MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by safety1st | 2025-11-04 06:34:46+00:00
It's always interesting to read opinions that are diametrically opposed to your own, especially when they come from people you have deep disagreements with (in this case, it's not the poster, but his inspiration, Drew DeVault who I am philosophically not aligned with).

Maybe the philosophical disagreements stem from different life experiences, as I started my career at a Big Tech, and learned the hard way that no, I could NOT change the organization I was a part of. It was the C-suite's way (and they served at the pleasure of the Board and the shareholders), or it was the highway.

So I took the highway, started my own business, and we're small and obscure and it follows the principles I want it to follow and it makes me money, and as far as I'm concerned that's awesome. It's the good version of capitalism and if we're smart enough we might very well beat the old company I walked away from in some manner in a free market one day.

My main point is that a company is going to follow the interests of its board and its shareholders. I suspect that whatever Drew did did NOT change the organization at Linode. I suspect it always followed the interests of its shareholders and still does, and what he really did was improve the efficiency of the asset they owned. Not to throw shade on someone who makes things better within their organization. But either you own it or you don't in which case you merely serve at the pleasure of the ones who do. I think more talented people should go off and own their own thing.
by thereeldeel | 2025-11-04 06:35:05+00:00
The core issue with the traditional MCP/Tool Calling approach is that adding too many tools or having to chain multiple calls leads to models behaving worse and inefficiently using tokens. Cloudflare's new concept proposes converting MCP tools into a TypeScript API and letting the LLM write code to call that API, instead of listing all the tools for the model to call directly
by qart | 2025-11-04 06:35:30+00:00
I have them all installed, but I use WezTerm most often because it is fastest to give me a window when I hit the assigned shortcut key. Ghostty is a hair slower. Kitty takes 2-3 seconds. I keep launching terminals pretty frequently, so this matters to me a lot. The only other feature that it must have is truecolor.
by umanwizard | 2025-11-04 06:35:40+00:00
Sure, there exist hills where some reckless people who refuse to brake can hit 60mph/100kph on a classical (non-motorized) bicycle. Unfortunately it’s difficult to prevent such stupid behavior, but thankfully, the places where it can happen are severely limited.

Therefore, we should count our blessings that it’s not more common, rather than allowing devices that enable it.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-11-04 06:36:48+00:00
Yes, it's a culture where the people can above can enforce it (poorer countries, people being paid so much that don't feel they can leave the job). Exactly as it was in the 1800s. Same exact 1800s ethos.

We didn't start working with 5 8 hour days from the begging. 5 8 hour days isn't some magical number. It was fought hard for, with business screaming it couldn't be done. With people killed over it. The people that fought and died for that weren't fooling themselves even though many told them they were.

I worked crazy hours when I was young. I'm not some slacker. But saying we somehow settled upon the perfect combination the very first time labor won concessions from business, and also that the human condition can never improve from where it is, it a ridiculous position.
by goobatrooba | 2025-11-04 06:37:39+00:00
Just reacting to your first sentence: as a man I find it understandable that the protective laws are focused on protecting women and children as it's a simple fact of our reality that the vast majority of violent crime is committed by men, and that women and children have less physical ability to defend themselves. Yes I also want men protected (though that means mostly again from other men) but as a societal aim the women and children part clearly is a higher priority and need.
by xelxebar | 2025-11-04 06:37:41+00:00
> The way to understand Arthur Whitney's C code is to first learn APL

This is the main insight in my breakdown of the J Incunabulum:

https://blog.wilsonb.com/posts/2025-06-06-readable-code-is-u...

When I first encountered it years ago, the thing was impenetrable, but after learning APL to a high level, it now reads like a simple, direct expression of intent. The code even clearly communicates design tradeoffs and the intended focus of experimentation. Or more on the nose, to me the code ends up feeling primarily like extremely readable communication of ideas between like-minded humans. This is a very rare thing in software development in my experience.

