MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bilekas | 2025-10-17 01:16:15+00:00
I'd just like to say, I'm somewhat diagnosed for anxiety and some adhd in Europe so it's a bit more loose, I never consider it or even medicate much. But this has made me think about the tiny things that throw me. And just now I found the perfect example. My TV. I removed all netflix, prime Disney etc. But as I'm watching YouTube which I'm prone to do to chill out. I sit on the remote. The remote had a netflix button, TV decides I need to install in, automatically, referral cookies loaded and my TV from my video I'm watching, to sitting on the remote, has netflix in my face asking me for money. Just happened AGAIN.
by underlipton | 2025-10-17 01:19:24+00:00
>The resistance to UI change is huge among die-hard users so the projects tend to get stuck in whatever UI language they had a decade ago when they started

Oh, worse: stuck in whatever weird, half-baked UI decisions that were made because someone had a great idea that they did not test at all, or because they hated the industry standard approach that everyone else uses. It's no secret that Blender adoption exploded when they added normal menus, and then made right-click select an optional function, and then finally added an auto Maya-like interface option.

But that's one instance where we lucked out. Not just because they fixed it, but also because the thing that needed to be fixed was in users' face and obvious.
by nl | 2025-10-17 01:20:05+00:00
OpenAI Codex currently seems quite a lot better than Gemini 2.5 and marginally better than Claude.

I'm using all three back-to-back via the VS Code plugins (which I believe are equivalent to the CLI tools).

I can live with either OpenAI Codex or Claude. Gemini 2.5 is useful but it is consistently not quite as good as the other two.

I agree that for non-Agentic coding tasks Gemini 2.5 is really good though.
by technothrasher | 2025-10-17 01:20:29+00:00
I made some text adventures in elementary school on the school's Apple II machines in the early 80's after playing Scott Adams' games (as a side note, it was amazing to be able to tell him directly many years later how much he influenced my learning to program). Anyway, a few years after I graduated from the school, I went back to visit, and some kids figured out it was me who's adventures they'd been playing and asked how to get past the one point in one that they couldn't figure out. I had to tell them, much to their disappointment, that I hadn't actually finished that game.
by knighthack | 2025-10-17 01:20:38+00:00
One other thing - latency.

The newest Macbooks have insanely powerful hardware (I have an M4 Macbook Max). Yet they do not feel as speedy or instant on my machines with i3. There's always a perceivable milliseconds of latency, with response time from the keyboard to the screen. As someone who has tons of key bindings, I find this tolerable, but it can get a bit grating compared to just how instantaneous everything is on my Linux.
by lz400 | 2025-10-17 01:21:46+00:00
That's not correct. It counts the total number of school shootings. Some of those shootings had no victims. The total of students shot is also provided with some more elaboration with charts here.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-17/us-school-shootings-2...

As you can see your number of 13 makes no sense, there were 200-300 students shot (!)
by cies | 2025-10-17 01:22:54+00:00
I don't program in Elixir, but I'm a fan.

I was a fan of Ruby -- because of it's pragmatism and subjective beauty -- but then I got into type systems.

Elixir now also has a type system and, so does Ruby...

Though I know program in Kotlin, which syntax-wise is very much a "typed Ruby".
by FrostKiwi | 2025-10-17 01:23:14+00:00
They already have the Plugin Marketplace [1]. It's all too much of a fast moving target for something as rigid as a package manager I think. Open source projects for now will be limited to Awesome-* collections [2]

[1] https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/plugin-marketpla...

[2] https://github.com/hesreallyhim/awesome-claude-code
by btown | 2025-10-17 01:25:17+00:00
If a single TCP channel is all that is allowed, on a single port to a single orchestrator IP, and the only service attached to that channel on the other end is the orchestrator which reports results to the host worker, why would you need anything to do with DNS? Isn't this a simple thing to do with a firewall rule, once you know the orchestrator's network-local IP?

