MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sothatsit | 2025-10-17 12:30:16+00:00
I hope we move to a world where things like Skills replace MCP. People could package scripts that make API requests with curl instead of providing custom MCP servers. I think this has the potential to be much more flexible than MCP, make use of existing REST API infrastructure, and have much better context characteristics for agents.

MCP can be very clunky, both in it polluting your context and it being annoying to set up new services. Skills are simpler and put more work on the agentic harness, which I like.

Even before "Skills" I found that if you could write bash scripts for agents to execute instead of running MCP servers, that would often work a lot better. It's not always easy for things like controlling a browser, but when it does work bash scripts can be much simpler to manage. Skills are effectively an extension of this idea, just with nicer context management built-in.
by nobleach | 2025-10-17 12:30:48+00:00
Even though I do not write Elixir on the job, I often cite their docs as a gold standard. They're succinct, easy to read, and most often show an example of how a method is used. What's better is that the language has documentation as a first-class citizen (it's even testable!) meaning your auto-generated docs will look as nice as the language's.

I complain about OCaml docs all the time. But Elixir? no way.
by lunias | 2025-10-17 12:30:50+00:00
People are absurd... a majority of them got together and elected Trump in the first place. Lots of those people never considered any other option. A lot of times the reasoning goes: "Abortion is bad. I vote Republican." or even "I don't like that guy's face. I vote Democrat." People 100% make decisions and affect outcomes based on things that others consider trifling. Most people are not up late racking their brains over some Machiavellian scheme; they're like, "Nah, I want the sports car tho, minivans suck".
by dboreham | 2025-10-17 12:30:52+00:00
Quick note that while I hear nothing but good things about Hetzner, the approach is generic -- applies to the many other bare metal "SmallCo" providers. For example we use Hivelocity and have been very happy. Perhaps also worth mentioning that you can literally buy computers and rent space to plug them in and hook up to the internet in a place we call a data center. That's even cheaper when you know your workload long term and have access to capital.
by NoNameHaveI | 2025-10-17 12:31:01+00:00
"Future generations are gonna look back at us for our treatment of animals, especially farmed animals, much the way we look back at our slave owning ancestors." I predict that in the next 100 years, or less, consumption of animal products will be much the same taboo as tobacco consumption (in the USA) is today. Yes, they will still be around, but if you enjoy them openly, you will be a bit of a social pariah in many circles.
by thomasikzelf | 2025-10-17 12:31:13+00:00
I build a figma clone for animation (https://moos.app). It is by no means a super large project (I think 40k loc) but is has reasonable frontend complexity. Most stuff is just composed of simple functions. For example routing is just an eventListener on hashchange. For state I am passing around an environment or firing events (the event system is 100 loc). For showing UI there is one convenience function to create HTML elements. Basically tag(tagName, props, ...children) (implementation also 100 loc). Each view is it's own file and manages itself. The object list can contain thousands of items so it uses a virtual list for performance (100 loc).

As you can see most functionality can be implemented in around 100 lines of code. The advantage is that you can build up functions just for your needs. These functions are super easy to understand because they don't have any dependencies and the whole implementation fits on one or two screens. There is very little indirection.

Another advantage is that most code is actually doing something concrete. With frameworks you often have a lot of code that is just pointing to other code, or is boiler plate code to set something up. Not having any boilerplate code also makes stepping through the debugger a lot easier.

The project has no build step in development which also makes debugging easier. It does have a build step in production.

Most people use frameworks to give the code structure. When writing vanillajs you need to bring the structure of the code yourself. This does take some getting used to but I think it is an essential skill for good programmers to have. On top of that many frameworks push you into structure that does not make much sense in my mind (for example seperating the view and the controller if those are always gonna change together).

So to conclude: My advice for building without frameworks is, just start building. Problems will come up and you can tackle those as you go. Do you think you need to use events in your application? A simple implementation is 10 lines of code and can be written in 10 minutes. If it takes me 1 hour to not use a library I will spend that 1 hour. Most frameworks will not bring that much value. Easy things become short and hard things will become impossible. I think most value is actually brought by the language and the basic api's (DOM, CSS, etc)
by twoodfin | 2025-10-17 12:31:41+00:00
The premise was the IRS could send 90% of taxpayers pre-filled forms for approval & these would have a high degree of accuracy—if you have to go over them with a fine-toothed comb, what’s the point?

I don’t know the % of Americans each year who have a tax-related event that isn’t already reported to the IRS, but given something like the complex eligibility rules for the widely-used EITC, or the number of folks paying back college loans, I’m comfortable saying it’s much higher than 10%.

A ton of tax law is premised on who lived where for how long to determine primary residence. Many citizens—especially poorer ones—move a lot. The IRS should build reporting mechanisms to keep tabs on where everyone lives month-to-month?

