MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ranger_danger | 2025-11-10 21:42:32+00:00
I think with these kinds of ideological issues, all one can do is vote with their wallet. Nobody is forcing you to fly Ryanair, there are other choices, and if you don't like their practices, don't fly with them. If enough people do it, then they might change their ways, but if their 80% number is accurate, you're probably just stuck not flying with them anymore and nobody else is going to care but you, unfortunately.

Not trying to be rude at all... you said their goal is not yours, so that's why you choose not to do business with them. Every business can't please everyone at the same time.
by cgriswald | 2025-11-10 21:42:34+00:00
I’m not sure that is a clue so much as actual boring behavior.

I think using shortcuts as a warning sign is okay but the author here uses it as a hard filter. She lacks curiosity. She doesn’t ask the groom why he chose that venue. She didn’t ask how he used ChatGPT. She just cared that he heard about it from ChatGPT rather than what… from an ad in a wedding magazine? A google search? Asking friends? Hiring a planner? That lack of curiosity makes her look like a crap journalist and drives her delusional shortcut, probably to her own detriment.
by gyomu | 2025-11-10 21:42:50+00:00
> is it about doing, or is it about getting things done?

No, this is a false dichotomy and slippery slope dangerous thinking.

It’s about building a world where we can all live in and find meaning, joy, dignity, and fulfillment, which requires a balance between pursuing the ends and preserving the means as worthwhile human pursuits.

If I am eating a delicious meal but the people preparing it had a miserable time, or it was prepared entirely by robots controlled by nefarious people using the profits to harm society, I don’t want it.

Human society and civilization is for the benefit of humans, not for filling checkboxes above all else.
by VWWHFSfQ | 2025-11-10 21:43:01+00:00
This sounds like the perspective of a beat-down Seattlite that thinks all the problems are just "normal". I lived there for a very long time, and have lived in several other major cities since then.

Seattle's problems are not "normal". And they should not be normalized by thinking this is just how it is. It is not that way in other places.
by gmueckl | 2025-11-10 21:43:23+00:00
The problem here is that the law and order politicians world wide pretty consistently follow a pattern that starts by demanding surveillance tools to fight very serious crimes and those crimes only. Once they get that, they eventually start another campaign to allow use of the tools that they now have access to for less serious crimes. After a few cycles of this, you get a massive erosion of citizen rights.

This is called "Salamitaktik" in Germany.
by bluGill | 2025-11-10 21:43:24+00:00
Ada has been around for years. The approach to memory safety isn't as strong as Rust, but it is a lot strong than C or C++. C++ is also adding a lot of memory safety, it is a lot easier to bypass than it is in Rust (though I've seen Rust code where everything is marked unsafe), but you still get some memory safety if you try.

All benchmarks between Ada, C, C++, and Rust (and others) should come down to a wash. A skilled programmer can find a difference but it won't be significant. A skilled C++ programmer wouldn't be using unordered_map so it is unfair to point out you can use something bad.
by api | 2025-11-10 21:43:28+00:00
I find the point about memory safety to be pretty damning.

People think it's a slight on their abilities. "I can write memory safe code!" Maybe you can. There are two huge problems here, and they're problems that will never go away no matter how good you are.

The first is that this doesn't scale. As soon as you add more programmers to a project, you multiply the odds of bugs like this. Even if everyone's just as good, not everyone will have the whole program in their head or code in exactly the same style.

The second is that code rots. Your new C (or Zig) program might be totally correct and memory safe when it's first written. Then you commit it to a repo. Then you move on to another project for a while. Then someone else fixes something and you merge a PR. Then you come back to it three months later and you're under pressure to implement something. Then you work in a new feature a year later and you've forgotten some of the really nit-picky details of how things work. It's very easy over time for bugs to creep in, and if the language doesn't catch them they'll sit in the code until they cause random crashes or, worse, a CVE.

