MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wrs | 2025-12-18 17:23:50+00:00
I suspect the hidden assumption here is that frontend and backend are written by different people/teams with a narrow interface between them. Because they use different technologies and build tools it’s easy for them to end up being competely siloed, which IMO is one of the worst aspects of how webdev evolved in the last 20 years.

Thus, it’s considered normal that the backend team spits out some JSON and doesn’t know or care what the frontend team does with it.

With HTMX that distinction doesn’t exist so much (the frontend consists of fragments generated by the backend) so you will need a different organizational approach. The “frontend” folks will need to write a lot of “backend” code, but presumably in a separable layer.
by S_Bear | 2025-12-18 17:24:20+00:00
I was at a conference in St Cloud, MN a few years ago, and I could see the Panda Express from my hotel. Took around 40 minutes to walk there because I couldn't get the timing right to frogger myself across the 6 lanes. Got stuck in the island in the middle for a good 15 minutes because the slip lane always had cars in it.
by GoatInGrey | 2025-12-18 17:25:05+00:00
> These tools are here to stay.

I see this stranded claim get trotted out in the corporate world all the time as a refutation to "The AI broke". I fail to understand who the invisible audience for this is supposed to be.

Also, the FOMO argument for why one should use X as much as they can comes across as scammy. Not that I believe you're trying to scam anyone. Though the person you originally got this from may have been!
by BeetleB | 2025-12-18 17:25:18+00:00
Edit: Just realized the library discussion was in another thread - but the discussion was still with you so I'm keeping it in this comment.

> So how did that work out for the hypothetical “disabled person”?

He didn't have access before, and he doesn't have access now. Nothing is worse for him.

It's not his responsibility to provide the service to others. It is the library's, and they clearly failed and are rightfully blamed for no one having access. If I were a normal person in the town, I would blame them, not the person filing the lawsuit.

If the library shut down because they had clear mold issues they refused to pay to fix, would you blame the immunocompromised, at risk person who filed the lawsuit? Or would you say the library should get its act together and provide a safe/healthy environment?

Imagine a school shutting down because they cannot afford all these new colored students that they could exclude before. Are you going to blame the colored students for insisting on their rights?

This is basic Civil Rights 101. You can't use the excuse of "we don't have money" to discriminate, which UCBerkeley was clearly doing.

> Now they nor anyone else has access to the free content.

Nothing is free. The library patron paid for it via taxes, as did everyone else. Just as everyone pays federal taxes, as did the person in another state who sued UC Berkeley. He's paying, and not getting what he is owed.

If you don't like it, just don't take federal funds. Many organizations' web sites are inaccessible, and that's totally OK and legal.
by dariosalvi78 | 2025-12-18 17:25:27+00:00
Local, middle class owners can own how many empty flats? 1%? 10%? Of course I don't have a number, but I'd bet that if you remove the mega-owners, that 30% would drop significantly.

Airbnb was not a bad idea, but it has been perverted. It's time to regulate it and probably break it too.
by bitexploder | 2025-12-18 17:25:33+00:00
There is a very important concept in security engineering around feedback loops. Consider the following: A vulnerability is discovered 5 years after it was introduced. The issue is patched and life goes on for the engineering organization that discovered it. Some time passes and they discover an architectural flaw and that the issue was not isolated. They must now expend precious effort fixing this entire flaw and the 5 years of dependencies that accreted on it. Now, consider, the team that designed this system and the engineer that implemented it discover the vulnerability leading to the architectural issue within two weeks. They refactor the code and eliminated generational security debt. Not to mention the engineers that wrote the code are not around 5 years later further increasing the "interest" on the debt.