IMHO, ideas around "readable code" and "good practices" in software development these days optimize for large, high-turnover teams working on large codebases. Statistically speaking, network effects mean that these are the codebasese and developer experiences we are most likely to hear about. However, as an industry, I think we are relatively blind to alternatives. We don't have sufficient shared language and cognitive tooling to understand how to optimize software dev for small, expert teams.
by matwood | 2025-11-04 06:37:51+00:00
For a non-obvious leak it's pretty normal to recommend a new system at that age. The reason is that a tech's time is expensive, and finding a leak can take a lot of time. Then once it's found, if the leak is in the exchange you're looking at a fairly large replacement part cost.

At least in the US, refrigerant costs have been high because of a shortage, not taxes.

https://www.coolingpost.com/world-news/us-ac-companies-move-...
by godelski | 2025-11-04 06:38:04+00:00
In a bit related way I've been trying to push the idea of "engineers need to be grumpy."

Not so much that we need to not be happy and not enjoy our lives, but that our job is to find problems and fix them. In that setting, being "grumpy" is recognizing the problems. If you're dogfooding your product, you should be aware of its strengths and faults. Fixing the faults gives clear direction that allows you to make your products better. You don't have to reach perfection, such a thing does not even exist. Instead we do this iteratively, as the environment is dynamic, just as is the customer's needs.

I would say that this is loyalty to the company and the product, though not loyal to the politics. It is clearly loyal to the product, which we as engineers are in charge of creating. But it is also loyal to the company because the things we build are the very foundation of the company itself. Being loyal to politics may keep you your job, but it is a short term solution that reinforces a culture of politics itself.

To managers: don't dissuade engineers who raise issues or complaints. These are not "no" in the language of engineers, they are "yes, but". Encourage those conversations because that's how we resolve the issues and build the things. The managerial role is to help those conversations not get stuck or too heated. Your job is to help maintain engineers' passions because that's what pushes the product, and consequently the business (and consequently your success), forward. But that passion is fragile. STEM is a creative endeavor through and through. If not given time to "play around" and try new things then that passion dies. When that passion dies your innovation turns lazy and your only goal is to make something bland like a thinner phone for the 7th year in a row.
by itsDrManhattan | 2025-11-04 06:39:51+00:00
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We created an icon with Phone (1) and changed the over-ear market with Headphone (1).

Now working on a new form factor for the AI era.

We are looking for exceptional, high-agency Full-Stack engineers who are passionate about using AI to build the future of consumer electronics!

Have a look: https://careers.nothing.tech/
by FloorEgg | 2025-11-04 06:39:52+00:00
It seems maybe you mixed up non-fungible value-bottlenecking human services with "everything".

Many things can get cheaper, some things get more expensive, and median person gets more wealthy and buys more of both.

In reality, yes, inflation plays a role in this, but the article is pointing to other patterns layered on top of it.

On average, over long term, despite inflation, people can afford way more good and services.
by numpad0 | 2025-11-04 06:41:17+00:00
> ... on selling these things.

Or making those things.

I think it could make sense if that $2.3k mostly only accounted for Western labor involved rather than representing entirety of "real" costs. Like - just entirely making up - 1k to ship it from middle of the Pacific to nearby ports to you, 0.5k from the port to location of installation, another 0.5k to install, 0.3k for documents preparations and extra wood screws, 2.3k total. And $25k worth of man-hours in CNY to manufacture, which effect is isolated and contained within their own economic bubble.

I can't just believe in the "them subsidization" theory anymore, international prices just don't seem like compensating for anything. It feels like paying for energy costs of delivery systems rather than the product. It just doesn't make sense.
by umanwizard | 2025-11-04 06:41:32+00:00
Walmart isn’t a supermarket, it’s a hypermarket, which isn’t really the same thing. This isn’t specifically a US distinction: it would also not be called a “supermarché” in France for example.