You can either simplify the tax code dramatically or increase massively the amount of preemptive reporting to the IRS. Otherwise this idea of the IRS divining the typical American’s tax obligations is unworkable.
by alexpotato | 2025-10-17 12:31:43+00:00
I enjoyed the article and wanted to share a story that highlights how a good data model can even bused for incident management tickets:

- Incident ticket gets created

- It used to go to a department wide alias

- Head of Dept used to open the email, hit forward and then have to To/CC the owner of the system affected

- JIRA (which we used) already the idea of a Component and you could tie an owner to each Component

- Update the notifications to be: in the "To" field was the Component owner and who opened the ticket. In the "Bcc" field was the department wide alias

- Now, the Dept Head could just hit reply and get to the right people. The BCC meant that everyone knew something had occurred.
by cesarb | 2025-10-17 12:32:22+00:00
On top of that, there was the removal of built-in J2EE; you needed to add external copies of the J2EE pieces, and some of them (like CORBA) weren't available as separate packages. And later versions of these external J2EE packages changed the namespace of all their classes, which is especially painful in Java due to its common use of dynamic loading of classes by name and lazy linking (and lazy linking errors do not inherit from Exception, which allows them to escape from catch-all "catch (Exception e)" clauses). The rest of the ecosystem is starting to depend on these new versions, so staying with old versions of these J2EE packages is not an option.
by theoreticalmal | 2025-10-17 12:32:25+00:00
Isn’t TSMC one of like 3 semiconductor producers on the planet? And wouldn’t that satisfy your claim of “once a market is controlled by a few players, all true growth stops”? But we’ve seen phenomenal and continuous improvements over the last few years. So which part of our situation do we have to re-interpret for your claim to be correct? Is the growth not “true”? Is 3 not “a few players”? Or is, perhaps, your outlook somehow incorrect?
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-10-17 12:32:26+00:00
I buy a lot of books from used book stores. Fundamentally I'm only paying for the paper it's printed on as none of those fat proceeds($3.99 paperback) ever reach the publisher. Totally cool and legal.

When I'm following a new book that's coming out, I'll drop the $30 on the unnecessarily large hardcover with the thick paper that fluffs it up.

I have only ever purchased one eBook though, and it was an awful experience. I had to crack the DRM so I could read it on the same app I read all my other books on.

When I buy a physical book, I can put it on my shelf and share it with anyone I want. I can't do that with an ebook. And if I can't comfortably read the oversized print copy, I'm going to just go find a copy online.

I basically refuse to buy physical modern fiction due to the publishing industry making every physical copy as large as possible. I have old mass-market paperbacks that have twice the density per page, thinner pages, and overall more portable than the massive soft-covers with giant print that they sell today. They're just uncomfortable to read. I took a copy of "Death's End" and a copy of "Thinking in Jazz" by Paul F Berliner. From the outside, the two books have nearly the same dimensions. The latter weighs almost twice as much, has nearly 300 more pages, and the page density is nearly a third tighter. Why should both these books take up the same amount of space on my shelf? Why do publishers think they're so important as to take up two seats on the plane? Bring back smaller mass market formfactors ffs and I'll pay full price for their bullshit.

Publishing companies are making their products worse and worse to consume. As Gabe Newel says, it's a distribution problem.
by piva00 | 2025-10-17 12:32:43+00:00
The same 2nd amendment from 1791 when the most firepower a government could have were cannons shooting round cannonballs?

Surely in 2025 a ragtag group of people with some revolvers, pistols, hunting rifles, and a small minority owning assault rifles, with limited ammo will be able to fight against the most well-funded armed force with tanks, IFVs, assault helicopters, aircrafts, missiles, rockets, and military infantry armed to the gills wearing NVGs.

People who think 2A will do anything in case your government actually turns violent on you are just trying to maintain the illusion of control.
by Aissen | 2025-10-17 12:33:08+00:00
As an infrastructure engineer (amongst other things), hard disagree here. I realize you might be joking, but a bit of context here: a big chunk of the success of Cloud in more traditional organizations is the agility that comes with it: (almost) no need to ask permission to anyone, ownership of your resources, etc. There is no reason that baremetal shouldn't provide the same customer-oriented service, at least for the low-level IaaS, give-me-a-VM-now needs. I'd even argue this type of self-service (and accounting!) should be done by any team providing internal software services.
by Annabella_W | 2025-10-17 12:33:24+00:00
Today’s newsletter covers:

The Nobel prize winning ‘molecular sponges’ and their surprising uses in biosecurity.

A 200% safer AI-designed car bumper that may never materialise.

Virtual sensors for fusion discoveries and a tough dilemma for future science.

