MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bncndn0956 | 2025-12-04 14:46:47+00:00
When I was 10 years old, I asked my maternal grandfather, "why does anything exist at all?"

My grandpa explained it in layman terms which even I could understand. He said, "If nothing should exist because it is simpler state to be in for everything, a sort of Primordial Law. Then what is the mechanism by which this law is enforced. Who or what is ensuring that Law is implemented everywhere for eternity. If we assume that such a mechanism must exist, then we have just proved that something must exist."
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-12-04 14:46:57+00:00
a one time cost of a big download is something customers have shown time and again that they're willing to bear. remember that software is optimized for ROI first and all other things second. Sometimes optimizing for ROI means "ship it today and let the first week of sales pay salaries while we fix it", sometimes ROI means picking between getting the file size down, getting that new feature out and fixing that game breaking edge case bug. Everything you do represents several things you choose not to do.
by sentinelqa | 2025-12-04 14:48:37+00:00
I built SentinelQA to make it easier for developers to understand why CI tests fail.

Most pipelines fail for unclear reasons; huge logs, flaky tests, regressions and subtle changes that aren't obvious. Debugging often means scrolling through thousands of lines to find a single clue.

SentinelQA analyzes each run and generates: - readable summaries of what went wrong - flaky test detection - regression insights - action items and possible next steps - visual diffs for UI/snapshot tests - code-level analysis for related changes

There’s a free plan and a 7-day Pro trial if you want to explore the full dashboard.

Would love any feedback, especially from teams dealing with unstable CI pipelines or noisy test suites.

https://sentinelqa.com
by pmontra | 2025-12-04 14:48:49+00:00
> Putting things on a screen was (is) stupidly simple.

This is why HTML is still a great language for building UIs and that's why Visual Basic had a huge success in the early 90s: drag UI components on a panel, write the callbacks for clicks, save and distribute the exe. Almost anybody could do it.

React and its siblings are much more complicated than that.
by gr4vityWall | 2025-12-04 14:49:23+00:00
> maybe $250/month (...) which you can then use to go and earn 100x that.

25k/month? Most people will never come close to earn that much. Most developers in the third world don't make that in a full year, but are affected by raises in PC parts' prices.

I agree with the general principle of having savings for emergencies. For a Software Engineer, that should probably include buying a good enough computer for them, in case they need a new one. But the figures themselves seem skewed towards the reality of very well-paid SV engineers.
by marcosdumay | 2025-12-04 14:49:30+00:00
> I don't know what to do about it

Do something similar to what we do with video: make a government enforced voluntary rating system (that is, you use if you want, if you use and lie, the government hits you) with a standard where sites can tell their ratings to the clients.

Have the parents decide if they will use the rating for anything.
by 1dom | 2025-12-04 14:50:03+00:00
> For whatever reason, kubernetes just irritates me. I find it unpleasant to use. And I don't think I'm unique in that regard.

I feel the same. I feel like it's a me problem. I was able to build and run massive systems at scale and never used kubernetes. Then, all of a sudden, around 2020, any time I wanted to build or run or do anything at scale, everywhere said I should just use kubernetes. And then when I wanted to do anything with docker in production, not even at scale, everywhere said I should just use kubernetes.

Then there was a brief period around 2021 where everyone - even kubernetes fans - realised it was being used everywhere, even when it didn't need to be. "You don't need k8s" became a meme.

And now, here we are, again, lots of people saying "just use k8s for everything".

I've learned it enough to know how to use it and what I can do with it. I still prefer to use literally anything else apart from k8s when building, and the only time I've ever felt k8s has been really needed to solve a problem is when the business has said "we're using k8s, deal with it".

It's like the Javascript or WordPress of the infrastructure engineering world - it became the lazy answer, IMO. Or the me problem angle: I'm just an aged engineer moaning at having to learn new solutions to old problems.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-12-04 14:50:04+00:00
It’s so very ironic that your comment appears on this particular post. We had a much better version of this with interface builder on NeXT in the late 1980s (and later Mac OS X). Similar tooling existed for DOS and Windows.