Most of them do have a (relatively small) grocery section, but are primarily dedicated to non-consumables like clothes, children’s toys, furniture, electronics, etc.

Whereas a typical supermarket (e.g. Safeway, Fry’s, Albertsons, Whole Foods etc.) might have a relatively small section of all of the above, but are primarily dedicated to food.
by T_Potato | 2025-11-04 06:42:47+00:00
I have a tangent question: How do you deal with a team that spends days nitpicking implementation, double-speak and saying. I didn't actually expect you to implement this the way I said, I was just saying it would be nice if it was like this, can you undo it. I spend 3 weeks on a code review because of the constant back and forth; and I wish oh I wish they would allow PR to be small but the rule is that the PR has to implement the full deliverable feature. And that can mean 20 files to constantly change and change and change and change. Oh and then the why did you use Lombok question that occurs even though the project uses lombok and so you are stuck defending the use of a library that's is used in the project for no random reason than to flatter the egos of the gatekeepers who say, yes this is good but I want you to name this abc instead of ab before we merge. When in context it doesn't add or remove any value, not even clarity.
by JonChesterfield | 2025-11-04 06:42:53+00:00
Refuse to merge into their branch. If you have serious test coverage and the refactor doesn't change behaviour, it'll be fine.

If you don't have test coverage, or if the "refactor" is also changing behaviour, that project is probably dead. Make sure there's a copy of the codebase from before the new lead joined so there's a damage mitigation roll back option available.
by nyargh | 2025-11-04 06:43:09+00:00
It's very out of context and so obviously coordinated.

It is also very strange to see the repeated attempts to import US culture war issues to Sweden. Often completely unrelated to Swedish national issues, just blindly throwing stuff at a wall to see what sticks and capture headlines for a few weeks.

The far-right Sverige Demokraterna party does this regularly, but other parties often fall for it too.

A more paranoid person might say it resembles Active Measures operations of a hostile foreign government that wants to distract and sow chaos in western states, but who knows...
by locknitpicker | 2025-11-04 06:43:10+00:00
> (...) a multitude of government programs that seek to eliminate extreme poverty, (...) consumer protection policies that make it genuinely expensive (...)

I don't think this opinion holds a rational basis.

Extreme poverty being a factor in low job demand is an argument for coercing people into performing certain tasks even though they are not economically viable just because it benefits you personally. This is not a valid argument, neither indentured servitude or slavery. Isn't the US supposed to be a free market economy where free Enterprise reigned?

Complaining about regulation, including waste disposal, is also dumbfounding. Being required to dispose of air filters in a landfill is not the reason why you can't afford a repair. This opinion is also comical as HVAC also covers air quality because otherwise you can be cool in a room but literally sick.

This sort of opinion sounds completely irrational and unsubstantiated, and extremely ideological.

The main factors driving repair cost are things like device longevity, unit price, speed and ease of repair, parts availability, etc. That's mainly it. When you call someone to your house to repair something, the price tag covers that person's cost of living for the fraction of the time it takes them to deal with your problems. On top of that, you need to pay whatever parts they need to buy to get your things back to work. That's where the money goes.
by kbrkbr | 2025-11-04 06:44:19+00:00
I'm with you on this.

But asked for reasons I can only point to the social nature of their societies, where love and anger make sense, or of their hurt-behavior.

I also find it very hard to believe that everything else is slow evolution of components, and here all of a sudden something super complex comes into being out of nowhere.

But I still have no idea how it could work. What are the components and their interplay?
by ryao | 2025-11-04 06:44:25+00:00
> If you live in the United States today, and you accidentally knock a hole in your wall, it’s probably cheaper to buy a flatscreen TV and stick it in front of the hole, compared to hiring a handyman to fix your drywall.

While this is true, the costs are inflated because you need to repaint the entire room to get the original look, rather than only pay the cost of merely replacing the drywall. Of course, some handymen are much more expensive than others, so it is possible that is more expensive too.