Chinas tariffs and the dirty secret of the rare-earth metals powering our green future.
by lelanthran | 2025-10-17 12:33:29+00:00
> C VLAs got dropped in C11, function prototypes changed meaning in C23, and K&R declarations were dropped from the standard.

Not so sure I'd call these huge breaking changes. They're breaking, sure, but I'd expect them to be trivial to fix in any existing codebase.

Maybe VLAs are a huge breaking change? Most code never used it due to no way at all to use them safely, so while it is a pain to replace all occurrences of them, the number of usages should be really low.
by nativeit | 2025-10-17 12:34:46+00:00
Presumably the volatility inherent to “volatile chemicals” makes it challenging to reproduce on-demand. I’d imagine you’d need something like dozens of base compounds, alcohols and acids to create esters and carrier media, some way of protecting all of it from oxygen, a hyper-accurate mixing device that can then by hyper-cleaned between each scent, since our noses would be too sensitive to allow even a small amount of cross-contamination…and then, why stop at smell? You basically already have everything you need for taste as well. Insert some lab-grown tissues and/or fibers, and we’ve invented the Star Trek replicator!
by whstl | 2025-10-17 12:35:32+00:00
After being immersed in cloud-native hell for a few years, I'll say it:

This setup is probably also easier to reason about and easier to make secure than the messy garbage pushed by Amazon and other cloud providers.

People see Cloud providers with rose-colored glasses, but even something like RDS requires VPCs, subnets, route tables, security groups, Internet/NAT gateways, lots of IAM roles, and CloudWatch to be usable. And to make it properly secure (meaning: not just sharing the main DB password with the team) you need way more as well, and it's hard to orchestrate, it's not just an option in a CloudFormation script.

Sure securing a server is hard too, but people 1. actually share this info and 2. don't have illusions about it.
by owenversteeg | 2025-10-17 12:35:35+00:00
I would actually disagree. A typical characteristic about "food in the place it's famously from" is that the _median_ level of quality is quite high, and particularly in the case of anything involving bread - that it's fresh. The case of pizza in NYC is the same. There are certainly places selling shit pizza and shit croissants to tourists, but even in a fairly popular tourist hotspot it will likely be very freshly made and of surprisingly good quality. Even the bottom of the barrel (a $1.50 pizza near Times Square or Paris train-station chain boulangerie) is above the best thing you can get in countless countries around the world. Don't get me wrong, I'll happily go in search of The Best of whatever, but if just pick a place at random, it probably will be surprisingly good.

Legally, to even call yourself a boulangerie in France you must bake your goods on site, make the dough from scratch, ferment yourself, shape everything yourself... that alone guarantees a certain floor of quality: https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI0000... There are in fact quite strict laws about boulangeries in France... since a law in 1790 they are not even allowed to pick their own vacation days!
by sethammons | 2025-10-17 12:35:37+00:00
Counter point: spooky code at a distance is bad. Splitting your code to live partially in source control and partly in the database means keeping multiple layers in sync. This is coupling, and coupling multiple things, especially if that means teams, together means increased overhead.

I have seen business rules as stored procedures lock a business into their current model across with a dozen teams, effectively making system improvements impossible. And because they needed some olap atop oltp in some cases, their very beefy postgres solution crawled down to a max of 2k queries per second. I worked with them for over a year trying to pull apart domain boundaries and unlock teams from one another. Shared, stored procedures was a major pole in the tent of things making scaling the technical org incredibly hard.

Repeat after me: uncoupled teams are faster.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-17 12:36:13+00:00
As historical background information, MMTk was initially implemented in Java, and used on the JikesRVM VM, one of the very first bootstraped Java implementations.

https://www.jikesrvm.org/UserGuide/MMTk/index.html

Eventually they rewrote it in Rust,

https://www.mmtk.io/

Thus it is much more than the 5 years mentioned on the post, that only covers the rewrite.
by antisol | 2025-10-17 12:36:13+00:00
This reminds me of when Australia tried to force twitter to block a video globally: https://news.rebekahbarnett.com.au/p/elon-musk-wins-latest-c...

In one of the more enlightened things Elon has done in the last few years, he fought back, and he won.

Interestingly, here in AU, there was a storm of media outrage at the time, saying all kinds of nasty things about Musk, making all kinds of assertions about how he was super arrogant and wrong to insist on upholding american's freedom of speech, with no attempt to justify why. It was almost like we were just expected to assume that AU law applies everywhere on earth.

Here's a fun sample of a totally unbiased article from the time: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-20/elon-musk-reacts-to-e...

Strangely, when the court order wasn't upheld because AU laws don't actually apply outside our country, and the gubmint that was so outraged and "ready to take him on" lost badly on every point, there was no huge storm of media coverage about that.
by refactor_master | 2025-10-17 12:36:20+00:00
The term is actually a Chinese loanword, 火爐. One could then argue that without writing it with characters it just becomes meaningless sounds, which could have originated from any number of characters, if given no context. So therefore, your example doesn’t work so well either.