These aren't avoidable issues. They're inherent to software and its life cycle. Memory safe languages (and secure computing systems in general) are the only way to deal with them.
by grvbck | 2025-11-10 21:43:29+00:00
The distribution of four-leaf clovers is not uniform; they tend to cluster in certain areas. Many moons ago when I was a small kid, on my walk to school I had to walk a bit under high voltage power lines. Found tons of four-leaf clovers under there. I have no idea if the magnetic field did anything to help the mutation, or if it was just a coincidence, but I've never found a spot like that again.
by CooCooCaCha | 2025-11-10 21:44:13+00:00
That’s interesting because i love computers and parts of programming. Algorithms are fascinating and I get a deep sense of satisfaction when my program works.

But at the same time I find programming to be a frustrating experience because I want to spend as much time as possible thinking about what I’m trying to build.

In other words I’d rather spend time in the dream-like space of possibilities, and iterating on my thoughts quickly than “dropping down” to reality and thinking through how I’m actually going to build it, what algorithms to use, how to organize code, etc.

Because of that I’ve found vibe coding to be enjoyable even if it’s not perfect.
by fngjdflmdflg | 2025-11-10 21:44:25+00:00
>Yes, lots of people have immigrated, but they're a tiny fraction of those who wanted to immigrate

What point are you making here specifically? Are you saying the law is considered broken unless all or most people that want to come to the US can come? If so, the citizens (or at least the government) of the country are the ones that decide its laws, not people who want to immigrate to that country.

>H-1B is a good example, it counts as immigration but it is really not

The fist link I gave only includes green cards issued, it doesn't include H-1B visas to begin with. In any case, H-1B is not that significant a source of immigration, it seems to account for less than 1 million people in the US.[0] And it pays better than immigrating illegally in 99% of cases, most people would take that. Also by your own metric immigrating illegally isn't immigration either. I don't see what specific point you are making. Are you saying people come here illegally because they don't want to come via an H-1B visa, or are you just making a general point that immigration is not that high?

>The comparison with EU is not meaningful, especially since it isn't even a country

Then why does the worldbank include it? And why use OECD as a metric for anything if it isn't a country?

>population growth of the US and the world

The "highest in 100 years" statistic is in terms of percentage, so that shouldn't be relevant.

[0] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/U... "As of September 30, 2019, the H-1B authorized-to-work population is approximately 583,420."
by wyldfire | 2025-11-10 21:44:26+00:00
> Casting is when you change the type, but don't change the data..

Is that the case? That's not what I think of when I think of C-style casts.

float val = 12.4; int val_i = (int) val;

The representation in memory of `val` should not match that of `val_i`, right? The value is encoded differently and the quantity is not preserved through this transformation. I don't think that means that the data weren't changed.

Maybe you're thinking of aliasing/type-punning? Casts in C do perform conversions as they do in C++.
by colechristensen | 2025-11-10 21:44:28+00:00
You are the one making the assumption that I meant Canada should be controlled by the US when I meant and wrote no such thing.

And Europe _absolutely_ should unite under a single government instead of this pseudo national semi-single-currency/market with a vague poorly representative European government designed mostly just to dance around the fact that these small states are stuck on archaic nationalist ideas and can't get along with a unified purpose. The world needs the strength a unified Europe could provide to counteract Russian aggression, the growth of Chinese power, and the crumbling cornerstone of world order the US is going through.

Being offended is strange.
by mothballed | 2025-11-10 21:44:40+00:00
Feels more like stalking to me when the government does it. The intent is to intimidate and put the observed parties in imminent fear of imprisonment if they do something those in power do not like. Coupling this with intentionally following them around, with the specific goal of en masse systematic targeting of those in transit, albeit with stationary cameras strategically replaced, has a lot of parallels to criminal stalking.

