MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ModernMech | 2025-10-25 15:15:32+00:00
Thank you, I kept waiting for a chart or some numbers that never came. Per usual, we are talking about orders of magnitude difference compared to actually high performing code. Another word for that is "slow". Just worlds apart in expectations.

Of course the lesson is when it comes to performance, it's extremely hard to make up with tuning what you lose in language design. You can optimize the work all you want but nothing beats designing it so that you don't have to do a good chunk of it in the first place.
by dc396 | 2025-10-25 15:15:54+00:00
See https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/rest..., section 2(e):

"Statutory references to the Department of Defense, Secretary of Defense, and subordinate officers and components shall remain controlling until changed subsequently by the law."

That is, until a law is passed by Congress, DoD is the primary, controlling title (DoW is an "additional secondary title" according to the EO).
by jcalvinowens | 2025-10-25 15:16:01+00:00
I had an MRI with contrast once. I remember the gadolinium injection made me extremely nauseous for a few minutes, but otherwise it has had zero effect on me personally.

Some sad advice: don't ask doctors about this, my experience is that it will cause them to write you off as a crazy person no matter how you bring it up. Many of them lump this in with what they see as "influencer illnesses", whether fairly or not.

And maybe more practically, if you really need an MRI, whatever you might have is much more likely to hurt you.
by gruez | 2025-10-25 15:16:08+00:00
Right, because they're broken down for parts, but there's only so much you can do. For one, every time Apple tries to do something to lock down parts, right to repair people decry it as some sort of trojan horse to shut down third party repairs. Moreover even with parts serialization, there's only so much you can do. There's no inherent way for a bag of electrolytes to identify itself to a phone. The best you can do is add a chip to it and identify using that, but you can't prevent that chip from being transferred.
by sys_64738 | 2025-10-25 15:16:14+00:00
The key difference between a Principal and Senior Developer is the pivot from what you know to who you know. Principal is meant to take initiatives and run with them. Senior Developers do the real work. Principals are called out by execs when they need to refer to ownership in a specific space. Senior Developer, not so much. I only glanced/searched at this individual's webpage briefly, but it seems like they weren't fully clicked for understanding organizational behavior. The difference between "what you know" and "who you know".
by righthand | 2025-10-25 15:16:15+00:00
I just throw everyone who tells me “chatgpt said” or “ask chatgpt” into the idiot pile in my brain. It’s not nice but usually these are people who tell me incorrect things in the first place. Or turn in half finished unoptimized work. Maybe Llms are just a way to identify the mentally lazy?

No one I know who says this kind of thing would read this article. People love being lazy.
by panphora | 2025-10-25 15:18:08+00:00
Author here.

I appreciate the point about unidirectional data flow solving real problems, but I think we're trading one complexity for another rather than actually simplifying things.

Yes, cascading state changes with Backbone Store were frustrating to debug. But React's abstractions introduce their own set of equally frustrating problems: stale closures where your click handler sees old state, infinite useEffect loops because an object in the dependency array gets recreated every render, mysterious input clearing because a key changed from stable to index-based.

The difference is that Backbone's problems were explicit and visible. When something broke, you could trace the event handlers, see what fired when, and understand the flow. The complexity was in your face, which made it debuggable.

React's problems are hidden behind abstraction layers.

I'm not saying React doesn't solve problems. I'm questioning whether those solutions are appropriate for the 99% of apps that aren't Facebook-scale. Sometimes the explicit, verbose approach is actually easier to reason about in the long run.
by chrisweekly | 2025-10-25 15:18:23+00:00
It has some good points (and vanilla-extract IS awesome), but it's also a bit unfair, eg ignoring tailwind affordances like `apply`.

That said, for learning the "right" way to think about and use CSS, https://every-layout.dev is hands-down the best resource I've encountered in my 20+ years working with websites.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-25 15:19:16+00:00
Have you thought about it? If you have given it serious thought and decided that this is what you want, then by all means, go ahead.

The problem is that people choose permissive licenses to be "nice" when the truth is they have tons of unwritten rules and hidden assumptions. Magical thinking like "if I publish this open source software then it will come back to me in some way, maybe a job, maybe a sponsorship." No such deal exists. Then they wake up one day with corporations making billions off of their software while they're not making even one cent, and they suddenly have a very public meltdown where they bitterly regret their decisions. I've seen it happen, even with copyleft licenses.
by jerlam | 2025-10-25 15:19:23+00:00
> It isn’t uncommon for small companies facing financial difficulties to delay moving the 401(k) contributions they deduct from workers’ paychecks into their retirement accounts

Wow, so it is basically legal to use your employees' paycheck for short term, zero interest loans. And if you go out of business the employees have to fight to get their money back from a dead company.
by mikeckennedy | 2025-10-25 15:19:27+00:00
Why in the world would you create a soundtrack for a course? This Python + AI coding course has a few odd quiet, silent sections. Most of it is standard talking style. But when Claude is working hard, sometimes I want everyone to just see what it's doing and I want to get out of the way. This isn't a lot, but it's enough that'd rather have something interesting while Claude is working.

