable to read the comments here on Hacker News, however in practice IP protections on such tiny bits of content are rarely if ever enforced.

In a similar vein, I'd like to be able to block any YouTube content that is sponsored. This seems a lot more possible, since Sponsor Block already maintains this info.