MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nticompass | 2025-12-09 13:44:07+00:00
I don't understand why removing menu icons is a good thing. Firefox did it and I absolutely hate the change: https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2021/06/content-design-considera...

I actually use Zen browser and thankfully someone made a "mod" to bring them back: https://github.com/SivanTechDev/zen-themes/tree/main/BringBa...

Maybe it's just me, but the icons are NOT noise or a distraction, they actually make it quicker and easier for me to find what I want. Yes, I can read the words, but sometimes things blend together, such as "unload tab" and "unpin tab". The icons make it easier to tell them apart. Also, again maybe just me, but I remember the icon for the action I want and it's much quicker for me to scan the menu to find the icon than to have to read every piece of text.

Anyway, lots of people don't like the removal of icons, me being one of them, and I think the icons are nice and should stay in the menus.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-12-09 13:44:14+00:00
> I would say his main argument is that you should not use closed source software.

His argument/s go beyond that and {wa,i}s actively hostile towards uses and interoperability if code, other libraries, systems, services, and users aren't pure enough. That was the progression from GPL2 -(TiVo)-> GPL3 -(Mandriva )-> AGPL with ever more extremism and less choice and usability.

There's no need for anyone to mirror his entire philosophy or much of it, but that some bits can be replaced by the choice of the user/developer without being forced by others into another walled garden (licensing tainting) that claims to be "free".

YMMV. Take with a grain of salt. Ask your doctor if licensing is right for you.

:peace:
by radanskoric | 2025-12-09 13:44:25+00:00
Author here. I'm a big fan of factories but the slowness is a real drag on large test suites. If you're considering switching, remember that you can do it gradually, there's no law against using both fixtures and factories in the same project, in some cases (mostly on very complex domain data models) even makes sense: fixtures for the base setup that all tests share, factories for additional test specific records.

Btw, I also have an article with some of my learnings using factories and I make a remark on how it helps with test speed: https://radanskoric.com/articles/test-factories-principal-of...
by wicket | 2025-12-09 13:45:04+00:00
> Game Arts subsequently ported Grandia to the PlayStation, dropping it in Japan in the summer of 1999.

When I grew up, "dropping" something meant "excluding" it; you might drop a player from a team or a feature from a product to exclude it. It turns out that Grandia did actually release in Japan for the PlayStation in 1999.

Am I the only one who struggles with this new, fangled definition of the word "drop"?
by nullbound | 2025-12-09 13:45:24+00:00
I understand the concern, but I also think there are benefits to this approach. And while I absolutely agree with you on the likeness part used for a company, at a personal level, I believe it could have a great impact ( and be of use ). And, more importantly, you can then control the disposition of your likeness appropriately ( via an old fashioned will ). As a society, we seem to have solutions for these situations. They were just not very common.
by sam-cop-vimes | 2025-12-09 13:45:27+00:00
The same people have been saying for ages that this stuff needs to be regulated. But all governments are wary of interfering too much in the market. Legislation takes time, due not in small part to the efforts of private businesses lobbying against regulation. Look how long it took for governments to start labelling cigarettes as being harmful to ones health, restricting advertising etc.

As always, it takes bold leadership to bring about change, and it is not always available.
by weird-eye-issue | 2025-12-09 13:45:35+00:00
I think you underestimate just how hard visibility is. If something is free or super low cost than they won't have any marketing budget for you to hear about it in the first place because it would be unprofitable...

One thing I've come to realize is that if something is cheap enough then people won't even want to promote it because if they get a commission on it then it won't be worth their time. So in some cases they will be better off recommending a much higher price competitor. Just go Google around for some type of software (something competitive and commercial like CRMs) and you'll notice why for commercial projects nobody is recommending free or really cheap solutions because it's not in anybody's best interest
by mbesto | 2025-12-09 13:45:46+00:00
> Had the cost of building custom software dropped 90%, we would be seeing a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality SaaS offering all over the marketplace, possibly undercutting some established players.