You can listen to and download the whole track if you're looking for some chill developer music to put on that isn't distracting.

Let me know what you think!
by tensility | 2025-10-25 15:19:31+00:00
"But the comments that quote it directly are almost always trash."

Because the output is almost always trash, and it takes re-doing the work and then claiming that it came from LLMs for it not to be.

These tools are being sold to me as similar to what a Jr engineer offers me, but that's not at all true because I would fire a Jr that came to me with such bullshit and needing such significant hand-holding so often as what I see coming out of an LLM.
by panphora | 2025-10-25 15:20:15+00:00
Author here.

The "paleo influencer" comparison is interesting, but I think it actually works both ways here.

Yes, there's a temptation to romanticize the past and dismiss modern tools. But there's an equally strong tendency to assume that newer, more popular, and more widely-adopted automatically means better. React didn't just win on pure technical merit. It has Facebook's marketing muscle behind it, it became a hiring checkbox, and it created a self-reinforcing ecosystem where everyone learns it because everyone uses it.

The article isn't suggesting that a "huge global collective of the world's most talented engineers have been conned." It's asking a much more nuanced question: did all that effort actually move us forward, or did we just move sideways into different complexity?

Look at the two implementations in the article. They do the same thing. They're roughly the same length. After 15 years of React development, countless developer hours, and a massive ecosystem, we're not writing dramatically less code or solving the problem more elegantly. We're just solving it differently, with different tradeoffs.

Sometimes looking backward isn't about being a "retro-idealist," it's about questioning whether we added complexity without proportional benefit. The paleo diet people might be onto something when they point out that we over-engineered our food. Maybe we over-engineered our frameworks too.
by orwin | 2025-10-25 15:21:26+00:00
Yes, something i didn't know whan i was 18. It's not easy to know what to eat when you're young, and to pick up bad habits. Then when overeating destroyed your hormonal balance (insulin, ghrelin are appetite regulating hormones that which imbalance can make a tiny bit of hunger massive and painfull), it's extremely hard to adopt "normal" eating habits without a lot of stability in your life.
by danans | 2025-10-25 15:21:26+00:00
Congress should rescind that law also. It also doesn't mean anything when it's not enforced, and rescinding it has broad popular support.

But as you probably know, practically speaking it's not feasible to enforce every law on the books at all times, so the balance of laws enforced tells you about the priorities of a government. This one sees white collar crime as a feature, not a bug.
by danaris | 2025-10-25 15:21:42+00:00
The thing is, while this is, to some extent, true, it has to coexist alongside the fact that many SaaSes, in practice, are predatory and overpriced.

Once you're providing your product as SaaS, the incentives for you to gatekeep features behind higher tiers of subscription become very strong. Similarly, the incentives to create lock-in become much more prominent than they are if you only get paid again if they liked your product enough to buy the next version, too.

And, in all likelihood, the extra money—the difference between "how much we need to continue to provide a high-quality product (including dev salaries)" and "how much we're charging you"—is going to pad the execs' bonuses and fund stock buybacks.

I would love to see there be a middle ground—where any piece of software that makes sense to have as SaaS can be provided as such, for what it costs to make it plus reasonable profit, at a high quality, and the dark patterns are disincentivized through regulation and/or through voting with our wallets.

Unfortunately, given the political climate we live in, that's not going to happen any time soon. So for me, personally, by far the best choice is always going to be to pick software I can buy once and own forever, and if I want the next version I can buy that.
by panphora | 2025-10-25 15:21:53+00:00
Author here.

I agree that all frameworks require learning framework-specific concepts, but I think there's a meaningful difference in what you need to know and how that knowledge transfers.

With Backbone, jQuery, or vanilla JavaScript, you're learning DOM APIs, event patterns, and explicit state management. These are things that are visible, inspectable, and fundamentally close to the platform. When something breaks, you can pop open devtools, see the actual DOM, trace the event handlers, and understand what's happening. The knowledge you gain is transferable. It's about how the web platform actually works.

With React, you're learning abstractions on top of abstractions: virtual DOM diffing, reconciliation algorithms, why objects in dependency arrays cause infinite loops, why your click handler sees stale state, why your input mysteriously cleared itself. This is React-specific magic that doesn't transfer. It's knowledge about how to work around React's mental model, not knowledge about how the web works.