(Certainly this would prevent things like package manager installations, etc... but if you're in a use case where you really want to sandbox things, you wouldn't want people to have e.g. NPM access as I'm sure there are ways to use that for exfiltration/C&C!)
by georgemcbay | 2025-10-17 01:25:20+00:00
> Convert the whole codebase into a string

When using the Gemini web app on a desktop system (could be different depending upon how you consume Gemini) if you select the + button in the bottom-left of the chat prompt area, select Import code, and then choose the "Upload folder" link at the bottom of the dialog that pops up, it'll pull up a file dialog letting you choose a directory and it will upload all the files in that directory and all subdirectories (recursively) and you can then prompt it on that code from there.

The upload process for average sized projects is, in my experience, close to instantaneous (obviously your mileage can vary if you have any sort of large asset/resource type files commingled with the code).

If your workflow already works then keep with it, but for projects with a pretty clean directory structure, uploading the code via the Import system is very straightforward and fast.

(Obvious disclaimer: Depending upon your employer, the code base in question, etc, uploading a full directory of code like this to Google or anyone else may not be kosher, be sure any copyright holders of the code are ok with you giving a "cloud" LLM access to the code, etc, etc)
by CamperBob2 | 2025-10-17 01:26:01+00:00
These would be the same omniscient, benevolent regulators who intentionally set speed limits well beneath the 85th-percentile rule where highway safety is optimized? (Well, no, those would be different regulators entirely, but still...)

Speed limits aren't about being able to stop everybody, they're about being able to stop anybody. If nobody exceeded the speed limit, then rest assured, it would be lowered further.
by loeg | 2025-10-17 01:26:24+00:00
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42675538

Edit: Oh, right, this isn't even the first report on this from CR:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42675944 (2010, 2018, 2020, 2024)

Worth keeping in mind the baseline -- Americans consume something like 2-5 ug of lead daily, on average, and Europeans consume something like 25-100 ug of lead daily, on average.
by gruez | 2025-10-17 01:28:57+00:00
> because DRM effectively removes the work from the public domain in perpetuity.

This doesn't make for a good anti-DRM argument because the concern can simply be addressed by requiring a DRM-free copy to be deposited at the library of congress (or similar[1]) so it can be released in 150 years (or whatever) it actually becomes public domain.

Moreover how would you even define what "DRM" is? Is spotify refusing to provide a .mp3 file download for their streaming service a "DRM"? What if they implement streaming via webrtc, to make it extra-annoying to manually download? For games, is it "DRM" to add mandatory online requirements even for single player? What if there's an ostensible reason for the online requirement, like if the gameplay is computed server-side a-la world of warcraft?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit
by Meleagris | 2025-10-17 01:29:21+00:00
+1 for Storyteller. It is beyond fantastic to have my progress seamlessly synced between my ebooks and audiobooks.

I’m paying for BookFusion, to have synced cross-platform reading. It’s expensive, but seems to be one of the few cross-platform synced readers that supports the EPUB Media Overlays from Storyteller.

Have you experienced ghosting with your Boox tablet? I’d like to get one, but I know that ghosting would bother me.
by zdragnar | 2025-10-17 01:31:39+00:00
It really depends on how good your inspecting tools are. Using runtime methods and functions instead of macros mean the code is all right there, and what you're debugging is what you see in your editor (setting aside silly things like reflection shenanigans).

With macros, even language servers may need customization if they introduce new syntax. The code that runs doesn't exist until it runs, so you can't see it ahead of time.

This doesn't sound like too big a problem if you're familiar with the tooling already, but trying to figure out where some random method comes from in a rails code base when you're new to Ruby is somewhere between a nightmare and impossible without debugging and using the repl to tell you where the source is.

React has a JSX macro, and I love using it, so there's definitely room for them. There is a world of difference in developer experience when macros are used versus when not, however, and it is wrong to say that it is all the same.
by vunderba | 2025-10-17 01:31:57+00:00
It's because it's not written in QBasic. It's written in a variant of QBasic called QB64 [1] - a spiritual successor to Microsoft's QBasic intended to run on modern 64-bit machines.

