MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by neom | 2025-12-30 15:28:34+00:00
I know this sounds extreme but I get actually angry/frustrated and often just can't watch peoples TVs. I don't watch TV myself but if I go to someones house and they have the TV on and it's one of those "enhanced" TVs, it boils my blood. I went to film school, I have emmy's, I've watched hours long conversations about frame rates and dynamic range choices and so many aspects of the creative process that the TV then...removes, heck sometimes I see these smart TVs playing something and I can't even tell what framerate it might even be in, sometimes it looks like in one scene it's 60p and in another is like 300p, then back to 24p? it's so jarring. I'm really surprised people even like these features/manufacturers think they're good defaults. Really grinds my gears!!! </rant>
by bulletsvshumans | 2025-12-30 15:29:28+00:00
I think coding agents require fundamentally different development practices in order to produce efficiency improvements. And just like any new tool, they benefit from wisdom in how they are applied, which we are just starting to develop as an industry. I expect that over time we will grow to understand and also expand the circumstances in which they are a net benefit, while also appreciating where they are a hindrance, leading to an overall efficiency increase as we avoid the productivity hit resulting from their misapplication.
by microtherion | 2025-12-30 15:29:38+00:00
> From what I can tell, everyone seems to be looking at chatbots

A friend recently explained to me that this trend is awful for newer businesses trying to get into a niche:

* Chatbots give a lot of weight to Wikipedia in their training data.

* Wikipedia demands "notability" for pages being created.

* So non-incumbent businesses have a hard time getting on Wikipedia, and chatbots keep recommending incumbents.
Show HN: Stop explaining the obvious to Nano Banana
by s265lee | 2025-12-30 15:29:40+00:00
AI image editing felt like testing my ability to explain what I see: “exactly X, preserve Y, the person on the Z..." and it would still edit the wrong stuff.

So I built a paint-and-prompt editor.

(1) You paint the region

(2) Type a short prompt, and done

Prompt before: "Remove the person in the far-left corner behind the person wearing a black jacket. Preserve everything else in the image, no identity change... etc"

Prompt now: "Remove him."

Website: https://swisy.app

If you try it, it will break. Please do let me know what sucked and why not worth trying. I'll fix it.
by chrisweekly | 2025-12-30 15:29:54+00:00
Related tangent: I recently learned about Mise^1 -- a tool for managing multiple language runtime versions. It might ease some of the python environment setup/mgmt pains everyone complains about. It apparently integrates with uv, and can do automatic virtualenv activation....

1. https://mise.jdx.dev/lang/python.html

via
https://gelinjo.hashnode.dev/you-dont-need-nvm-sdkman-pyenv-...
by sureglymop | 2025-12-30 15:30:00+00:00
In rust I really like the grmtools set of tools: https://github.com/softdevteam/grmtools.

It is lexx/yacc style lexer and parser generation and generates an LR1 parser but using the CPCT+ algorithm for error recovery. Iirc the way it works is that when an error occurs, the nearest likely valid token is inserted, the error is recorded and parsing continues.

I would use this for anything that is simple enough and recursive descent for anything more complicated and where even more context is needed for errors.
by tolerance | 2025-12-30 15:30:02+00:00
I didn’t mean to suggest that they would’ve. I just named a government document with significant gravity behind it to affect a point similar to the author’s:

> There’s nothing inherently wrong with this style, but one would hardly want an official document or legal contract to appear “warm and soft.”

Consider the response I gave to the other child comment on this thread referring to a different document as a revision if that suits you. [1]

I’m sorry. I don’t know of nor do I have the wherewithal to find any correspondence from the State Department to bolster my argument that “humanist fonts” are not always suited to the tenor of all government correspondence. Oddly, none of the press releases on state.gov are available in PDF as far as I can tell.

Wait.

At least imagine this!