If you are one of the few using wallpaper and have extra wallpaper for just such emergencies, using the extra wallpaper to paper over it should be cheap.
by helloplanets | 2025-11-04 06:44:51+00:00
10^15 lines of code is a lot. We would pretty quickly enter the realm of it not having much to do with programming and more about just treating the LOC count as an amount of memory allocated to do X.

How much resemblance does the information in the conditionals need to have with the actual input, or can they immediately be transformed to a completely separate 'language' which simply uses the string object as its conduit? Can the 10^15 lines of code be generated with an external algorithm, or is it assumed that I'd written it by hand given an infinitely long lifespan?
Show HN: Built a soundboard for my haunted garage with AI assistance
by JoeOfTexas | 2025-11-04 06:45:40+00:00
It's 3 weeks from Halloween and I decided to host a haunted garage at my house for our neighborhood. I drafted a layout of the garage, got donated decorations, spent $500 on amazon to transform the garage and found a great horror ambience on youtube.

Oh crap, its 1.5 weeks away now, and I need sound effects. All the apps have prefilled spooky sound effects. None of the apps let me auto-play sound effects, because I'm short on actors.

I do web dev, simple, I just make one. Tadah, in about an hour I got a prototype. In 4 hours I finished it. I had some boilerplate already done to get it up on a URL.

Next actual sound fx...

1. Download a few from free soundfx sites.

2. Crap, I need specific ones, found ElevenLabs, and generated my own, and downloaded a few already generated by others.

3. Upload to R2

4. Hardcode into the throwaway webapp

5. The show is ON.

Got a good 2.5 hours of about 200+ people, and sometimes the sound fx lined up perfect with actors scaring our guests. FUN!

Now, I'm showing it off on HN, before I throw it away. Goodbye.
by lifthrasiir | 2025-11-04 06:45:56+00:00
> These are mostly narrow pre-emoji symbols that have been extended with an alternate emoji representation.

Nitpick: this is incorrect. Easy counter-examples would be arrow symbols like →. UAX #11 helpfully explains what is "ambiguous" about those characters:

Ambiguous characters occur in East Asian legacy character sets as wide characters, but as narrow (i.e., normal-width) characters in non–East Asian usage. (Examples are the basic Greek and Cyrillic alphabet found in East Asian character sets, but also some of the mathematical symbols.) Private-use characters are considered ambiguous by default, because additional information is required to know whether they should be treated as wide or narrow.

In the other words, these characters have been commonly available in both Asian and non-Asian character sets and assigned different widths by them.
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-11-04 06:46:02+00:00
In my experience so far most languages I've encountered have been similar enough that language choice mostly comes down to "Does it have the APIs I need" and "Do I like the tooling." There are a handful of exceptions where the capabilities of the language are fundamentally different enough to provide a competitive edge.

- Systems languages with manual memory management, like C or Zig, where real-time/low-latency performance is important.

- Rust and its borrow checker, as an alternative to manual memory management.

- A strongly FP influenced language such as a Lisp or Haskell. Especially Lisp macros. Exceptionally good for working with structured data in cases where purity is more important than performance.

- The BEAM/OTP architecture for distributed systems (Erlang/Elixir).

- Languages with good CUDA/PTX/Vulkan support, for programs that need the GPU.

- Assembly. This was a much bigger deal in the past before compilers got good. Today good mostly for educational purposes.
by godelski | 2025-11-04 06:46:50+00:00
> My main point is that a company is going to follow the interests of its board and its shareholders.

Why do you think these are misaligned?

Fundamentally the company's success depends on the product, right? Sure, the shareholders are what needs to be appeased but they set their price on the excitement of what's to come. We can abuse this by creating artificial hype but do you not think that growth is better sustained with hype over worthwhile new products?