I went over the BAS source the last time this was posted a few weeks back and it has a lot of keywords that are specific to QB64 so unfortunately you can't run this on a true DOS machine (or DosBox).

[1] https://qb64.com
by EvanAnderson | 2025-10-17 01:32:08+00:00
Similar background here. The public library had Apple II machines and I became quite enamored with making proto-text adventures in Applesoft BASIC. Because you had to sign-up for time I wrote a lot of my programs longhand on nth generation photocopies of "program template" sheets that they handed out at the library (lined paper with columns for line numbers, statements, comments, etc).

The spaghetti code was astounding, and I remember squeezing line numbers between existing code-- adding a "31 GOTO 40" so I could squeeze a "room" into lines 32-39.

I never did grok the idea of building an "engine". Mostly I had PRINTs, INPUTs, and IF/GOTOs.
by chrsw | 2025-10-17 01:33:36+00:00
I mostly use Gemini for everyday Q/A and research type stuff. I find it's pretty accurate and gets straight to the point. I mostly use Claude and very recently Codex for systems software dev. I'm very interested to see what changes.

I'm wondering how these models are getting better at understanding and generating code. Are they being trained on more data because these companies use their free tier customers' data?
by selcuka | 2025-10-17 01:34:27+00:00
> over 6800 of these rooms are essentially identical. Snowball is used in this context as the ultimate illustration of the absurdities of old-school adventures, with their mazes and sprawling geographies full of corridors and empty rooms. [1]

[1] https://www.filfre.net/2013/06/snowball/
by harimau777 | 2025-10-17 01:35:45+00:00
How would a weaker government help? However imperfect, governments are the closest thing that regular people have to a protector. At the very least people need a powerful government to play against powerful corporations in the hope that they weaken each other enough to minimize their ability to prey upon the rest of society.

How are you envisioning people protecting themselves against corportations?
by Magmalgebra | 2025-10-17 01:36:34+00:00
While I get what you're saying I don't think this is what most people think of as "solved".

The brass tacks are:

1. Estimates for the cost of obesity globally are somewhere around 2 trillion dollars.

2. Telling people to diet and exercise usually did not get them to lose weight

3. Giving people semaglutide does get them to lose weight

So many people in my life who were unhappy and struggling with their weight are now happy because semaglutide worked where advice about diet and exercise did not. I can't imagine most rare disease drugs will have that level of impact.
by corimaith | 2025-10-17 01:36:40+00:00
You're taking the most charitable view of the underlying worldview of the progressive left and the most infernal view of the right. That's not epistemologically fair.

There is a alot of performative contradiction being performed here, there's an evokation of post-structuralist assumptions when you critique the particularist structure of modern society that favours certain archetypes based on certain assumptions, but then your later statement about oppressors and oppressed itself is projecting a new framing that is prone to it's own dubious assumptions and favours certain archetypes (the oppressed). There isn't much actual concrete grounding of ethical values here, and that's ironically reflected in the fact that most people do have different opinions on the matter.

But that's not a contradiction that progressivism can escape, because to provide a strong grounding to say "Racism is bad", you need to evoke from a universalist framework, one that empiricism or liberalism previously provided. But it is precisely the perceived arrogance to declare your values as universal when they emerged particularly from the West that is what is being critiqued in critical theory as Systemic Racism. Power + Prejudice.

Well, the Left and Right does draw alot from the identity politics promulgated from the Nazi Philosopher Carl Schmitt. Did you know that he supported the Nazis from the basis of pluralism, that he was terrified of the rise of universalist, homogenous world state?
by bigbadfeline | 2025-10-17 01:36:45+00:00
> like what happened with Jack Ma.

What happened to Jack Ma? Other than taking a quiet vacation and then continuing to enjoy his piles of money?

I'm genuinely curious, he is an interesting character. I wonder why he believed he would be able to pull off what he tried to pull off, my only explanation is, he didn't really know what he was doing. I'm always happy when I find new information about him.
by georgemcbay | 2025-10-17 01:37:06+00:00
I think we are in full agreement, really.