You mention that batching and DOM reconciliation are solvable problems that justify React's complexity. But the article's point is that for most apps -- not Facebook-scale apps with 1,000 components on one page, but normal CRUD apps -- those problems can be solved with simpler patterns and conventions. We don't need a virtual DOM and a sophisticated reconciliation algorithm to build a form validator.

The real question isn't "does React solve problems?" It's "does React's complexity match the complexity of the problems most developers are actually solving?"
by HowardStark | 2025-10-25 15:22:02+00:00
Honestly, I was so confident in what I thought I knew (namely evil giant Alaskan mosquitoes) that I didn’t bother to read the article I linked, I just added it for others’ context. Culiseta alaskaensis is probably the source of confusion, and I think a switch-up happened when this was first relayed to me. Looks like the island might be back on, assuming it doesn’t get hot enough to become temperate in the next few years hah.
by rogerbinns | 2025-10-25 15:22:07+00:00
C code needs to be updated to be safe in a GIL free execution environment. It is a lot of work! The pervasive problem is that mutable data structures (lists, dict etc) could change at any arbitrary point while the C code is working with them, and the reference count for others could drop to zero if *anyone* is using a borrowed reference (common for performance in CPython APIs). Previously the GIL protected where those changes could happen. In simple cases it is adding a critical section, but often there multiple data structures in play. As an example these are the changes that had to be done to the standard library json module:

https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/119438/files#diff-efe...

This is how much of the standard library has been audited:

https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/116738

The json changes above are in Python 3.15, not the just released 3.14.

The consequences of the C changes not being made are crashes and corruption if unexpected mutation or object freeing happens. Web services are exposed to adversity so be *very* careful.

It would be a big help if CPython released a tool that could at least scan a C code base to detect free threaded issues, and ideally verify it is correct.
by SoftTalker | 2025-10-25 15:22:20+00:00
There is plenty of electronics-oriented content online that will teach you way more than 65 circuits. It's not "hands on" in the sense those Radio Shack kits were, but that's what Sparkfun is for.

And I just checked their site, and what do you know... https://www.sparkfun.com/sparkfun-inventors-kit-for-micropyt...
by phil21 | 2025-10-25 15:22:30+00:00
I grew up quite poor.

My parents cared enough to find ways to get me into private schools on grants and scholarships.

My neighbors had just as many if not more opportunities to do so but did not care enough to do so for their children.

Yes, it’s caring. Education as a top priority for poor families is the number one way a parent can give their kid a better life than they had. Most do not even try.
by parpfish | 2025-10-25 15:22:30+00:00
i didn't read the original article, but an interesting aspect to the elderly screen addiction is that there's a real imbalance in content consumption vs. content creation.

young folks on social media create a lot content (posts/photos/videos) meant for their peer group to consume, so their feed is a mix of authentic peer-generated content and whatever mass-produced stuff sneaks into their feed.

older folks do not share nearly as much. maybe a text-based facebook comment once in a while. so when they log and consume from their feed, they aren't watching things created by their peers -- they're seeing content that professionals created for the purpose of broadcast.
by hypfer | 2025-10-25 15:22:36+00:00
Sure, but the action is still incorrect and that's why the reaction was removal.

Deserving sounds like a punishment, but it's just action => reaction. Attendance privilege was misused so it was revoked for a while.

I get where you're coming from, but the question there always ends up "where is the line?"

The answer in this case makes it simple. The line is crossed the moment transactional self-promotion happens.

No surprises for anyone. No discussions about which groups might be allowed to do so and why. A simple "no transactionality full stop".

Btw, most bans in my space expire after a while, because I do believe that people can and will change, but, as per the CoC, there is also another way to appeal a ban.
by tromp | 2025-10-25 15:24:15+00:00
> The image itself piCore-16.0.0.img is only 101MB in size, which is really small compared to Ubuntu server > is this the smallest possible OS out there? The answer to this is: no, but the alternatives are to use stripped back versions of the Linux kernel, and I don’t feel too comfortable doing that yet, but who knows perhaps in the future I might revisit this article.

Having grown up with hobby computers whose OS typically fit into 16KB of ROM, I find it hard to believe that an OS for a fixed type of hardware needs to be over 1MB in size (64x larger) to support a webserver for static web pages...
by ac29 | 2025-10-25 15:26:16+00:00
> But yeah it's kind of delusional to put a blanket ban on code you could read yourself.

uBlock origin is 307k lines of code. Yes, you could read it all, but its an impractical task.

Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting uBO is untrustworthy, but just because a piece of software is open source doesn't mean it is practical for an individual to audit the code themselves.
by sibeliuss | 2025-10-25 15:27:09+00:00
Yes, applying compositional patterns and one-way data flow is most appropriate for all apps, independent of scale. Why? Because developer A (author of app x) leaves company. Developer B gets hired. Developer B is onboarded in an afternoon because things can be understood at a glance thanks to functional patterns and one-way data flow.