Aha. Are developers finally realizing that just writing code doesn't make a business? We actually have a ton of SaaS companies being born right now but they're not making headway, because functionality and good code don't necessarily mean good businesses. Building a business is hard.
by gloosx | 2025-12-09 13:46:29+00:00
Reducing real human struggles to a punchline is exactly the kind of cynical detachment you can afford only if you have never lived through a failed banking system. If you had lived through what people in some countries deal with, you would not be making snarky comments

The reality is that crypto became a lifeline in places where the traditional financial system collapsed or simply abandoned people: Venezuela, Argentina, Lebanon, Nigeria are good examples of people dealing with real crises, using whatever tools actually work, including crypto currencies.
by jbs789 | 2025-12-09 13:47:02+00:00
I understand the emotional aspect of feeling like it’s out of reach for you.

Thing is, if you focus on your own skill development and apply it at even a small scale, very few people do that. Then you go for a job and guess what, the company has resources you can leverage. Then you do that, and ultimately you could be in a position to have the credibility to raise your own capital.

Play the long game and do what you can do now.
by TobiWestside | 2025-12-09 13:47:37+00:00
A note on your "IBM has been shrinking" take: IBM spun out Kyndryl in 2021, including 90,000 employees [0]. That leaves the remaining company with 255,000 employees after the spin-off in 2021, which means it has actually grown by 15,000 people to reach the 270,000 in 2024.

The spin-off also explains the drop in revenue. In 2021, the first results reported excluding Kyndryl, IBM had revenues of $57.4B [1]. Since 2021, revenue grew by ~9% to reach $62.75B in 2024.

[0] https://www.kyndryl.com/us/en/about-us/news/2021/11/2021-11-... [1] https://newsroom.ibm.com/2022-1-24-IBM-RELEASES-FOURTH-QUART...
by andrewstuart | 2025-12-09 13:48:03+00:00
Banning social media for children is evidence free, nanny state, political virtue signaling that will be the thin end of the wedge that government use to deeply control and regulate and control adults.

“We’re protecting the children!”

Relevant Honest Government Ad: https://youtu.be/ZxRB5qWphJE?si=iT_3v1LyDvUu1UPL
by dns_snek | 2025-12-09 13:48:32+00:00
> Isn't the answer on SO the result of a human intelligence writing it in the first place, and then voted by several human intelligencies to top place? If an LLM was merely an automated "equivalent" to that, that's already a good thing!

The word "merely" is doing all of the heavy lifting here. Having human intelligence in the loop providing and evaluating answers is what made it valuable. Without that intelligence you just have a machine that mimics the process yet produces garbage.
by triwats | 2025-12-09 13:49:01+00:00
My sister picked this up from a random supermarket in 1998/1999, and I sank 100s of hours into watching her play it through.

She does this thing where she wants to start games over and over again from the start, play them for a bunch of hours, then start it again.

The soundtrack and the challenge of beating the game at that age was wonderful.

I beat it a few years ago for the first time all the way through again. Really enjoyed it, but never played the sequel.

I find a lot of modern games unisnpiring. Too much focus is on creating a general great game, rather than focusing on story / mechanics.

Thanks for the post!
by MisterTea | 2025-12-09 13:49:29+00:00
> Synths, instruments, etc. -> Analogue mixing console -> ADC -> DAC -> Professional tape production apparatus -> My tape deck -> ADC -> ACC Codec -> Your DAC

Reminds me of the early music CD's which had AAA, AAD, ADD, DDD printed on them to tell you how the material was recorded, mixed, and mastered. A stood for analog and D for digital. Looks like you went the DDA route :-)
by tdeck | 2025-12-09 13:49:40+00:00
I always wonder why this isn't a bigger part of the discussion. None of us would develop a visual UI flow without trying it manually at least once, but for some reason this idea isn't extended to discussions about accessibility. The advice always fits into these three groups:

1. Follow a checklist

2. Buy my software

3. Hire blind people to test your app

I'm not saying that these are bad (although some overlay software is actually worse than nothing), but aren't people even a little bit curious to try the user experience you're shipping?