Having gold on your person in a societal collapse is going to be somewhat better than having a slip of paper that says you own gold (in theory you could barter with it) but neither is going to help you much. When the shit actually hits the fan to that degree, the best thing you can be is heavily armed.

But my personal plan is to just hope the shit never hits the fan to that degree while I'm alive and not really worry about it. Its effectively a singularity event beyond which I don't think there's much point in planning for it as an individual.
by userbinator | 2025-10-17 01:37:16+00:00
IE6 was basically the canary in the coalmine. Holding the web back from constant change was a good thing as it let many more implementations be usable. Remember Opera and the various other browsers around at the time? Not long after IE6 died, they got crushed too by Google using change as a weapon against its competitors. The recent notable change of Google requiring JS even for its own search engine, and thereby shutting out simple and basic browsers like Lynx, should be extremely concerning for the future of the web.
by jwpapi | 2025-10-17 01:38:02+00:00
In October we had Aider, which is more useful to me then Claude Code, as it allows more targeted changes and faster switching between models, modes and into my personal typing.

Not just Claude Code, but all these tools are just better in generating more slop, which is generating more effort in your codebase in the future. Making it less agile, harder to maintain and harder to extend without breaking.

I still haven’t found a useful usage of MCP for me, if i want tool calling I get a structured response by the AI and then do a normal API call. I don’t need nor want the AI to have access to all these calls it’s just too unreliable.

I’m really just sharing my personal preference as I also prefer a pedal bin over an electric one as there is delay in the later and you have the exchange batteries, whilst the first just always works.

The main issue with AI to me is reliability and all that happens is we give it more and more power. This might work out or stall us.

For me personally I don’t feel much improvement and I cant share the hype anymore, whilst I’m still more then grateful for the opportunity to live at this time and have AI teach me decent skills in a wide range of topics and accelerate my learning curve.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-10-17 01:38:03+00:00
For me, this is a "near miss" in that the data model is an implementation detail. Instead, the subtitle identifies where the value resides:

Your product's core abstractions determine whether new features compound into a moat or just add to a feature list.

Which is captured by the Domain Model[0]. How it is managed in a persistent store is where a data model comes into play.

See also Domain Driven Design[1].

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_model

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-driven_design
by martinpw | 2025-10-17 01:38:39+00:00
I would like a way to sort all comments on a topic by net upvotes. I believe the current system ranks toplevel posts by net upvotes, and the same recursively for sibling replies, but that means a highly rated reply to a low rated parent comment will get lost in the nether regions of the page.

Of course I understand that max upvotes is not the be all and end all, but when there are a dozen interesting posts a day, each with 300+ comments that I want to parse, I need a way to still have some life, so a way to get the net reader take on the top few comments would be a nice filter.
by benzible | 2025-10-17 01:39:16+00:00
They both ultimately produce BEAM bytecode, but Gleam compiles to Erlang source first (then through the Erlang compiler), while Elixir compiles to Erlang's abstract format. Gleam doesn't prevent OTP use - it has type-safe OTP bindings, but they're less mature/feature-complete than Elixir's, plus Elixir has better BEAM runtime integration (stack traces, profiling tools, etc).
by pdimitar | 2025-10-17 01:39:31+00:00
Well I am not sure Gemini or any other LLMs respect `.gitignore` which can immediately make the context window jump over the maximum.

Tools like repomix[0] do this better, plus you can add your own extra exclusions on top. It also estimates token usage as a part of its output but I found it too optimistic i.e. it regularly says "40_000 tokens" but when uploading the resulting single XML file to Gemini it's actually f.ex. 55k - 65k tokens.

[0] https://github.com/yamadashy/repomix/
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-10-17 01:40:12+00:00
You might think that based on a cursory anecdotal comparison, but studies show it is not true.

"Ultra-processed food staples dominate mainstream U.S. supermarkets. Americans more than Europeans forced to choose between health and cost" - https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.02.16.24302894v...