> The State Department is taking decisive action against five individuals who have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose. These radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states—in each case targeting American speakers and American companies. As such, I have determined that their entry, presence, or activities in the United States have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.

<https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...>

In “Carlito”!

It’s already in “Open Sans”, which looks thinner and may have a taller X-height. What do you think of it? Not quite “warm”; certainly “soft”, I think. Should I feel concerned about this news? Or just alright?

Anodyne. That’s the way the words start to look after some time when set like this. How far away is that feeling from “banal”?

[1]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/SAP-SJ...
by ndiddy | 2025-12-30 15:30:17+00:00
Whenever people bring this up I find it somewhat silly. Wine originally stood for "Windows Emulator". See old release notes ( https://lwn.net/1998/1112/wine981108.html ) for one example: "This is release 981108 of Wine, the MS Windows emulator." The name change was made for trademark and marketing reasons. The maintainers were concerned that if the project got good enough to frighten Microsoft, they might get sued for having "Windows" in the name. They also had to deal with confusion from people such as yourself who thought "emulation" automatically meant "software-based, interpreted emulation" and therefore that running stuff in Wine must have some significant performance penalty. Other Windows compatibility solutions like SoftWindows and Virtual PC used interpreted emulation and were slow as a result, so the Wine maintainers wanted to emphasize that Wine could run software just as quickly as the same computer running Windows.

Emulation does not mean that the CPU must be interpreted. For example, the DOSEMU emulator for Linux from the early 90s ran DOS programs natively using the 386's virtual 8086 mode, and reimplemented the DOS API. This worked similarly to Microsoft's Virtual DOS Machine on Windows NT. For a more recent example, the ShadPS4 PS4 emulator runs the game code natively on your amd64 CPU and reimplements the PS4 API in the emulator source code for graphics/audio/input/etc calls.
by Someone | 2025-12-30 15:30:35+00:00
I feel the reverse. I can see one can claim Swift has everything but the kitchen sink, but its actors, to me, don’t look shoehorned in.

Reading https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr..., their first example is:

actor TemperatureLogger {
let label: String
var measurements: [Int]
private(set) var max: Int

init(label: String, measurement: Int) {
self.label = label
self.measurements = [measurement]
self.max = measurement
}
}

Here, the ‘actor’ keyword provides a strong hint that this defines an actor. The code to call an actor in Swift also is clean, and clearly signals “this is an async call” by using await:

await logger.max

I know Akka is a library, and one cannot expect all library code to look as nice as code that has actual support from the language, but the simplest Akka example seems to be something like this (from https://doc.akka.io/libraries/akka-core/current/typed/actors...):

object HelloWorld {
final case class Greet(whom: String, replyTo: ActorRef[Greeted])
final case class Greeted(whom: String, from: ActorRef[Greet])

def apply(): Behavior[Greet] = Behaviors.receive { (context, message) =>
context.log.info("Hello {}!", message.whom)
message.replyTo ! Greeted(message.whom, context.self)
Behaviors.same
}
}

I have no idea how naive readers of that would easily infer that’s an actor. I also would not have much idea about how to use this (and I _do_ have experience writing scala; that is not the blocker).

And that gets worse when you look at Akka http (https://doc.akka.io/libraries/akka-http/current/index.html). I have debugged code using it, but still find it hard to figure out where it has suspension points.