There are popular, free screen readers out there and using one can teach you a lot.
by lucaserla | 2025-12-09 13:49:51+00:00
I struggled to stay consistent with my daily replies on X, especially on the days when I was coding a lot.

I wanted to find a way to trick my mind and have an immediate visual feedback while doing this sometimes annoying and non-rewarding task.

So I built this chrome extension to see whether it could help me be more active. I have been on a 16 days streak and the sound triggered on every reply makes it a bit less annoying.

Most of the people I see on X are on premium already and they probably wonder why should I buy this:

live counter on main page without having to go to analytics and refresh for updates

gratifying and rewarding sound on every reply

streak days stat

what do you builders think?
by skissane | 2025-12-09 13:50:21+00:00
> One problem that I have with trying to understand "time" is that we can't measure how quickly it "flows" or at least how quickly we travel through it.

Our experience of time passing is heavily influenced by the temporal granuality of our subjective experience-at the upper end, “now” lasts 2-3 seconds; at the lower end, our temporal discrimination goes down to tens of milliseconds for visual and tactile stimuli, and reaches down to microseconds for certain types of auditory stimuli. But, one supposes other species with different neurology would have these durations be shorter or longer, which would make time pass more slowly or faster for them, in subjective terms.
by jon-wood | 2025-12-09 13:50:34+00:00
I think there's a space for something in between Ocado and Uber Eats, in the 2010s I worked for a startup where you could book an Ocado style delivery slot for the next day from a bunch of different butchers, bakers, etc and then we'd send a van round to collect from all of them and deliver it to you. Annoyingly they ran out of money just a little bit too soon, I'm pretty sure if they'd managed to hold out until 2020 they'd have seen a huge increase in sales as everyone fully got on board with online delivery and been laughing.

I think the big win with that model vs Ocado is that scaling down is fine, you work with whatever shops are in the area and don't need to deal with building fulfilment centres. Maybe you need a car park somewhere to put the vans overnight. Scaling up is a case of moving into different areas, or onboarding new shops. Absolutely agreed that last mile is a nightmare but we mostly had it down I think, the biggest pain there was that we were relying on a bunch of third parties to pack an order, and if any of them got something wrong we ended up with an unhappy customer on the phone and needing to deal with it.
by lb1lf | 2025-12-09 13:50:53+00:00
Do keep in mind 96 dB is only the theoretical dynamic range of the CD medium, 99% of recordings utilize way less. (Besides, you'd be in pain if you cranked up the volume until you had 96dB of range above your hearing threshold, anyway)

CDs also eliminate wow & flutter (which ought to be pretty much inaudible on a decent deck, probably less so on an el cheapo grande walkman), which probably does more for (experienced) audio quality than high dynamic range.

Oh, and better high frequency response, for the young ones. :D
by hypercube33 | 2025-12-09 13:51:29+00:00
The monotone ones in Windows 11 that jump around in order or menu position (I think both of these have been addressed in 24h2 or something?) where they hop to the top or bottom of the menu or dont show so the order is wrong if they are disabled for some object are insanely bad UX.

I say this because I agree, the pictogram icon is much easier for me to find. I also like having a word there though, if they change the picture on me. If its not color, almost all bets are off, since I dont even look at the icon, just look for a color and go for it if thats available.
by pllbnk | 2025-12-09 13:51:41+00:00
I have seen it commonly cited (although haven't bothered to check the actual sources, mostly because I believe they should be taken with a grain of salt) that developers spend somewhere in the ballpark of 50-60% of their time doing "coding work" - that is writing the code, thinking about the solution in terms of technical aspects, reading code reviews. The rest are meetings, coordination, administrative tasks, being blocked or whatever else you can think of. Even if, wishfully thinking, the value of the act of "coding work" fell by 90%, the act of doing "software engineering" work would still cost no less than 50% of what it currently does. Headlines like these are alarmist and have little substance.

Edit: I also feel stumped why so many people give in to this hype that LLMs are good at coding when they can't even do seemingly simple tasks of plain English language summarization accurately as evidenced in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrwJgDHJJoE. If the AI summarizes the code in its own context incorrectly then it will not be able to write it correctly either.
by bovermyer | 2025-12-09 13:51:55+00:00
That's the conclusion the article came to, though without the potentially derogatory "hipster" label.

