MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jacquesm | 2025-11-20 04:34:13+00:00
That's a tough one. Because I think to let this crap stand unopposed is degrading HN and I should either stop using this site (which I've already done for well over a year) or keep speaking out. Not speaking out while continuing to use the site would make me a 'good German' and that's not something I'd be comfortable with.

But between the likes of drysine and rayiner HN is poorer and even though the motto is 'curious conversation' this isn't that and it is making me wonder to what degree 'curious conversation' and 'rage driven engagement clicks' are the same thing but with a nicer name.
by mifydev | 2025-11-20 04:34:19+00:00
Yeah, it should work for clis, even now. For larger codebases we just need to get two things right: - create good plans with the adequate tradeoffs for the type of service - make sure to have enough lints and tests to verify the completion end to end, either with browser, or with typechecking or like for c++ - complex static analysis.
by bontaq | 2025-11-20 04:35:14+00:00
I've found really hammering it with *important*, all caps, "NEVER", etc finally made it start using the tidewave MCP for elixir development well. It felt really heavy handed but it worked.

For an idea of how heavy handed it was, this is my claude.md (with some explanatory text before): https://gist.github.com/bontaq/77b56d90b30e29c84c53c86d7fe05...
by defen | 2025-11-20 04:35:22+00:00
Hindsight is 20/20 but that article definitely makes me question the technical leadership of the project. They chose to write a source transformer (which introduced its own set of issues) rather than update string literals to use b'' syntax because they didn't want contributors to have to learn how to use python 3? And because they didn't want lines to be too long? And because it would break change attribution for the lines in question? None of those reasons sound compelling to me at all, but the author presents them as the correct decision.
by grishka | 2025-11-20 04:35:52+00:00
"Now the end-to-end encryption will leak into the UX even more and you better like it"

I'll say it again: E2EE will never become mainstream unless someone somehow manages to implement it such that it's completely transparent to the user while keeping all the features that people have come to expect from IM apps, like server-stored conversation history or support for multiple devices. By "completely transparent" I mean that the user doesn't have to do any extra actions whatsoever to make it work.
by gregopet | 2025-11-20 04:35:59+00:00
That's not true. You can use those cookies, you just need to explain them somewhere on the site. No opt in required.

I talked with our then national information law official (funny fact, same person is currently president of our country), rule of thumb is if you're not using your users' personal data to pay for other people's services (e.g Google analytics) or putting actual personal data in them, you're generally fine without the banner.

Further, if you're a small shop or individual acting in good faith and somehow still violated the law, they will issue a warning first so you can fix the issue. Only the blatant violations by people who should've known better will get a fine instantly (that is the practice here, anyway, I assumed that was the agreement between EU information officers)
by jordanb | 2025-11-20 04:36:06+00:00
Max Martin is considered incredibly good at what he does.

https://youtu.be/DxrwjJHXPlQ?si=m-A6M8xrad5MrQqZ&t=151

Adam Conover discussed ad bumpers from the 1990s and 2000s. These were legal requirements for children's programming from the FCC. They're a compliance item, yet they were incredibly well made and creative in in many cases:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vI0UcUxzrQ

Because people at the top of their game will do great creative work even when doing commercial art and in many cases, will do way more than is perhaps commercially necessary.

So much of this AI push reminds me of the scene in 1984 where they had pornography generating machines creating completely uninspired formulaic brainrot stories by machine to occupy the proles.
by ztp123 | 2025-11-20 04:36:15+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with AI music tools recently, and ended up making something I didn’t expect: an 80s glam-metal parody song about software engineering chaos.

I wrote all the lyrics myself (“One Hot Feature”), fed them into Suno, and the model generated a surprisingly polished track — full vocals, instrumentation, arrangement, and mix. The whole thing took maybe 20 minutes end-to-end. What surprised me most wasn’t the audio quality (which is good), but how well the model adapted to the tone, humor, and style. I didn’t prompt it with any melody — just the words — and it built a full composition around them.