I would note you might see this as another bland "shift left" argument and you could definitely view if through this lens. But if you consider it from a systems thinking lens it actually incorporates dynamics that are not typically included in shift left. It helps you consider the system within your organization and how to shorten those feedback loops. It also, conveniently, makes engineering organizations stronger as a whole as these feedback loops are also intrinsically linked to the organizations software development process as a whole. It is pretty hard to have a tight security vulnerability discovery loop without a good software engineering practice around it. For security issues like this they are effectively a strict subset of software quality issues.

You can apply this feedback loop shortening to /so/ many things in life.
by ee64a4a | 2025-12-18 17:26:10+00:00
>> that this is actually Steam Machine 2.0. Valve already tried this a decade ago, and it flopped.

> I find this framing to be beyond maddening [...]

> It was also a thoughtful partnering with hardware vendors

As numerous post-mortems (some of which I quoted in the article) recount, the hardware partners themselves largely consider their experiment back then a flop as well.

> But it was a thoughtful, intelligent long-term commitment to an ecosystem

With respect, I think you're overselling it. It's hard to call a machine that basically didn't play any of the at-the-time hits well "a thoughtful, intelligent" move. If you read some of those linked post-mortems, I think you might agree as well.

> I think it's best understood as a return on investment that begun those many years ago

I think there's nuance here, which is that Valve made lemonade from the lemon that was the flop of the Steam Box. They turned that failed move into an initial investment through diligence and effort. In a sense, that's part of what I'm trying to bring attention to -- Valve didn't just write off the failure and abandon the market, but took signal from it and tried again.
by WhyOhWhyQ | 2025-12-18 17:26:23+00:00
I agree. His first and second game are based on deep themes and unique concepts. He explores the medium of video games in new ways. The selling point of this game seems to be "largest puzzle game ever". I'm excited to see if there are deeper ideas once I play it though.

One of Blow's favorite games is Steven's Sausage Roll. I personally didn't enjoy it because the intellectual content of that kind of puzzle is, as far as I can tell, exploring a large tree of sausage roll states. And while I had a few aha moments playing it, as far as I can tell the way you do that at the end of the day is just to try all the possible states.
by jackling | 2025-12-18 17:27:30+00:00
Jai is designed for games, it aims to do a few things that can help game developers, as well as developers in general.

- Lower compilation times for debug builds. - Better debug messages. - A standard library that comes with a production ready graphics API, so gamedevs don't need to worry about the current state of graphics API and can just dig in. - Standard input API for cross OS development. - AOS to SOA automatic conversion to simplify code that needs to be performant, while retaining a clean syntax. - A context system, which should help with simplifying functions definitions while keeping things strongly typed. - The ability to rewrite ASTs, to do compile time programming. Ideally simplifying code, while keeping runtime speed performant, and keeping compilation speed fast.

This is just to name a few off the top of my head. The performance and API stuff is directly going to help game devs. I view it similar to Odin, something that is in production software right now, where you can have a clean langugae, with a strong standard library and primitives to help you develop quickly.
by dismalaf | 2025-12-18 17:27:31+00:00
> What features in Jai make it superior to C++ for writing games specifically?

You can write games in C or Fortran, so why write games in C++? You can write things in C++, why make Rust? Basic worked, why make Python or Ruby?

Why does it need "features" that make it "superior"? It should be good enough that he didn't want to use C++, so he made a new thing...
by al_borland | 2025-12-18 17:27:39+00:00
Converting office space to housing is easier said than done.

Offices are looking to maximize floor space for workers. This means central controls for HVAC, centralized kitchenettes and bathrooms (plumbing), and very few people are near a window. Someone looking for a place to live will want control of their HVAC systems, personal bathrooms, a full kitchen, and a decent amount of natural light… as well as windows that can let in some outside air. Trying to retrofit all the plumbing and ductwork may end up looking ugly, maybe it could be done. The window issue can be an impossible one to solve. Commercial and residential building have fundamentally different bones.