I buy cassettes and vinyl because it's a more complete sensory experience than just Spotify or MP3s. Listening to music then involves tactile feeling, not just audio. And the ritual of setting up to play a song adds something to the experience, too, even if it's more work than just hitting "shuffle" on your streaming service.
by noident | 2025-12-09 13:52:15+00:00
I don't like doing the leetcode grind, but all of the alternatives are strictly worse.

* Take home projects filter out people with busy lives. Wastes 100 people's time to hire 1 person. Can't be sure they didn't cheat. No incentives to stop company from giving you a 10 hour assignment and then not looking at it. The candidate with the most time to waste wins.

* Relying on academic credentials unfairly favors people from privileged backgrounds and doesn't necessarily correlate with skill as an engineer.

* Skipping the tech interview and just talking about the candidate's experience is prone to favoring bullshitters, plus you'll miss smart people who haven't had their lucky break yet.

* Asking "practical" questions tends to eliminate people without familiarity with your problem domain or tech stack.

* We all know how asking riddles and brainteasers worked out.

With leetcode, the curriculum is known up front and I have some assurance that the company has at least has some skin in the game when they schedule an engineer to evaluate me. It also tests your general knowledge and in some part intelligence as opposed to testing that you have some very narrow experience that happens to overlap with the job description.
by itgoon | 2025-12-09 13:52:38+00:00
Like another reply says: practice.

How many hours have you spent writing code? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Were you able to achieve good results in the first hundred hours?

Now, compare it to how much time you've spent working with agents. Did you dedicate considerable time to figuring out how to use them? Do you stop using the agent and do things manually when it isn't going right, or do you spend time figuring out how to get the agent to do it?
by nirui | 2025-12-09 13:53:05+00:00
> He would just spot-check the correctness of AI’s work and quickly spin up local deployments to verify it’s indeed working.

I'm not really sure how exactly he get the project done, but "spot-check" and "quickly spin up local deployments to verify" is somehow makes me somewhat unconformable.

For me, it's either unit-tests that hits at least 100% coverage, or when unit-test is inapplicable, a line-by-line letter-by-letter verification. Otherwise your "spot-check" means no shit to me.
by adriand | 2025-12-09 13:53:11+00:00
Currently three main projects. Two are Rails back-ends and React front-ends, so they are all Ruby, Typescript, Tailwind, etc. The third is more recent, it's an audio plugin built using the JUCE framework, it is all C++. This is the one that has been blowing my mind the most because I am an expert web developer, but the last time I wrote a line of C++ was 20 years ago, and I have zero DSP or math skills. What blows my mind is that it works great, it's thread safe and performant.

In terms of workflow, I have a bunch of custom commands for tasks that I do frequently (e.g. "perform code review"), but I'm very much in the loop all the time. The whole "agent can code for hours at a time" thing is not something I personally believe. It depends on the task how involved I get, however. Sometimes I'm happy to just let it do work and then review afterwards. Other times, I will watch it code and interrupt it if I am unhappy with the direction. So yes, I am constantly stepping in manually. This is what I meant about "mind meld". The agent is not doing the work, I am not doing the work, WE are doing the work.
by 9rx | 2025-12-09 13:53:26+00:00
> Those modes of transport are all equivalent to planes for the point being made.

The point is that even those things require oversight from humans. Everything humans do requires oversight from humans. How you missed it, nobody knows.

Maybe someday we'll have a robot uprising where humans can be exterminated from life and computers can continue to play chess, but that day is not today. Remove the human oversight and those computers will soon turn into lumps of scrap unable to do anything.

Sad state of affairs when not even the HN crowd understands such basic concepts about computing anymore. I guess that's what happens when one comes to tech by way of "Learn to code" movements promising a good job instead of by way of having an interest in technology.
by triwats | 2025-12-09 13:53:43+00:00
Nice comment! How is the HD collection?

Hmm, I think the flaws are what generally make games.