If you put up cameras on all the intersections on the way of say an ex went to work, and started logging when they were coming and going, it's hard for me to believe a prosecutor wouldn't be able to file that under some stalking-adjacent statute. The fact that they're doing the same thing en masse doesn't make it more generalized, it's just a larger scale of high specificity.
by pizlonator | 2025-11-10 21:44:50+00:00
This article comes up with yet another definition of memory safety. Thankfully, it does not conflate thread safety with memory safety. But it does a thing that makes is both inaccurate (I think) and also not helpful for having a good discussion:

TFA hints at memory safety requiring static checking, in the sense that it's written in a way that would satisfy folks who think that way, by saying thingys like "never occur" and including null pointer safety.

Is it necessary for the checking to be static? No. I think reasonable folks would agree that Java is memory safe, yet it does so much dynamic checking (null and bounds). Even Rust does dynamic checking (for bounds).

But even setting that aside, I don't like how the way that the definition is written in TFA doesn't even make it unambiguous if the author thinks it should be static or dynamic, so it's hard to debate with what they're saying.

EDIT: The definition in TFA has another problem: it enumerates things that should not happen from a language standpoint, but I don't think that definition is adequate for avoiding weird execution. For example, it says nothing about bad casts, or misuses of esoteric language features (like misusing longjmp). We need a better definition of memory safety.
by burningChrome | 2025-11-10 21:45:31+00:00
I've thought of going back to a palm pilot for the same thing. There are tons of Handspring and Palm Pilot Tungsten versions on ebay for under $40.

I believe the Palm T2 and T3 had bluetooth so would be interesting if you could connect the two to keep contacts and appointments off your smartphone. I'm seeing Handspring Treo 650's for under $100 as well.
by sib | 2025-11-10 21:45:56+00:00
Year Europeans Obtaining U.S. Lawful Permanent Resident Status

2014 83,270

2015 85,800

2016 93,570

2017 84,340

2018 80,020

2019 87,600

2020 68,990

2021 61,520

2022 75,610

2023 80,280

Yup, definitely looks like no Europeans have ever considered moving to the US...
by nickmonad | 2025-11-10 21:46:03+00:00
It seems to me that, in practice, you'd want the "LiveBatcher" to have some durability as well. Is there a scenario where a customer could lose their place because of a horribly timed server shutdown, where those transfers hadn't even been sent to TigerBeetle as pending yet? Or am I misunderstanding the architecture here?

Edit: Yes, I think I misunderstood something here. The user wouldn't even see their request as having returned a valid "pending" ticket sale since the batcher would be active as the request is active. The request won't return until its own transfer had been sent off to TigerBeetle as pending.
by denysvitali | 2025-11-10 21:46:10+00:00
I truly enjoy programming, but the most frustrating part for me was that I had many ideas and too little time to work on everything.

Thanks to AI I can now work on many side projects at the time, and most importantly just (as you mentioned) get stuff done quickly and most of the time in good enough (or sometimes excellent) results.

I'm both amazed and a bit sad, but the reality is that my output has increased significantly - although the quality might have dropped a bit in certain areas.

Time is limited, and if I can increase my results in the same way as the electric street lights, I can simply look back at the past and smile that I lived in a time where lighting up gas-powered street lights was considered a skill.

As you perfectly put it, it's not about the process per se, it's about the result. And the result is that now the lights are only 80% lit. In a few months / years we'll probably reach the threshold where the electric street lights will be brighter than the gas-powered ones, and you'd be a fool if you decide to still light them up one by one.
by joshstrange | 2025-11-10 21:46:15+00:00
I'll freely admit you have more data (experience) to work with on this than I did in the tests I ran almost a year ago. I spent a lot of time documenting my schemas, feeding the LLM sample rows, etc and the final results were not useful enough even as a starting point for a static query that a developer would improve on and "hard code" into a UI. I approached it as both:

- Wouldn't it be cool to let my users chat with their data? ("How many new users signed up today/this event/this month/etc?" or "How much did we make yesterday?")