I imagine a conversation would end up being better for very low income housing if was done simply and on a budget. I visited a place like this once. It wasn’t a converted office, that I know of, but it was low income housing that was dorm style. There was a galley kitchen in the hallway of the floor and a shared bathroom for everyone. Each room was maybe 8’x10’. Not somewhere most people would choose to live, but better than nothing.
by bobjordan | 2025-12-18 17:27:47+00:00
I’ve been a fan of this philosophy since the Intercooler.js days. In fact, our legacy customer portal at bomquote.com still runs on Intercooler. I spent the last year building a new version using the "modern" version of that stack: Flask, HTMX, Alpine, and Tailwind.

However, I’ve recently made the difficult decision to rewrite the frontend in React (specifically React/TS, TanStack Query, Orval, and Shadcn). In a perfect world, I'd rewrite the python backend in go, but I have to table that idea for now.

The reason? The "LLM tax." While HTMX is a joy for manual development, my experience the last year is that LLMs struggle with the "glue" required for complex UI items in HTMX/Alpine. Conversely, the training data for React is so massive and the patterns so standardized that the AI productivity gains are impossible to ignore.

Recently, I used Go/React for a microservice that actually has turned into similarly complex scale as the python/htxm app I focused on most of the year, and it was so much more productive than python/htmx. In a month of work I got done what took me about 4-5 months in python/htmx. I assume because the typing with go and also LLM could generate perfectly typed hooks from my OpenAPI spec via Orval and build out Shadcn components without hallucinating.

I still love the HTMX philosophy for its simplicity, but in 2024/2025, I’ve found that I’m more productive choosing the stack that the AI "understands" best. For new projects, Go/React will now my default. If I have to write something myself again (God, I hope not) I may use htmx.
by leoedin | 2025-12-18 17:27:53+00:00
I think the parent's point is that when you have a react front-end, your back-end basically just deals in structs of data. There's no HTML or templating to think about. It's just JSON-serialisable structs. That makes the code on the back end much simpler, which makes it easier to run in a resource-constrained environment.

The only exposure the back-end has to HTML is streaming the static files to the browser. Which can be done in small chunks.

If your back-end is rendering HTML with every request, it has to do a lot more work. It has to load HTML templates into memory and insert strings into them.
Is analytics a necessary evil rather than a real value driver?
by tiazm | 2025-12-18 17:28:19+00:00
I’ve been working in analytics and advanced analytics for about 6 years. I started in a large consultancy and later went solo, so I’ve seen both enterprise and smaller product teams up close.

Something keeps bothering me. In most projects, analytics feels like infrastructure that no one is genuinely excited about. People rarely want to invest in it when building a product. It’s treated as something you should have, not something you want to have.

Teams are “happy” to pay for software development, advertising, copywriting, design. Those are seen as directly useful. Analytics (GA4, event tracking, or even more structured setups like CDPs) is often perceived as background noise, necessary to keep the engine running, but not something that meaningfully moves the product forward day to day.

In practice, many teams end up using only a handful of metrics to make decisions, even when a complex analytics stack exists underneath. The rest is there “just in case.”

I’m curious whether others see the same pattern. Is analytics undervalued because its ROI is indirect and delayed? Or is most analytics work simply over-engineered for the actual decisions teams make? At what point does analytics shift from “necessary plumbing” to a real competitive advantage?

Would love to hear perspectives from founders, engineers, and product folks who’ve built and scaled things.
by derektank | 2025-12-18 17:28:22+00:00
>Someone who wants to tell you something true doesn't lead their communication with emotional distraction.

This seems needlessly cynical. Someone can have multiple objectives in writing, to tell you facts and also to capture your attention or to convey an emotion and motivate you to action. Very little writing is done with a single purpose in mind. We don’t expect academics drafting research papers to eschew concerns about the impact the writing will have on their career for example.

Starting a story with an anecdote that humanizes the information is simply acknowledging the reality that people want more than just facts. If the latter was all they wanted, most of us would only read encyclopedias and textbooks.
by falcor84 | 2025-12-18 17:28:28+00:00
This is a really good report!