The investors are fickle and do not have the interest of the company in mind. They only have that interest so long as they hold their shares and they couldn't care less when they sell. But a business should not think in the moment, but the trend over time. Those investors will come and go and we want them to. You don't do that by appeasing the small subset of investors that invest now, especially those who are looking to get in and out as fast as possible. If the investors are the "real customer" then how do you sustain them in the long term? Certainly this is highly aligned with sustaining the people actually buying the products.

This seems highly related to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy[0]. Those who voice are the first group, devoted to the goals of the organization. Those who care about the quarter and no further are the second. Loyal to the organization. Worse, loyal only while it suits them. And that's no loyalty at all.

[0] https://jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
by vulkoingim | 2025-11-04 06:49:11+00:00
Working on and off on a little project to make Spotify recommendations better.

You get to choose the genres you're interested in, and it creates playlists from the music in your library. They get updated every day - think a better version of the Daily Mixes. You can add some advanced filters as well, if you really want to customise what music you'll get.

https://riffradar.org/
by tavavex | 2025-11-04 06:49:13+00:00
> And it's really... odd... how the entire article is written as if the practice is solely performed by men on women. (Even though that might be the prevailing pattern, this kind of 'condensing down' is ultimately sexist erasure.)

You can't create a moral panic by having nuance. Why would they care about what people of what genders actually participate in kink play like this? No, if justifying policy is what's needed, instead you have to manufacture a pressing crisis. Just pretend that there's an epidemic of random heterosexual men watching too much porn and starting to nonconsensually strangle their partners out of nowhere. This article already endorses a lesser version of this story - that strangling porn only features women, that it's created solely for men, that its purpose is to degrade women in general through these acts (because surely no one ever is actually into choking, am I right?), and that men are rapidly becoming more misogynistic en masse because of it. Now that slots right in alongside all the societal fears and beliefs we have about protecting women. Every encroachment on NSFW content to come will keep banging the same drums of protecting a group that's seen as needing protection or is marginalized (excluding marginalized groups that the government hates, of course). And most people will probably believe it.
by BoredPositron | 2025-11-04 06:49:34+00:00
It took a long long time going from a walking bike to the one we know now. It's not going to be different from AI. Transformers will only get us so far and for the rest we need another tock. AGI is not going to happen with this generation of hardware. We are hitting spatial scaling limits in video and image generation and we are hitting limits with LLMs.
by locknitpicker | 2025-11-04 06:50:47+00:00
> I didn't see anything in their comment where they added "and therefore we ought return to rampant extreme poverty", did I miss it?

The US is already experiencing rampant extreme poverty. There are people in the US holding multiple jobs and still can't afford to eat, let alone healthcare.

Again, this argument that things are expensive because the poor can't work and regulation somehow is suffocating businesses is purely ideological and not supported by facts.
by ahtihn | 2025-11-04 06:51:13+00:00
If it's objectively bad code, it should be easy enough to point out specifics.

After pointing out 2-3 things, you can just say that the quality seems too low and to come back once it meets standards. Which can include PR size for good measure.

If the author can't explain what the code does, make an explicit standard that PR authors must be able to explain their code.
by kelnos | 2025-11-04 06:51:18+00:00
> This is mostly down to people being afraid of anything even remotely trades-like. Learn to do some basic home repair, it will save you thousands.

Installing a new HVAC system is not "basic home repair".

Yes, there are HVAC-related repairs that qualify as basic, but we're also talking about the big things.

And while yes, many homeowners could learn how to install a new heat pump, run refrigerant lines, make sure every connection is torqued properly, etc., most would not want to or have the time to do so, and that's fine, normal, and expected.
by ryandrake | 2025-11-04 06:51:23+00:00
Most of the tradesmen around me won't even get out of bed for less than $1,000. They really don't want piddly little jobs from us peasants. I've started DIY'ing almost everything I need to do around the house because if you call an electrician, he'll quote you a $2,000 "go away" price because he's busy doing $50K new construction jobs.