You may claim that’s because Akka http isn’t good code, but I think the point still stands that Akka allows writing code that doesn’t make it obvious what is an actor.
by tucnak | 2025-12-30 15:30:45+00:00
You're not supposed to admit it, but I never cared for Dijkstra's arguments on the matter. The same goes for his GOTO tirade, although that has been distorted by time somewhat. Pascal is using 1-ord, Fortran, R, Mathematica. If anything, it seems there's a longer tradition of 1-ord in scientific computing. In this view, I must agree insofar I don't think Julia people are serious about their "general purpose" stance whatsoever. But hey, these are merely idiosyncrasies. People say multiple dispatch is the shit, but it's just one bit of the puzzle with Julia. How they managed to engineer a solid foundation, semantics like that, without unnecessarily sacrificing performance—I don't think they get enough credit for that from programming guys.
by arielcostas | 2025-12-30 15:30:55+00:00
On the other hand, it may end up the other way: pressure you or bully you into quitting yourself. Here in Spain it happens sometimes: firing you is expensive and they don't want you around for whatever issue, so they'll try to find any justification to fire you, or just pressure you in some way on another to make you miserable enough to quit. No doubt that would happen in the US.
by ajkjk | 2025-12-30 15:30:56+00:00
wouldn't say that... they're very distinctly not like people, that's (part of) the problem. But I don't think the difference is measured exactly in the choices of words and punctuation. It's more like... you can tell, reading AI writing, that it's not "sincere"; no person would want to say what the AI is saying, because it feels fake and disingenuous. The phrases and em dashes and whatever else are just the method for this effect. Real people use the same phrases but with real intent to communicate behind them, and the result is different in a way that is curiously easy to detect.
by bryceneal | 2025-12-30 15:30:59+00:00
This is a great list. Even the first line item would be amazing. I'm really feeling this pain presently as I am moving my setup to a new dedicated machine.

Put aside the bit rot that occurs constantly with digital project files in a way it never did with tape, just getting my DAW, plugins, samples, projects working has been a giant pain. I am a big fan of deterministic/reproducible computing environments in general. My primary machine is setup declaratively with Nix. It would be great if something like this existed for my music setup without having to compromise on creative choices.

Most of these plugins are of dubious software quality, but that is not mutually exclusive with their ability to accomplish great sounding results. One of the reasons I bought a dedicated machine for music is that I inherently don't really trust them to be running on the same device as my personal computing. Some of them (Universal Audio Apollo) even require kernel extensions on MacOS.

If anyone is attempting to solve this, I'd like to hear about it.
by orwin | 2025-12-30 15:31:08+00:00
If we take out most of frontend work, and the easy backend/Ops tasks where writing the code/config is 99% of the work, i think my overall productivity with the latest gen (basically Opus 4.5) improve by 15-20%. I also am _very_ sure that with the previous generation (Sonnet 4, sonnet 4.5, Codex 5.1), my team overall velocity decreased, even taking into account the frontend and the "easy" tasks. The amount of production bug we had to deal with this year is crazy. To much code is generated, and me and the other senior on my team just can't carefully review everything, we have to trust sometime (especially data structures).

The worse part is reading a PR, and catching a reintroduced bug that was fixed a few commit ago. The first time i almost lost my cool at work and said a negative thing to a coworker.

This would be my advice to juniors (and i mean basically: devs who don't yet understand the underlying business/architecture): use the AI to explain how stuff work, generate basic functions maybe, but write code logic/algorithm yourself until you are sure you understand what you're doing and why. Work and reflect on the data structures by yourself, even if generated by the AI, and ask for alternatives. Always ask for alternatives, it helps understanding.
You might not see huge productivity gains from AI, but you will improve first, and then productivity will improve very fast, from your brain first, then from AI.
by mort96 | 2025-12-30 15:31:39+00:00
I'm in Norway, I was once at the railway station and someone collapsed on the platform and needed medical attention. Conductors of both trains currently at the platform attended the person, so train traffic was delayed.

The official reason for the delay, according to the Ruter app, the info screens and announcements over the PA system, was "signalfeil" ("signal error"). So at least in Norway, we clearly have a culture of describing all sorts of problems, including completely non-technical problems like someone having a medical emergency, as a problem with the train signals.
by JohnFen | 2025-12-30 15:32:12+00:00
> I can estimate how long it would take me to do something but Claude?

If I were in this situation, what I'd do is to continue to give estimates as I always have before, ignoring the use of genAI, and keep track of how much the accuracy of those predictions have changed. That would give me some real data on which I can begin to adjust my time predictions.