I was particularly fascinated about the self-replication section [0]; I wasn't aware of the RepliBench paper [1], and now that I skimmed through it, I'm quite concerned. It was clear to me before that there's nothing particular stopping an AI from replicating, but seeing the already high success percentage at current levels of technology (e.g. 46% success of replicating itself onto compute) is very scary.

[0] https://www.aisi.gov.uk/frontier-ai-trends-report#self-repli...

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18565
by ritvikpandey21 | 2025-12-18 17:28:40+00:00
we disagree! we've found llms by themselves aren't enough and suffer from pretty big failure modes like hallucination and inferring text rather than pure transcription. we wrote a blog about this [1]. the right approach so far seems to be a hybrid workflow that uses very specific parts of the language model architecture.

[1] https://www.runpulse.com/blog/why-llms-suck-at-ocr
by IncreasePosts | 2025-12-18 17:28:56+00:00
When I first moved to NYC, my neighbor was a 70 year old single man who absolutely hated living in NY at that point in his life, but couldn't leave because his rent was so cheap(I was paying $1500 for a studio and he was paying $300 for a 1BR) - he literally could not afford to move even to a cheap area. It certainly would have been better for him if he could just swap apartments with someone living outside the city who wanted to move in, but that would be illegal.

I think rent control advocates focus on people who might be lucky enough to get a rent controlled apartment, but it is much harder to think about what happens to all the people who want to move to a city but can't because no housing stock is available.
by voidmain0001 | 2025-12-18 17:28:58+00:00
"...scrolling your feed, it actually makes you money" https://youtu.be/BKRd5M0TE6w?t=133

"...double tap to do a quick buy and immediately I trade $10 worth of Avantis" https://youtu.be/BKRd5M0TE6w?t=211
by itintheory | 2025-12-18 17:29:09+00:00
I can't answer your question about Docker or Podman, but in Kubernetes there is the NetworkPolicy API which is designed for exactly this use-case. I'm sure it uses Linux native tooling (iptables, nftables, etc) under the hood, so it's at least within the real of feasible that those tools can be used for this purpose.
by sovietmudkipz | 2025-12-18 17:29:12+00:00
Checking out the website now. Looks enticing. Would a user of accelbyte multiplayer services still be in the business of knowing about underlying VMs? I caught some copy on the website that led me to question.

As a hobbyist part of me wants the VM abstracted completely (which may not be realistic). I want to say “here’s my game server process, it needs this much cpu/mem/network per unit, and I need 100 processes” and not really care about the underlying VM(s), at least until later. The closest thing I’ve found to this is AWS fargate.

Also holy smokes if you were a part of the team that architected this solution I’d love to pick your brain.
by zipy124 | 2025-12-18 17:29:21+00:00
Yes you are correct, however I don't understand how this relates to my point, do you mind clarifying? I'd also caveat that the library (the purchaser of these bundles at most universities) often buys bundles based on requests from academics (more specifically research groups/departments) at the university, thus the readers do have some sway over which are purchased.
by troupo | 2025-12-18 17:29:30+00:00
> Especially for people who have never attempted to write the software they are criticizing.

E.g. Casey and Blow often criticise the Visual Studio debugger. It's slow, has quite limited functionality. And it progressively gets worse over time (e.g. it can no longer update watched values at the same speed as you step through the program).

Do they both have to write a debugger to demonstrate how bad it is?

No. Other people do it, single-handedly. See RAD Debugger (https://github.com/EpicGamesExt/raddebugger) and RemedyBG (https://remedybg.handmade.network). Relevant Casey rant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U

And the same is true for a lot of other software.

You don't have to write some software to criticise how bad it is. E.g. I cannot but make fun of Discord for implementing "we will intentionally kill our app if it consumes 4GB of memory and are very good at prioritising fixing memory issues seeing a whopping 5% improvement for p95 of users": https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/1pej7l7/restart...