"Price and availability trends by level of neighbourhood deprivation however, remain unclear; while studies in the US have tended to find differences between neighbourhoods and prices for availability of healthier food items, studies conducted in other countries have generally reported no association" - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3679513/

"The distribution of the FPro scores in the three stores shows a high degree of similarity: each store exhibits a monotonically increasing curve (Fig. 2a), indicating that minimally pro-cessed products (low FPro) represent a relatively small fraction of the inventory of grocery stores, the majority of the offerings being in the ultra-processed category (high FPro). Although less-processed items make up a smaller share of the overall inventory, they likely account for a proportionally larger portion of actual purchases, highlighting a discrepancy between sales data and available food options. Never-theless, systematic differences between stores emerge: Whole Foods offers a greater selection of minimally processed items and fewer ultra-processed options, whereas Target has a particularly high pro-portion of ultra-processed products (high FPro)." - https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-024-01095-7.epdf?shar...

"“Our research shows that consumers prioritize taste and price when shopping for food, with nutrition coming in a distant third,” Balagtas said. “So the fact that consumers associate healthy eating with high costs and low taste is a challenge for food manufacturers and public health advocates.”" - https://ag.purdue.edu/news/2025/08/how-americans-make-health...

We have more ultraprocessed foods, fewer healthy options, the healthy options are more expensive, and their distribution is uneven (less healthy food depending on the store). Consumers' associations confirm this.

Meanwhile abroad there is less ultraprocessed food, the healthy food is more often subsidized (so it's cheaper), and healthy food distribution choices are more evenly distributed.
by echelon | 2025-10-17 01:41:11+00:00
Is America's semiconductor boom real?

How much capacity are we building?

What processes? What types of semiconductor products? High end? Middle? Low?

How much capacity?

Can we substitute or replace Taiwan in the future in the event of conflict?

I can't watch the video right now, but I'm curious about its claims. Or any additional HNer context.
by Quarrel | 2025-10-17 01:41:33+00:00
re: 3) & medical related prompts

At gemini.google.com you can provide context & instructuions (Settings->Personal Context). I provide a few bits of guidance to help manage its style, but I haven't been getting much pushback on medical advice since adding this one:

" Please don't give me warnings about the information you're providing not being legal advice, or medical advice, or telling me to always consult a professional, when I ask about issues. Don't be sycophantic. "

YMMV.
by eru | 2025-10-17 01:41:55+00:00
That's an interesting question!

I believe it's the original. But it would be fun to think about an (almost) perfect copy hanging there.

For a case in point: the British museum has the original Rosetta stone. Complete with long queues and keeping visitors at a respectable distance.

In the same building, the British museum also has a very good copy of the Rosetta stone. That copy just stands there without any case around it, you can just go and touch it.
by spartanatreyu | 2025-10-17 01:41:55+00:00
Probably for the best.

It's human nature to start trusting AI suggestions just because they look good enough without actually checking them. That's going to lead to massive issues down the line the more it goes on.

Snippets are more useful.

If you're doing something repetitive, a vetted snippet does wonders. Learning how to make your own snippets with appropriate tab stops is a seriously underrated skill.

High competence in regex search-and-replace, multi-cursor, and snippets is an amazing combination.
by dwd | 2025-10-17 01:42:54+00:00
To be more exact, it is 70-80% of hospital-aquired UTIs are catheter linked.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31532742/

The infection rate is initially 3-10% but increases by 5% for every day its left in.

Some more information here on biofilm development and sepsis/mortality rates which is chilling.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2963580/
by Telemakhos | 2025-10-17 01:43:26+00:00
One of the most humbling moments in my life was learning from a friend what a object was, and how that differed from GOTO statements. I had already done something similar by inventing abstraction, when I figured out that I could pre-define certain musical notes and then use those defined notes more simply in my BASIC code. I had not, however, made the leap between re-using notes and re-using rooms in a text adventure. That realization that all re-used things can be abstracted was formative, and I am very thankful to my friend for having explained what he was doing with rooms. At some level, I regret that I learned BASIC before an object-oriented language; at another, I'm glad that I did, because my training in stupidity made very obvious to me my shortcoming in logic when I learned a better way.