Curious to hear what others think about the state of AI music generation, especially:

Are we heading toward “everyone can make a polished song”?

What does authorship look like here?

How do you all feel about AI generating new music in a distinct style?

Happy to answer questions about the process.
by andsoitis | 2025-11-20 04:36:27+00:00
do you think he is wrong when he says that the West's superiority primarily comes from power, rather than ideas or value or religion?

I actually think that the West's superiority is due to a multitude of factors (not just raw power), but I can see how the CEO of a company on their investor call would emphasize the thing that their company brings to the table. Palantir, as far as I know, is not in the business of religion, for example.
by Teever | 2025-11-20 04:36:38+00:00
Agreed.

To me the hard take off won't happen until a humanoid robot can assemble another humanoid robot from parts, as well as slot in anywhere in the supply chain where a human would be required to make those parts.

Once you have that you functionally have a self-replicating machine which can then also build more data centers or semi fabs.
by shagie | 2025-11-20 04:36:46+00:00
They were inherited from even older languages and meant pretty much the same thing there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWK#Match_pattern_from_command...

#!/bin/sh pattern="$1" shift awk '/'"$pattern"'/ { print FILENAME ":" $0 }' "$@"

The $ notation for a variable in bash and awk... and BASIC...

RIGHTS imm & def RIGHT$ (sexpr, aexpr) ... PRINT RIGHT$ ("APPLESOFT" + "WARE", 8) SOFIWARE

One might make the claim that EWD498 was correct... https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498...

> It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

https://www.perl.com/pub/2007/12/06/soto-11.html/

> Now, however it was initially intended, I think BASIC turned out to be one of the first major scripting languages, especially the extended version that DEC put onto its minicomputers called BASIC/PLUS, which happily included recursive functions with arguments. I started out as a BASIC programmer. Some people would say that I’m permanently damaged. Some people are undoubtedly right.

... but it wasn't without previous examples that Perl went the way that it did with sigils.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-20 04:38:19+00:00
> I've never seen this before but I'm surprised anyone ever thought in good faith it wasn't tongue-in-cheek.

Even his defense of it was not that an argument that it was tongue-in-cheek. His defense is that it was an attempt (apparently by illustrating problems with the apparent logic of the existing draft) to get his staff to clarify the economic logic in a draft report.
by jmyeet | 2025-11-20 04:38:23+00:00
It's not only that he (allegedly) killed himself. It's the manner in which it happened.

First, extremely wealthy people are by and large sociopaths. It's how they get rich. They will never view themselves as responsible or deserving or prosecution. Many are so rich they never consider getting prosecuted a realistic possibility. They will use various legal means to hide assets from being reclaimed by victims. Alan Bond, an Australian entrepreneur, also raided pension funds (which he ultimately went to jail for) but he mysteriously got divorced from his wife (who got a large property settlement) before it all went south and he stayed on good terms with her even after the divorce. Weird, huh?

Second, it's weird that nobody on his yacht noticed he was gone. For hours. That... just doesn't make sense if you know how luxury yachts work. The principal or the owner will dictate the entire schedule of the boat. If they get up at 6am, staff will get up at 5am to make sure their needs are being met. Beverages, breakfast, whatever. At all times the bridge will be manned (ie have someone on watch) who will be looking out for hazards but also at cameras on the boat. They are on alert for things like a fire breaking out or a VIP being up so they can alert other staff.

So could he have slipped through that net to throw himself overboard? Sure, it's possible. It's not icnredibly likely however. Also, is that how a rich and powerful man who was once an arms dealer commits suicide? Again, it's possible but it doesn't seem like the most likely method.

Lastly, if you're going to kill somebody but don't want it to be seen as a murder, this tops the list of how you'd do it. Why? Because, being in the water is going to wash away evidence and there are multiple ways of inducing a heart attack that are essentially undetectable (eg potassium overdose). And the delay in the body being found will likely get rid of any potential evidence there too.