You literally laid out your UI in a WYSIWYG, drag and dropped connections to your code, and had something working on day one.

It was even easier than the web, because what you were laying out were full components with code and UI and behavior. The web still hasn’t caught up with that fully.

When I see comments like these, I better understand why old timers shake their fist at the youngsters reinventing the wheel badly because they don’t understand what came before.
by loudmax | 2025-12-04 14:50:24+00:00
I don't find your mother's reaction bizarre. When people are told that some behavior they've been doing for years is bad for reasons X,Y,Z, it's typical to be defensive and skeptical. The fact that your mother really did follow up and check your reasons demonstrates that she takes your point of view seriously. If she didn't, she wouldn't have bothered to verify your assertions, and she wouldn't have told you you were right all along.

As far as trusting AI, I presume your mother was asking ChatGPT, not Llama 7B or something. The LLM backed up your reasoning rather than telling her that dog feces in bushes is harmless isn't just happenstance, it's because the big frontier commercial models really do know a lot.

That isn't to say the LLMs know everything, or that they're right all the time, but they tend to be more right than wrong. I wouldn't trust an LLM for medical advice over, say, a doctor, or for electrical advice over an electrician. But I'd absolutely trust ChatGPT or Claude for medical advice over an electrician, or for electrical advice over a medical doctor.

But to bring the point back to the article, we might currently be living in a brief period where these big corporate AIs can be reasonably trusted. Google's Gemeni is absolutely going to become ad driven, and OpenAI seems on the path to following the same direction. Xai's Grok is already practicing Elon-thought. Not only will the models show ads, but they'll be trained to tell their users what they want to hear because humans love confirmation bias. Future models may well tell your mother that dog feces can safely be thrown in bushes, if that's the answer that will make her likelier to come back and see some ads next time.
by glenstein | 2025-12-04 14:50:55+00:00
Agreed! If anything, I think I'm tired of the "everyone says this when they get old!" hot take. Sometimes things really do get visibly worse and the intergenerational complaining about it is due to it really happening.

I bring this example up every time, but I'm a baseball fan. And seemingly every generation of fan has said there's more people striking out than there used to be. Is it because there part of getting old as a baseball fan? No! It's really happening. Strikeouts have quite literally been going up from one decade to the next for basically a century.

So sometimes it's because the thing is really happening. Environmental ecosystem collapse? Real. People having shorter attention spans every next generation? Real! Politics getting worse? Well, maybe the 1860s were worse, but the downward trajectory over the last 50 years seems pretty real. Inefficiency of increasingly automagic programming paradigms? Real!

Sometimes things are true even if old people are saying them.
by danaris | 2025-12-04 14:51:35+00:00
Microsoft is also moving more and more away from hardware exclusivity. Even their Xbox Game Pass service is now not tied to the console.

More broadly, AAA gaming as a whole is also moving away from hardware exclusivity. Third-party developers (like Square-Enix) have been making recent releases for all major platforms, and even some first-party console titles are now coming to PC (eg, the Horizon games from Sony).

I'm optimistic about the future of non-locked-down gaming.
by throw0101d | 2025-12-04 14:51:55+00:00
> It's only recently that an average person could jump on eBay and get assembled low-level electronic module/boards for cheap, and assemble into their project.

People have been tinkering with electronic/electric modules for decades:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiKey
by CodeMage | 2025-12-04 14:53:11+00:00
From the post: "The middle manager that doesn't perform any useful work is a fun stereotype, but I also think it's a good target to aim for."

This is the kind of argument that makes people come up with middle manager stereotypes in the first place. In fact, the whole post is a great example of why middle manager stereotypes exist: it starts with a straw man argument and comes up with a "better alternative" that makes life easier for the manager, regardless of what the manager's reports really need.