Having built many large-scale Backbone apps, anytime someone new came on board it was really very, very difficult, no matter how many design patterns one applied.

React's innovation was making FP mainstream. And then teaching the value of simplicity, as a principle. And yah, if something broke, it might be a little opaque, but at scale and in general, things broke _way less often_.

This is also the reason why most devs are full-stack now. Back in the day backend devs wouldn't dare touch FE code, and now its "not so bad", and pretty much anyone can work all over the stack.
by constantius | 2025-10-25 15:27:12+00:00
You're right, Slack/Trello alt is what I view it as, but the Trello part was more relevant for me.

For anyone reading, Zulip (for Slack) and Wekan (for Trello) are good replacements.

I needed to switch an org away from Slack, seems like Zulip has a new customer :).

https://zulip.com/ https://wekan.github.io/
by everdrive | 2025-10-25 15:27:41+00:00
>Can we stop

No, that's not possible. Your comment will be seen by a tiny minority of people on the internet and is a drop in the ocean. The impulse to persuade social change works in small groups, and the frustration you're feeling is completely feckless on the internet. (ie, if you were saying "can we stop [thing] in a small workplace you might actually have success. Out here on the internet this is really impossible, and is a mismatch between our intuitions and reality.)
by jpalawaga | 2025-10-25 15:28:46+00:00
Depends. They found one of these in New York but it’s very easy for 10s of thousands onto gather in a relatively small area. For example, New Year’s Eve, sports/concert at msg, regular foot traffic at Times Square, etc. so I think barring even antennas shenanigans, disguising it could be not impossible.

(I also understand they rarely use all active SIMs at the same time but instead rotate through in order to avoid arousing suspicion)
by not_kurt_godel | 2025-10-25 15:29:17+00:00
It's a broader definition of HATEOAS. A stricter interpretation with practical, real-world benefits is a RESTful API definition that is fully self-contained that the client can get in a single request from the server and construct the presentation layer in whole with no further information except server responses in the same format. Or, slightly less strictly, a system where the server procedurally generates the presentation layer from the same API definition, rather than requiring separate frontend code for the client.
by LexiMax | 2025-10-25 15:29:24+00:00
Some people enjoy the relative simplicity and straight forwardness of C, some folks enjoy the flexibility and zero cost abstractions C++ gives you.

Some people can appreciate both. I actually like both languages for different reasons and I don't really understand why they're consistently being pitted against each other. Language wars are... for lack of a more appropriate and less-crass term... stupid.
by diegof79 | 2025-10-25 15:29:26+00:00
I worked with Backbone, Angular 1, Ember, and then React.

The article overlooks the problems that made React popular:

- Composition: Composing components is easier and more efficient in React. Backbone’s render function assumes "this.$el" is mounted and available in the DOM. That makes composition difficult: you cannot simply nest one component inside another without managing the DOM lifecycle of subcomponents. You don’t need 1.000 components to feel the pain.

- Event handling: You can’t pass an event handler as a string, so the events object must be paired with the selector to locate the element. Any structural changes require updating selectors or managing unique IDs.

- State management: Re-rendering components when state changes becomes messy in Backbone fairly quickly. That mess is why Angular 1 gained popularity. React simplifies this further by enforcing a one-directional state flow.

- Efficient DOM updates: Even if you implement composition and state management ad hoc, you still must update the DOM efficiently to avoid layout thrashing and related issues. React isn’t immune, but these problems are typically easier to handle.

- Other features: Implementing useful capabilities from scratch, like lazy loading parts of components (for example, suspense) or building hybrid apps with server-side rendering, requires significant work.

I'll argue that nowadays, if you want to use vanilla JS with templating support, lit-html (not the full framework, just the template part) is a much better choice than Backbone.
by thelastgallon | 2025-10-25 15:29:29+00:00
Electricity prices are going up nearly everywhere. Bitcoin and AI are a wealth transfer from everyone to the crypto/AI folks.

Wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. That's being passed on to customers: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-elec...
by jodrellblank | 2025-10-25 15:29:32+00:00
> be me

> live in city

> breathe vehicle exhaust and tire dust everyday

> drink alcohol

> drive to my desk job

> live on ultra processed food

> salt and sugar for a treat

> better not touch this piece of paper - for my health

> open another Monster energy drink (tm). I can sleep when I’m dead.
by marky1991 | 2025-10-25 15:30:13+00:00
As a us person, I don't even know what deaf-mute means? (Is it deaf and mute? Like Helen Keller?) I've literally never heard the word used in my life.

But I'm sure basically any word has been used as an insult in some context, that doesn't mean it's useful to consider all such usage as such.