The whole thing just stinks to high heaven.
by HaZeust | 2025-11-20 04:38:41+00:00
Completely fair point. If I knew the importance of buying a house and how in reach it's always been for me with FHA loans, perhaps I would have taken budgeting classes more seriously. If I knew about the option of putting in some sweat equity for a new DIY kitchen countertop in that house I'd eventually come to buy, perhaps I would have paid more attention to the Pythagorean theorem to know how to cut the corner-piece. So on, and so forth.
by andai | 2025-11-20 04:40:21+00:00
The point of my comment is that if you use AI in the CLI it can be very helpful, because they're really good with text and pretty bad with everything else.

The general rule here is that you use it for what it's good for it's actually really good.

The "typing into my terminal" is mostly for interacting with Claude Code. I wish that part worked on my phone.

Although I do use the voice typing tons for text chat, ironically.
by makeitdouble | 2025-11-20 04:40:44+00:00
> I must be missing something, like do they have cheat codes to make it usable?

Some of us are in the weird spots where no OS "just works" and will require inordinate amount of setup and adjustments anyway.

I recently did an arch and Ubuntu install for two machines, and spend half a day each to get something mildly viable, and still tweak things from time to time two weeks after. Sheer hardware support was only a third of the pain.

Back in the days macos also took me about the same time to setup the local system , configure input and disable/workaround the silly stuff. Windows is on par IMHO (stuff are sillier, but disabling them takes about the same effort). For any of those I end with a fully working *nix system/subsystem, so the end setup makes very little difference to me.

The huge difference is windows having exotic[0] form factor support turned to 11, where linux will be rougher.

[0] I only care about tablets, I wonder if Bazzite could help, I'll be giving it a try in. few months I think.
by tombert | 2025-11-20 04:41:43+00:00
Huh. I wish I had known this before.

NixOS is annoying because everything is weird and symlinked and so I find myself fairly frequently making the mistake of writing `#!/bin/bash`, only to be told it can't find it, and I have to replace the path with `/run/current-system/sw/bin/bash`.

Or at least I thought I did; apparently I can just have done `#!bash`. I just tested this, and it worked fine. You learn something new every day I guess.
by SubiculumCode | 2025-11-20 04:42:00+00:00
For my use case, segmentation is all about 3D segmentation of volumes in medical imaging. SAM 2 was tried, mostly using a 2D slice approach, but I don't think it was competitive with the current gold standard nn-unet[1] [1. https://github.com/MIC-DKFZ/nnUNet]
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-20 04:42:15+00:00
It's not a joke. He didn't even say it was a joke. He said (as quoted on the Wikipedia page for the memo!) that it was “a comment on a research paper that was being prepared by part of my staff at the World Bank” and that it “sought to clarify the strict economic logic by using some rather inflammatory language”.

The closest it gets to being a joke is that it is mockery and derision directed at underlings as a form of feedback on work product.
by reactordev | 2025-11-20 04:42:29+00:00
My elderly mother is aware of AI yet she falls victim to it every time. I point out the obvious, the AI voice, the mouth not matching the words, etc and she just stares at me with disbelief that she was fooled (yet again) by AI. An hour later, she’s fooled again.

She also buys random stuff online because it’s on sale. Only because it’s on sale. She has no use for a home trampoline, a portable air conditioner, a men’s suit rack, or the dozens of Asian plates still in bubble wrap from a decade ago.
by bgwalter | 2025-11-20 04:42:31+00:00
If you want to steal code, you can take it from GitHub and strip the license. That is what the Markov chains (https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02724) do.

It's a code laundering machine. Software engineering has a higher number of people who have never created anything by themselves and have no issues with copyright infringement. Other professions still tend to take a broader view. Even unproductive people in other professions may have compunctions about stealing other people's work.
by noduerme | 2025-11-20 04:42:48+00:00
I listened a Jewish-focused podcast recently that essentially was about how Ecclesiastes was exhorting us to recognize that the time of (A/B testing: Reaping and sowing, embracing or not) was all taking place at the same, present moment. That every moment is the time for both - moments are finite but the human experience is not. That wasn't what I was thinking of when I wrote that comment about my own personal disenchantment and my need to soldier on, making things that are dust, but it's funny you mentioned it.