Doesn't mean I have to write Discord to criticise it. All I need is an understanding of rather basic performance and of general engineering practices.

And also, you've probably failed to even understand what they are criticising/saying: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46315616
by justin66 | 2025-12-18 17:29:49+00:00
The reason what you're doing here - pointing to the national debt as a reason not to spend on a particular thing - is so fallacious is twofold:

1. There is always a national debt

2. There are always things we spend money on, nevertheless

What this fallacy avoids is the necessary question of prioritization. Some things we'd like to spend money on are more important than others. In truth, there's always money for any given thing. There's never money for everything we might desire to spend money on.

"Well, it’s worth it, we just can’t" is just nonsensical. It's either worth it or not, and making that decision requires some work.

It's a fallacy that's used by politicians all over the political spectrum, and it's highly useful for them. "We cannot possibly afford that thing you are asking for" is a lot less alienating to voters than "it's either that thing you are asking for, or this thing my donors have demanded."
by JohnFen | 2025-12-18 17:29:51+00:00
I'm skeptical of this on two counts...

First, a lot of people I know would never thank a machine regardless of how happy they are with the results. Second, a lot of people habitually say "thank you" regardless of their actual satisfaction level.

Because of these two things, I doubt that whether or not someone says "thank you" is a strong indicator of satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-12-18 17:29:53+00:00
Most of us had parents that made mistakes. Some of those mistakes hurt us, stunted our development, or damaging our psyches. When we become parents, we try not to make the mistakes that our parents make.

But the problem is, there's more than one set of mistakes. In fact, they often come in pairs. If you move too far away from one mistake, you may not wind up in the sweet spot. You may be doing the other mistake.

In Zion National Part there is a hike called "Angel's Landing". You wind up on this ridge, with a 1000 foot dropoff on one side and a 500 foot dropoff on the other side. If you move too far away from one cliff, you fall off the other.

Parenting is like that. Take permissive vs. discipline, for example. If you avoid discipline too much, you may damage your kids by being too permissive.
by pcaharrier | 2025-12-18 17:29:56+00:00
Yes, Congress writes the laws, and the executive executes them. That’s certainly true in the general case. But when we talk about independent agencies like the FCC, the relevant question isn’t just the functional division of labor, but rather who holds the constitutional authority versus who exercises it under statutory constraints. In other words, even if Congress intends for the agency to act independently, the president’s Article II authority still provides the baseline for executive power. The pardon example illustrates the principle that some executive functions are exclusively presidential; independent agencies are essentially a statutory modification of that baseline, not a negation of it.

Of if one prefers to have it from directly from Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803):

"By the Constitution of the United States, the President is invested with certain important political powers, in the exercise of which he is to use his own discretion, and is accountable only to his country in his political character and to his own conscience. To aid him in the performance of these duties, he is authorized to appoint certain officers, who act by his authority and in conformity with his orders.

In such cases, their acts are his acts; and whatever opinion may be entertained of the manner in which executive discretion may be used, still there exists, and can exist, no power to control that discretion. The subjects are political. They respect the nation, not individual rights, and, being entrusted to the Executive, the decision of the Executive is conclusive. The application of this remark will be perceived by adverting to the act of Congress for establishing the Department of Foreign Affairs. This officer, as his duties were prescribed by that act, is to conform precisely to the will of the President. He is the mere organ by whom that will is communicated."
by kevin061 | 2025-12-18 17:29:58+00:00
It seems this is little more than a funnel for us to buy your 130 USD book.

130 USD from a complete stranger is quite the ask. Especially because, as you mentioned, you don't even work at Google.

Your GitHub also does not have a lot of content beyond a few pointers which frankly does not inspire confidence in your project.

I understand you have possibly dedicated many hours to this, and I mean no disrespect, but I really have no reason to trust you. The 130 USD book could have been written by ChatGPT for all I know.