To do it any other way is to just be guessing blindly.
by linsomniac | 2025-12-30 15:32:20+00:00
>The AI fluency tax. This isn't free to learn.

In programming we've often embraced spending time to learn new tools. The AI tools are just another set of tools, and they're rapidly changing as well.

I've been experimenting seriously with the tools for ~3 years now, and I'm still learning a lot about their use. Just this past weekend I started using a whole new workflow, and it one-shotted building a PWA that implements a fully-featured calorie tracking app (with social features, pre-populating foods from online databases, weight tracking and graphing, avatars, it's on par with many I've used in the past that cost $30+/year).

Someone just starting out at chat.openai.com isn't going to get close to this. You absolutely have to spend time learning the tooling for it to be at all effective.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-30 15:32:26+00:00
> Alternatively, RemObjects makes Elements, also a RAD programming environment in which you can code in Oxygene (their Object Pascal), C#, Swift, Java, Go, or Mercury (VB) and target all platforms: .Net, iOS and macOS, Android, WebAssemblyl, Java, Linux, Windows.

Wait you can make Android applications with Golang without too much sorcery??

I just wanted to convert some Golang CLI applications to GUI's for Android and I instead ended up giving up on the project and just started recommending people to use termux.

Please tell me if there is a simple method for Golang which can "just work" for basically being the Visualbasic-alike glue code to just glue CLI and GUI mostly.
by derbOac | 2025-12-30 15:32:30+00:00
Personally, I don't have a problem with them changing fonts. I personally think Times isn't a great choice for the reasons articulated in that statement (something open and more legible seems better to me), but I don't think it's a horrible choice either (it's standard and efficient with space). If the State Department wants to use a certain font, it's their prerogative.

What bothers me about the decision is their rationale. If they had just switched without any explanation, it would have seemed more judicious and politic, befitting a department of state. Even better would be to announce a thoughtful font choice with reasoning based on the font itself, without defaulting to some thoughtless option "because that's the way it was done in the past", and moving away from the existing choice "because DEI". As it is, in my opinion, they made themselves look like idiots by obsessing over fonts from the perspective of something like DEI, as if they are paranoid over any possible subatom of DEI infecting their presence. Rubio couldn't just make it about the font, so to speak, he had to get hung up on irrelevant details which makes him (in my opinion) look worse than anything he might be criticizing.

If you read the original announcement, my impression was that the choice of Calibri was because it it made state department functions easier as Calibri was the default in commonly used software (which seems kind of a poor reason to me, but one I can respect on practicality grounds). Legibility was also a concern (as it should be in my opinion). So something functional about Calibri (legibility) becomes "DEI" which is almost like cooties for this administration. Even if you disagree about the legibility of Calibri, denouncing legibility as a criterion per se seems absurd to me.

The whole decision seems like a joke to me and a lost opportunity to set a decent design standard.
by BirAdam | 2025-12-30 15:32:45+00:00
Direct propaganda? Not too much. However, the amount of content in the 1980s and 1990s that was in some way funded by the DOD was a bit crazy. Likewise, stuff like NED funded content. If one considers corporations part of the state, then the percentage of content that was propaganda would likely be more than 40%.

Today, this would be harder to figure. Because anyone can use a VPN and pose as a person in any country, any country’s intelligence people could be carrying out misinformation/disinformation campaigns at any time. How much of the left or right content on FB that mom is reading is from genuine actors vs intelligence actors? How many calls for violent action on the left and right are just FBI entrapment or Russian attempts to destabilize the USA?

When all of this was being built, this angle never occurred to me. It should have, but it didn’t. I naively thought, as so many did, that the ability of people to connect across national boundaries, across racial and gender lines, and across socio-economic divides would lead to a better, safer, and happier world. Sadly, I was completely mistaken. The internet became worse than life AFK on those fronts, people joined echo chambers, and radicalism increased.
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-12-30 15:33:34+00:00
>The conflict is not a disagreement over effectiveness. It's a misalignment between meritocracy and equity.