- An internal tool to use as a starting point for analytics dashboards

I still use LLMs to help write queries if it's something I know can be done but can't remember the syntax but I scrapped the project to try and accomplish both the above goals due to too many mistakes. Maybe my data is just too "dirty" (but honestly, I've never _not_ seen dirty data) and/or I should have cleaned up deprecated columns in my tables that confused the models (even with strict instructions to ignore them, I should have filtered them completely) but I spent way too much time repeating myself, talking in all caps, and generally fighting with the SOTA models to try to get them to understand my data so that they could generate queries that actually worked (worked as in returned valid data, not just valid SQL). I wasn't doing any training/fine-tuning (which may be the magic needed) but I felt like it was a dead end (given current models). I'll also stress that I haven't re-tested those theories on newer models and my results are at least a year out of date (a lifetime in LLM/AIs) but the fundamental issues I ran into didn't seem to be "on the cusp" of being solved or anything like that.

I wish you all the best of luck in improving on this kind of thing.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-11-10 21:46:22+00:00
There is so much complexity in interactions of systems that is easy to miss.

Saying that one can understand a modern CPU by understanding how a transistor works is kinda akin to saying you can understand the operation of a country by understanding a human from it. It's a necessary step, probably, but definitely not sufficient.

It also reminds me of a pet peeve in software development where it's tempting to think you understand the system from the unit tests of each component, while all the interesting stuff happens when different components interact with each other in novel ways.
by pzo | 2025-11-10 21:47:29+00:00
> Even the Ruby on Rails guy, David Heinemeier Hansson, never went for dominating an industry, becoming a platform with investor money and become an Unicorn

If something in europe has potential to dominate then it's eventually being bought by US capital, see Skype, Nokia. If someone is throwing at you 10+ digit check then it's hard to resist and even if you want to resist good luck with persuading your early investors about not taking the money.

EU doesn't have petro-dollar and as good money printer as US. EU doesn't also have citizens & big funds that ape savings into local stocks, another reason most companies IPO in US.
by tobyjsullivan | 2025-11-10 21:47:43+00:00
This reminds me of the debate around Soylent when that came out. Are meals for enjoyment, flavour, and the experience or are they about consuming nutrients and providing energy?

I’d say that debate was largely philosophical with proponents on both sides. And really the answer might be that both things are true for different people at different times. Though I also observe that soylent did not, by and large, end up replacing meals for the vast majority.
by jackpepsi | 2025-11-10 21:47:55+00:00
I resonate with what the author said about losing track of the Mental Model. I think that's the key to enjoying the process or not. I.e. the building up or utilising of that mental model (my own understanding) is they key to finding software development joyful.

Specifically:

"Easy but boring project" case: For projects where I am already familiar with a strong and sensible architecture then I find AI enjoyable to work with as a simple speed boost. I know exactly what I'm asking AI to do at every stage and can judge it's results well. It's not that interesting to me to code these components myself because I've done it before several times. My mental model of the problem space and a good solution is complete. I get some satisfaction from using my mental model.

"Challenging but interesting project" case: For projects where I don't yet understand the best architecture then I will inevitably ask AI to connect Component A to Component B without yet understanding that there should be a Component C. Because I don't have the understanding of the problem space. The thing is before AI I may have made this mistake myself, I just would have had the satisfaction of learning at the same time.

Given the time with these type of projects I basically write them twice: First pass making it work but as a huge mess, but building a mental model of the real problem space along the way. Second pass refactoring and getting it right, creating now a mental model of a good solution. Only after two passes would it be a project I would feel is done correctly and be happy (joyful) to publish it.

I have found AI enables you to get the first pass working much quicker, but without the learning along the way of the mental model to inform how to make the second pass properly. So If I want the challenging project to be joyful I still need to invest the time to learn from the first pass.

And that specific learning task I enjoy more if I do it iteratively as the AI and I build together, it's less enjoyable if I sit down afterwards and only inspect the code.

SO if I want a challenging project to be joyful I have to continue investing the time in the first phase to do the learning. AI just gives the opportuntity to produce a messy working prototype without learning anything, which may or may not make sense for the business side of things.
by pessimizer | 2025-11-10 21:47:56+00:00
People claiming that weird unfalsifiable (or often unmeaningful) inner states give them magical powers has got to stop being respected.