I've seen this whole "I will empower you to do everything on your own" principle in action and it's exhausting. Especially when the word "empower" is a used as a euphemism for "have you take on additional responsibilities".

Look, boss, sometimes empowering me is just what I need, but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate.
by anthonylevine | 2025-12-04 14:53:24+00:00
> that you don’t need templating, compiler, or anything special to write react, “it’s just JS”

This is still true. I don't currently use any of those things. And the existance of a compiler does imply you can't write Javascript. Totally different concepts. Also, pretty sure they had compiler plans for like years now.

> but then it breaks, or has awful performance.

You're gonna have to be more specific. I could repeat that sentence for every programming language/library on the planet and without specifics it would make sense.

> You can’t use if-else in JSX,

I don't need to use if-else in JSX to control flow. I can write if(condition) return html;

> which are hard to read, or using JS anomalies like having a condition expression return the last truthish evaluation.

See the sentence I just wrote before this. I can use if/else to control flow and return early without templating. How is that not ideal?

> And regarding signals, preact is using it and it doesn’t seem to break anything there.

It's not about literlaly "breaking" something. They could implement htem if they wanted to. It's about breaking the mental model.

In React, data flows down. That's a constraint, but not always a bad one. I know exactly where to look for data (up). With signals, that's throw out the window. And now, it's not just about what the component accepts via props/context (which again, is down) it now needs to turn itself on it's head.

I used Angular for years before React and I do not miss having things talking to each other throw multiple lateral levels.

> Function of a state has a nice ring to it, but eventually this was solved a long time before react, every templating engine is a function of a state.

> Function of a state has a nice ring to it, but eventually this was solved a long time before react, every templating engine is a function of a state. The hard part is composing the state easily which react has never been able to achieve.

This is incredibly misleading (and wrong). Templates don't compose. And React is quite literlaly the king of composition.

It's starting to feel like you've never actually used React, but instead are basing your opinions on what you see other people say (who have also not used React).
by wseqyrku | 2025-12-04 14:53:39+00:00
I meant more about this part:

> The threat to the environment, the consolidation of resources by the ones at the top, the spread of misinformation and lies, the acceleration of mass surveillance, the decay of critical thinking

My question was that how many people are actually concerned about those things? If you think about it it's kind of obvious but it takes conscious effort to see it and I suspect not many people do.
by paddleon | 2025-12-04 14:53:53+00:00
The funny thing is the CDC says the same thing as your parents did

Whipworm, hookworm, and Ascaris are the three types of soil-transmitted helminths (parasitic worms)... Soil-transmitted helminths are among the most common human parasites globally.

https://www.cdc.gov/sth/about/index.html
by macNchz | 2025-12-04 14:53:57+00:00
What is the actual return on that investment, though? This is self indulgence justified as « investment ». I built a pretty beefy PC in 2020 and have made a couple of upgrades since (Ryzen 5950x, 64GB RAM, Radeon 6900XT, a few TB of NVMe) for like $2k all-in. Less than $40/month over that time. It was game changing upgrade from an aging laptop for my purposes of being able to run multiple VMs and a complex dev environment, but I really don’t know what I would have gotten out of replacing it every year since. It’s still blazing fast.

Even recreating it entirely with newer parts every single year would have cost less than $250/mo. Honestly it would probably be negative ROI just dealing with the logistics of replacing it that many times.
by gwbas1c | 2025-12-04 14:54:01+00:00
You either don't have kids, or your children are adults.

It's impractical in today's world to raise children without access to devices like tablets and smart phones. That's like having a sugar-free, no TV, hand-sewn, ect, ect, household.

What's more important is to know what your kids are getting into, making sure they are comfortable discussing what they see, and teaching them independent decision making skills.