A lot of proponents of affirmative action will agree with this. They'll explicitly acknowledge that people admitted under AA will be underqualified, due to factors mentioned in the article:

[Minorities] may lack foundational skills (taken for granted in more affluent households and schools) and therefore might require breaks from study, which can lead to dropping out. They might have developed unhelpful habits or attitudes formed in teen years, or a sense of identity tied up with being part of a historically maligned group, affecting confidence and performance. [Affirmative action] does nothing to address these factors.

Said proponents would agree that AA is a failure if assessed strictly by these criteria. However, they would then go on to say that the benefits conferred by an elite education to the current crop of AA beneficiaries lead to future generations of minorities being less likely to experience the aforementioned issues, so after accounting for all future externalities, AA is a net good. As Justice O'Connor famously wrote in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) [0],

It would be a sad day indeed, were America to become a quota-ridden society, with each identifiable minority assigned proportional representation in every desirable walk of life. But that is not the rationale for programs of preferential treatment; the acid test of their justification will be their efficacy in eliminating the need for any racial or ethnic preferences at all. […] It has been 25 years since Justice Powell first approved the use of race to further an interest in student body diversity in the context of public higher education [California v. Bakke (1978)]. Since that time, the number of minority applicants with high grades and test scores has indeed increased. We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.

That said, it's been almost 25 years since she wrote that (and 50 years since California v. Bakke), and it's debatable whether those future externalities have manifested.

[0] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/306/
by h2zizzle | 2025-12-30 15:33:36+00:00
That interview is maddening. Of course people flinch more at bad sound versus bad imagery, they're completely different senses. Our hearing is deeper and more archaic, more directly connected to our emotional than language neural centers, and harder to shut off.

Imagine someone being perplexed at people's "conservatism" with regard to smell. Pump an even slightly unpleasant odor into the theater and people walk out in droves. The tolerance for these types of risky moves definitely varies by sense.
by jimbo808 | 2025-12-30 15:33:48+00:00
RE 2: It's not that far down the road either. Laziliy reviewed or unreviewed LLM code rapidly turns your codebase into an absolute mess that LLMs can't maintain either. Very quickly you find yourself with lots of redundant code and duplicated logic, random unused code that's called by other unused code that gets called inside a branch that only tests will trigger, stuff like that. Eventually LLMs start fixing the code that isn't used and then confidently report that they solved the problem, filling up a context window with redundant nonsense every prompt, so they can't get anywhere. Yolo AI coding is like the payday loan of tech debt.
by jlarocco | 2025-12-30 15:33:54+00:00
That's not really true. Even in the 90s there were large libraries of 3rd party widgets available for Windows that could be drag-and-dropped into VB, Delphi, and even the Visual C++ UI editor. For tasks running the gamut from 3D graphics to interfacing with custom hardware.

The web was a big step backwards for UI design. It was a 30 year detour whose results still suck compared to pre-web UIs.
by zppln | 2025-12-30 15:35:19+00:00
I'm an enterprise user and I find Windows 11 a complete disaster. They've managed to make something as trivial as right-clicking a slow operation.

I used to be a pretty happy Windows camper (I even got through Me without much complaint), but I'm so glad I moved to Linux and KDE for my private desktops before 11 hit.
by lesuorac | 2025-12-30 15:35:35+00:00
Its weird though because looking through the hackone reports in the slop wiki page there aren't actually reproduction steps. It's basically always just a line of code and an explanation of how a function can be mis-used but not a "make a webserver that has this hardcoded response".

So like why doesn't the person iterate with the AI until they understand the bug (and then ultimately discover it doesn't exist)? Like have any of this bug reports actually paid out? It seems like quickly people should just give up from a lack of rewards.