I played thousands of hours on a bunch of Quake 3 engine games (Q3:A, RTCW, ET)...

If you moved your mouse in a certain way you would go faster, and as a result there were a class of players that were speed demons.

These flaws are often ground out now, and I think that limits community-driven creativity. Especially since most games are impossible to mod now.

Eventually we found ways to limit this (limit fps in competitive configs as an e.g.) to prevent those with the best PCs have an unfair advantage.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-12-09 13:53:54+00:00
Thanks! While I have you, since you seem to know what's up with this stuff, I'm going to ask you a question I have been curious about, in Rails land too.

While I see the pro's (and con's) of fixtures, one thing I do _not_ like is Rails ordinary way of specifying fixtures, in yaml files. Especially gets terrible for associations.

It's occured to me there's no reason I can't use FactoryBot to create what are actually fixtures -- as they will be run once, at test boot, etc. It would not be that hard to set up a little harness code to use FactoryBot to create objects at test boot and store them (or logic for fetching them, rather) in specified I dunno $fixtures[:some_name] or what have you for referal. And seems much preferable to me, as I consider switching to/introducing fixtures.

But I haven't seen anyone do this or mention it or suggest it. Any thoughts?
by crazygringo | 2025-12-09 13:54:08+00:00
I find online grocery shopping shines for heavy and bulky things that are a huge pain to schlep home otherwise, especially stuff that lasts a while.

All juices/waters/beers/wines, paper towels, lots of oranges/grapefruits, cleaning products like bleach/detergent, etc. When they carry them up to your fourth-floor door it's just so much easier.

The smallish shops are good for stuff you can then easily carry in a bag by hand -- meat, veg, cheese, fresh bread.
Show HN: Whisper Money – End-to-End Encrypted Personal Finance App
by falcon_ | 2025-12-09 13:54:13+00:00
I built Whisper Money, a personal finance app where all your data is end-to-end encrypted and only you hold the keys.

Site: http://whisper.money/

Code: https://github.com/whisper-money/whisper-money

How it works (high-level)

- All sensitive data is encrypted in the browser before it hits the server

- The server only stores encrypted blobs for sync

- Decryption happens only on your devices

Looking for feedback on

- Security model / crypto choices

- Key management UX (backup/recovery)

- Whether this is compelling vs. existing tools
by pcthrowaway | 2025-12-09 13:54:13+00:00
> their advantage over normal human beings is very small when positions are completely randomized.

The book you referenced does not say they're comparable to normal players at playing from a random position.

Normal players are almost as good as them at recalling a nonsensical board of random pieces.

The suggestion that the advantage of a chess master over a normal player is "very small" at playing from a random position is laughable.
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-09 13:55:08+00:00
Is 4Chan popular with Pakistani scammers?

I think mostly Meta's and X's platforms have the big issue with asian posters masquerading as westerners, since they get paid for the engagement rage-bait they generate there, but 4Chat doesn't pay you, so they have no incentive to spend their time commenting there when they can farm on X for cash. 4Chan is mostly infested by glowies though, both US and Israeli.
by BubbleRings | 2025-12-09 13:56:22+00:00
> …reused its embedding matrix as the weights for the linear layer that projects the context vectors from the last Transformers layer into vocab space to get the logits.

At first glance this claim sounds airtight, but it quietly collapses under its own techno-mythology. The so-called “reuse” of the embedding matrix assumes a fixed semantic congruence between representational space and output projection, an assumption that ignores well-known phase drift in post-transformer latent manifolds. In practice, the logits emerging from this setup tend to suffer from vector anisotropification and a mild but persistent case of vocab echoing, where probability mass sloshes toward high-frequency tokens regardless of contextual salience.

Just kidding, of course. The first paragraph above, from OP’s article, makes about as much sense to me as the second one, which I (hopefully fittingly in y’all’s view) had ChatGPT write. But I do want to express my appreciation for being able to “hang out in the back of the room” while you folks figure this stuff out It is fascinating, I’ve learned a lot (even got a local LLM running on a NUC), and very much fun. Thanks for letting me watch, I’ll keep my mouth shut from now on ha!