I would argue that the loss of characters work for the Vietnamese because the intelligibility is “good enough”, in the same way that writing Vietnamese completely without diacritics for an English-language newspaper is also “good enough”.
by alberth | 2025-10-17 12:36:20+00:00
There's a value curve for infrastructure, I'll use an analogy...

Low Cost High Cost ============================================================== FARM WHOLESALER GROCERY RESTAURANT DOORDASH BUILD CO-LOCATION HETZNER AWS VERCEL

While it's not a perfect analogy, in principle it holds true.

As such, it should come as no surprise that eating at a restaurant every day is going to be way more expensive.
by maccard | 2025-10-17 12:37:19+00:00
I’m not a doctor. I have been through the runner with a different injury (slipped disc), and I’ve seen the medical advice change in my lifetime. my conclusion is pretty loosely “it’s going to come back, the cure may be worse than the disease, the better you take care of it when it’s good the easier it’ll be when it flares up”.

Look at elite athletes - golfers, tennis players, etc. they put their bodies under the stresses we do, pick up “career ending” injuries and manage to recover from them in many cases.
by debazel | 2025-10-17 12:37:34+00:00
It's not that uncommon for people to pay small donations to free releases on Bandcamp and similar sites where you can set your own amount. Most won't do it, but there's clearly a subset of consumers who do, or this business strategy wouldn't exist.

Personally I have no issue paying for books and other media as it's not the price keeping me away. My issue is that any amount of that money going to providers that are pushing this DRM locked content, which I will absolutely under no circumstances support, no matter how cheap.
by redhale | 2025-10-17 12:38:01+00:00
Looking through the issues tagged "documentation" provides many examples (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues?q=label%3Ad...). It's so common they have an issue template for "Missing documentation (feature not documented)".

Here are a few recent open ones: - "Documentation missing for new 'Explore' subagent" - https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/9595 - "Missing documentation for modifying tool inputs in PreToolUse hooks" - https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/9185 - "Missing Documentation for Various Claude Code Features (CLI Flags, Slash Commands, & Tools)" - https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8584
by dboreham | 2025-10-17 12:38:24+00:00
You need to buy the hardware. However, you don't really need a dude on-hand to swap stuff on a daily basis, unless you're trying to host backblaze. The approach we take (with our data center 1000 miles away) is to provision excess machines. So if we need 6 machines we'll provision, say 8. Failure modes are always assumed to be "the whole machine" -- so a machine is either in service or not. Over time (years) one or two machines might fail in one way or another. Every couple of years we mount a rescue mission to repair/replace the bad machines, do some upgrades etc. We have redundant switches and routers and would make a special trip to replace one of those if there were a failure. The entire deployment has a "scaled to zero" cloud hot standby in place for the eventuality that the whole setup gets nuked somehow.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-10-17 12:39:03+00:00
I think you might be doing something wrong then? Maybe you have the wrong file? The Kindle For PC app should always give you azw files, not azw8 (even if it does use the newer format they're all just named azw).

It should show up in the epubor app on the Kindle tab after you install the kindle app and used it to download your books. No need to drag and drop from the file system it's all right there in the app. It finds Kindle, Kobo, etc and lists them.

EDIT - Make sure you leave the Kindle app running. I think it needs to be able to read the keys from memory or something.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-17 12:40:52+00:00
It is its own can of worms, and maybe it is due to me using the language on and off since 1992, but I find what is possible in C++23, much easier for metaprogramming as the few times I had to understand trying to implement Rust macros.

C++26 reflection will make this much easier, without having to depend in stuff like the syn crate.

I wonder if going with two macro systems, each with its own syntax and approach, was such a good idea.
by simonsarris | 2025-10-17 12:41:37+00:00
> Capitalism is Luddite at a fundamental level

You mean: Capitalism is luddite at the individual level. At the aggregate level, it's the opposite.

> in a capitalist economy all participants are always incentivised to grow as large as possible

As opposed to...?

> Once a market is controlled by a few players - ALL TRUE GROWTH STOPS

I'm not trying to be insulting but I think you need to read a bit more about the world before capitalism. Before the Renaissance Italian and Dutch innovations in banking, company ownership, etc.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-17 12:42:08+00:00
Best way I've found to deal with moderately complex codebases and LLMs is to almost go overboard with splitting things into libraries/reusable components, and let the LLM go wild on each individual component, but I'm 100% of the owner of how all the pieces fit together.

Seems when a project goes beyond a certain scope, LLMs lose the ability of separating what they come across, so everything "blends into a global state" or something, and it'll indirectly be inspired by unrelated things. All LLMs/agents seems to suffer from this more or less, as far as I can tell.