Thinking 4 is red doesn't mean that you don't have to count anymore. It's as stupid of a claim as claiming that "hearing colors" allows people to see in the dark.

I'm a very, very fast minesweeper ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minesweeper_(video_game) ) player, and I play in a non-marking style (meaning I just click where mines aren't rather than bothering to mark where mines are.) I realized one day that I subjectively see the spots that I know don't have mines as differently colored than the ones that I know do. That does not mean that I am not doing the calculations in my head, it just means that they are so reflexive that I don't notice them. Because I am trying to clear as fast as I can, I've seen every pattern thousands of times, and my feedback is visual, there's a ghostly sort of visual marking showing the outcome of my calculation.

This is similar to how people echolocate and have no idea that they're echolocating: "How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation" https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Echo.htm

We are not necessarily aware of what we are applying complex logic to, even when it requires delicate timing and swings wildly over tiny differences. I'd go even further and say that we are necessarily less aware of calculations that we are making quickly, because being quick does not allow time for reflection.

You've just gotten good at finding 4-leaf clovers because you spend an enormous amount of time looking for 4-leaf clovers.
by FateOfNations | 2025-11-10 21:48:15+00:00
Technically, the web server can do content negotiation based on Accept headers with static files. But… In theory, you shouldn't need a direct link to the RSS feed on your web page. Most feed readers support a link-alternate in the HTML header:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Blog Posts" href="/feed.xml">

Someone who wants to subscribe can just drop example.com/blog in to the feed reader and it will do the right thing. The "RSS Feed" interactive link then could go to a HTML web page with instructions for subscribing and/or a preview.
by CooCooCaCha | 2025-11-10 21:48:31+00:00
I’m the opposite. I’d rather spend more time in a flow-like state where I’m dreaming of possibilities and my thoughts come to life quickly and effortlessly.

I often find tools frustrating because they are imperfect and even with the best tools you inevitably have to break from your flow sometimes to do stuff in a more manual way.

If a tool could take care of building while I remain in flow I’d be in heaven.
by bmurphy1976 | 2025-11-10 21:49:56+00:00
I prefer to treat testing like insurance. You purchase enough insurance to get the coverage you need, and not a penny more. Anything beyond that could be invested better.

Same thing with tests, get the coverage you need to build the confidence in your codebase, but don't tie yourself in knots trying to get that last 10%. It's not worth it. Create some manual and integration tests and move one.

I feel like type safety, memory safety, thread safety, etc. are are all similar. Building a physics core to simulate the stability of your nuclear stockpile? The typing should be second to none. Building yet another CSV exporter? Who gives a damn.

Context is so damn important.
by darknavi | 2025-11-10 21:50:44+00:00
For staging/committing I haven't found anything that I've liked more than Git Extensions' Commit view.

One of the main things I like about it is that it does _not_ auto refresh. A long time ago with SourceTree I'd have issues mixing git CLI and SoureTree because two processes would be doing things at the same time (I assume SourceTree was doing things like `git status` while I was trying to `git fetch` or something).

https://git-extensions-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/main/...
by martyheyman | 2025-11-10 21:50:50+00:00
Mainframe COBOL to POSIX native machine language or Java is largely a solved problem. 40 year old code that hasn't been touched in 30 years "ain't broke" and likely doesn't need fixing IMHO. Our take is get it to POSIX/Java so you can sort out all the OTHER STUFF and then rewrite/re-architect at your leisure. {disclosure: we're the GCC COBOL team}.
by verdverm | 2025-11-10 21:51:03+00:00
If this interests you, https://bsky.app/profile/jefferyharrell.bsky.social has been making some super cool visualizations of Qwen3's internal representations

One thing discovered was that 800+ tokens converged to a single point in the 2500+ dimensional unembedding space

Some examples:

https://bsky.app/profile/jefferyharrell.bsky.social/post/3m4...

https://bsky.app/profile/jefferyharrell.bsky.social/post/3m5...