I've personally struggled over and over with the question of whether I'm making code or music or art for some kind of quickly-fading recognition or to prove something to myself, or just to have something to do. I see pros and cons both ways. And I wonder whether there even is such a thing as leaving a lasting mark in this world. And whether it's better to leave no mark at all, than to leave any kind of stain. An imprint in a clay tablet that lasts 5000 years certainly is a mark. But then you risk being reduced to an archaelogical specimen.

We can still unscramble some cuneiform, but we can't decipher the personal motives of the writers, and I wish we could. I'm concerned with what it means to be a good human and a successful one at the same time, but, I'm a drop in the ocean.

I think the point of these philosophies is not really to make you a morally upright person so much as to show you that you're a grain of sand, and let you draw your own conclusions.
by zzo38computer | 2025-11-20 04:43:07+00:00
Sokoban is you must move the boxes to the targets, although it can be called a class of puzzle games that are similar even if they do not involve moving boxes to targets; such as, it is a turn-based game with tile grid that has a puzzle to move around the pieces, etc.

(Also, it does not load, which is why I asked for a proper documentation.)
by jamiejquinn | 2025-11-20 04:43:11+00:00
Snap! I also played around with closures a tonne in Zig. Definitely possible but not... ergonomic. Haven't ended up using them much.

And agree with allocators; in C I always considered using custom allocators but never really needed to. Having them just available in the zig std means I actually use them. The testing allocator is particularly useful IMO.

Never used Go but if it's Zig-like I might give it a shot! Thanks!
by anonymous908213 | 2025-11-20 04:43:17+00:00
I kind of get a vibe of AI-generated, human-edited article out of this. Not much of the super obvious patterns I'm familiar with, but there is this repeated/reworded paragraph:

> Charging the $1,000+ market-clearing price would eliminate scalping, maximize revenue, and maximize aggregate consumer welfare. But it would also destroy the artist's relationship with their fans, as they would be seen as the greedy artist who priced out their true fans.

> Artists and sports leagues know the market-clearing price for their tickets is $1,000+. They know that direct pricing would eliminate scalping and maximize revenue. But they also know that directly charging these prices would destroy their carefully cultivated relationship with fans. Nobody wants to be seen as the greedy artist who priced out the true believers.

Moreover, the content of the article seems very superficial and not grounded in reality. To my cursory understanding with a few minutes of research into the topic, Taylor Swift tickets do not, in fact, retail for $1000+ with the help of Ticketmaster. It is the scalpers who charge that. Taylor Swift does not see any of the additional money when a prime seating ticket retails for $300 and is then re-sold for $6000. The premise that an artist allows Ticketmaster to get a cut in order to sell a ticket at the market-clearing rate seems factually incorrect, and therefore the entire posited relationship between artist and Ticketmaster is incorrect.

As far as I understand, Ticketmaster has deals with the most valuable venues in the US such that if you want to perform at the venue, you must use Ticketmaster. It is not that you as an artist choose to use Ticketmaster to inflate your ticket prices for you while deflecting the blame, but rather that if you aren't willing to give Ticketmaster their cut you don't get access to desirable venues at all.

I'm open to correction if someone who is more informed on the topic wishes to chime in, but I would hesitate to take this article at face value. It seems crafted to sell an emotional narrative rather than making accurate observations of reality.
by lotyrin | 2025-11-20 04:43:30+00:00
Not inherently. Politics is inherently about policy, the consensus mechanism involved is undefined. The fact it's been degraded into a carnival of moralistic cultural violence and individuals and their virtues, charisma or lack thereof is not at all inevitable.