For example, a few years ago, my then seven-year-old complained to me about all of the Jesus videos that were popping up on Youtube. I told her to thumbs down them, and now Youtube no longer suggests them. She also knows that if other kids watch Jesus videos, that's their right and to keep her mouth shut.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-04 14:54:16+00:00
> technically the house analogy isn't that good because there are lots of people who won't sell below what they bought for

Just ignore the downside part of the house analogy because it doesn’t apply to this current DRAM situation where prices went up.

The key point is that if you buy something and its value goes up, you’re not going to offer it for sale at the same price you paid for it. You’re going to sell it at market rate.

Everyone does this, including retailers. It elicits angry cries of “gouging” from people who want to believe retailers are the cause of the high prices and be angry at them, but the market is big. It’s supply and demand.
by kokau | 2025-12-04 14:54:19+00:00
Text : I’ve been building a small tool called Brandolia, originally for myself because freelancers and small businesses around me kept asking for logos, color palettes, storylines, names, etc.

Instead of generating just a logo, the tool builds an entire brand identity automatically:

logo

color palette

typography

brand story + slogan

positioning

visual guidelines

landing page text

social media starter kit

All in less than a minute.

I built it solo (Supabase + OpenAI + Deno Edge Functions + a lot of prompt engineering), and I was surprised by how many non-technical users struggle with branding even more than with website creation.

Brandolia now has a few thousand users, and I'm trying to understand if there’s a real market demand for “full brand identity generation” vs. “just logo generation.”

I’d love feedback from HN on:

Whether this solves a real problem you’ve seen yourself or in your company

What features would actually matter to make it useful long term

Whether automated branding can coexist with design agencies or will always stay a niche tool

Site: https://brandolia.io (would appreciate critical feedback on UX, speed, and consistency)
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-04 14:54:22+00:00
There's also specialization and process optimization that big banks do that little CUs simply don't have the volume to justify. If someone buried deep within BofA or Chase or some other national entity looks at your stuff and says some factor that's marginal makes it a no-go for some product that's the end of it despite being offset by some other factor that's out of the ordinary in a good direction. At a credit union with the process broken down across fewer people the person making that decision is more likely to be able to see that the big picture math still works for a given product.
by shagie | 2025-12-04 14:54:24+00:00
From days of old...

Invoking Applet Methods From JavaScript Code - https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/in...

and

Invoking JavaScript Code From an Applet - https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/in...

Aside from the "Java is cool, name everything Java" in the early days - there was scripting between the browser and the applet using a language named JavaScript.
Show HN: Intrepid – A Visual Behavior Builder for Real Robotics Code
by frag | 2025-12-04 14:54:45+00:00
Hi! I’m building Intrepid, a visual behavior system for robotics that lets you turn any existing function (ROS1/ROS2, PyTorch, navigation, sensors, etc.) into a reusable behavior node with zero rewrites and no glue code. You just register a function and it becomes a visual block you can plug into missions.

Python SDK, agent, and a short walkthrough video are linked. SDKs for other languages like C/C++, Rust, Js in preparation.

Technical differentiator: nodes are created by direct runtime registration of real functions (no DSL, no code generation, no wrappers).

Demo video: https://youtu.be/lu8fDki-n5E Python SDK: https://pypi.org/project/intrepid-python-sdk/ Agent download: https://intrepid.ai/product/#download

Would love feedback from people building real robots (in particular but not limited to drones, ground vehicles, but also ground stations)
by sylware | 2025-12-04 14:55:11+00:00
There are 2 webs.

web apps and web sites.

web apps require a [java|ecma]script whatng cartel web engine, more and more only the gogol one (blink) will "correctly" work (abuse of dominant position).

web sites are noscript/basic (x)html ("forms" and the <audio> <video> elements). Usually a "semantic" 2D table with proper ids for navigation.
by mhitza | 2025-12-04 14:55:13+00:00
> my guess is that states are simply copying each other and/or global conditions are similar enough that they naturally come to the same conclusions around the same time.

I think that's the wrong guess. Even with chat control, in some previous forms, the proposals came of the back of lobbying. One such case was Ashton Kutcker's startup https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutchers-non-profit-start...