The job of a state is to create social good for its citizens by solving tragedies of commons which promote opportunities, solving common problems in a way that takes advantage of scale, and holding other organizations (other states, corporations, whatever) or individuals accountable not to be creating harm. By reducing them to cultural divide-and-conquer games this process has been crippled. A certain economic class is responsible for this, is not even subtle about it, and propagandizes the other classes into believing that it benefits them, that the worn down veneer of democratic processes involved could somehow legitimizes it despite the obviously poor outcomes.

When I see people say left/right or "whole spectrum" of political ideas I know they've bought into this reductive vision of what politics could ever even possibly be, and it's as disappointing as it is common.

I particularly love when I get involved in a demographic survey and I get asked to rank myself on a "very liberal" to "very conservative" spectrum as if those are the only possibilities. I am incredibly critical of both of these ideologies and positions of "compromise" between them are even worse: ahistorical, amoral and unethical.

People who live their whole lives within the Overton Window and can't imagine anyone lives outside of it are incredibly bizarre to me.
Show HN: Quantum4J – A Pure Java Quantum Computing SDK
by vijayanandg | 2025-11-20 04:43:41+00:00
I built Quantum4J because I couldn’t find a clean, dependency-free way to experiment with multi-qubit unitaries from Java. Most QC libraries target Python, so this is meant to bring quantum circuit construction and state-vector simulation to the JVM.

It includes: - state-vector simulator (~25 qubits) - standard gates (X, Y, Z, H, S, T, RX/RY/RZ, CX, CZ, SWAP, ISWAP, CCX) - measurement + classical registers - OpenQASM 2.0 exporter

Example: QuantumCircuit.create(2).h(0).cx(0,1).measureAll();

Would love feedback on the architecture, gate engine, or ideas for what to add next. Iam considering expanding Quantum4J into a more complete JVM quantum tooling ecosystem. Interested in feedback from practitioners or researchers using Java in QC or simulation.
by haddonist | 2025-11-20 04:43:49+00:00
One of the things Sal Mercogliano stressed is that the crew (and possibly other crews of the same line) modified systems in order to save time.

Rather than doing the process of purging high-sulphur fuel that can't be used in USA waters, they had it set so that some of the generators were fed from USA-approved fuel, resulting in redundancy & automatic failover being compromised.

It seems probable that the wire failure would not have caused catastrophic overall loss of power if the generators had been in the normal configuration.
by femiagbabiaka | 2025-11-20 04:44:07+00:00
I was referring to his stints as treasury secretary and on the NEC, during which he championed a worldview that saw economics as being science, with immutable laws, that inevitably led to policy outcomes that caused the explosion in income inequality that we've seen since 2008 especially. The U.S. would be in a better place if he was never in the Obama or Clinton admins.

But now that I think about it, the email leaks show that he was sexually harassing women while he was at Harvard too. So he was terrible at all three jobs.
by andai | 2025-11-20 04:44:25+00:00
>People do not realize that programming as we know it, is going to change.

I saw yesterday that I had been approaching software incorrectly. It feels futuristic because it's so fast, but it's still linear. One guy making one thing at a time (with some help from the computer).

But software can now be made so rapidly, that the bottleneck is actually curation. You can now generate a hundred ideas for software and a prototype for each one in the time it takes to make some coffee.

Going through all of it is the part that doesn't scale, it's bottlenecked by the individual. That's the reward function, right? Taste, discernment.

At this point software can grow itself, it can mutate, and it can combine with other software. I think building is entirely the wrong metaphor now.

I think a better metaphor would be a genetic algorithm. You try a bunch of stuff and see what works. Then you combine the best parts.
by SoftTalker | 2025-11-20 04:44:48+00:00
I'm a SWE, DBA, SysAdmin, I work up and down the stack as needed. I'm not using LLMs at all. I really haven't tried them. I'm waiting for the dust to settle and clear "best practices" to emerge. I am sure that these tools are here to stay but I am also confident they are not in their final form today. I've seen too many hype trains in my career to still be jumping on them at the first stop.