The more recent proposals for chat control were drafted by non-public "high level groups", the identity of which wasn't revealed to the public https://mullvad.net/en/why-privacy-matters/going-dark
by tonetegeatinst | 2025-12-04 14:55:20+00:00
I think the real bubble is NVIDIA....not AI.

Is AI overhyped...sure it is just like with any new technology like quantum computers or crypto or big data. The use cases are real and the value exists....its just because it is so new that everyone wants a slice of the pie and so we have the situation like we are in now.

AI, just like big data or crypto...is very hardware expensive. While we have gotten better at inference and training, the real issue is the cost of chips. These hardware people know what they have is in high demand and so they are charging through the roof.
by dgacmu | 2025-12-04 14:55:26+00:00
I'd take the opposite bet on this. They're diverting wafer capacity from lower-profit items to things like HBM, but all indications are that wafer starts are up a bit. Just not up enough.

For example: https://chipsandwafers.substack.com/p/mainstream-recovery

"Sequentially, DRAM revenue increased 15% with bit shipments increasing over 20% and prices decreasing in the low single-digit percentage range, primarily due to a higher consumer-oriented revenue mix"

(from june of this year).

The problem is that the DRAM market is pretty tight - supply or demand shocks tend to produce big swings. And right now we're seeing both an expected supply shock (transition to new processes/products) as well as a very sudden demand shock.
by salkahfi | 2025-12-04 14:55:43+00:00
The Pravda of 43rd Street is fighting for its right to commit treason. The Pentagon's new policy requires journalists to pledge not to solicit unauthorized information. The New York Times demands unrestricted access to leaks and the ability to destabilize the chain of command. They function as an information warfare apparatus for the globalist regime. The Pentagon is simply implementing self-defense protocols against a hostile, partisan organ. Their lawsuit is a public admission that their intelligence gathering operation was cut off. We call it protecting national security. They call it a lack of privilege
by doom2 | 2025-12-04 14:56:12+00:00
I think the disconnect for me is that I want AI to do a bunch of mundane stuff in my job where it is likely to be discouraged so I can focus on my work. My employer's CEO just implemented an Elon-style "top 5" bi-weekly report. Would they find it acceptable for me to submit AI-generated writing? I just had to do my annual self and peer reviews. Is AI writing valid here? A company wanted to put me, a senior engineer, through a five stage interview process, including a software-graded Leetcode style assessment. Should I be able to use AI to complete it?

These aren't meant to be gotcha rhetorical questions, just parts of my professional life where AI _isn't_ desirable by those in power, even if they're some of the only real world use cases where I'd want to use it. As someone said upthread, I want AI to do my dishes and laundry so I can focus on leisure and creative pursuits (or, in my job, writing code). I don't want AI doing creative stuff for me so I can do dishes and laundry.
by pjc50 | 2025-12-04 14:56:56+00:00
Quake is a rare exception. Source availability is rare on Windows, falling to almost zero for commercial applications (for obvious reasons). There's also plenty of corporate internal applications where the one company that is using it is also the only one with the source .. and they've lost it.

Quite a lot of game source is lost entirely even by the original authors.

Not to mention that even if you do have the source, changing the use of an API can be a really expensive software modification project. Even Microsoft haven't been entirely systematic, you can easily find WinForms control panel dialogs in Win11.

Some embedded Windows apps exist in this space as well. Oscilloscopes and other expensive scientific instruments that run Windows XP.
by mikepurvis | 2025-12-04 14:57:08+00:00
For a DDR3-era machine, you'd be buying RAM for that on Ebay, not Newegg.

I have an industrial Mini-ITX motherboard of similar vintage that I use with an i5-4570 as my Unraid machine. It doesn't natively support NVMe, but I was able to get a dual-m2 expansion card with its own splitter (no motherboard bifurcation required) and that let me get a pretty modern-feeling setup with nice fast cache disks.