MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by techjamie | 2025-12-14 19:29:46+00:00
Probably has to do with the method for teaching reading being terrible for several years, depending on if the school dropped phonics.

I saw some stuff about literacy dropping because they went from teaching to sound out words, to, as I understand it, basically just showing the word and teaching how it's said, hoping kids would naturally pick up the rules. This did not have good outcomes, and last I checked, there was a movement of schools going back to phonics.
by mergesort | 2025-12-14 19:29:49+00:00
I spend a lot of time teaching people AI by having them bring their own idea that we build it over a three-hour workshop. [1]

The workshop starts off with a very simple premise. I ask people to write their idea down in a Google Doc with all the details they need to hand it off to an AI, so the AI can build it autonomously.

What people discover is that communicating your idea is MUCH harder than they thought. They often write a few sentences or a paragraph, and I plainly ask them "if you gave this to a junior developer do you think they'd be able to build your idea?" They say of course not, and we try again.

We do a v2, a v3, a v4, and so on, while we talk through their ideas, develop new ideas ideas to improve their prompt, and I teach them about how AI can make this process easier. The workshop goes on and on and on like this, until we have a page or two of context. Finally we can hand the idea off to AI, and boom — a few minutes later they either have their idea or they have something we can quickly mold into their vision.

This part of the process is where I think most people struggle. People think they're good communicators, but they only realize how much work it is to communicate their ideas once they are faced with the prospect of clearly describing their problem and writing it down in front of another person.

I say this not to try to shill my workshops, but to say that the results are spectacular for a simple reason. Describing the problem well is 80% of the work, but once you do that and do it well — AI can take over and do a genuinely excellent job.

I often joke at the end of my workshops that I call these AI workshops, but it's effectively a three hour workshop on communication. Most software developers wouldn't pay much for a communication workshop even if it makes them more effective at using tools like Claude Code, Codex, or even vibe coding, so I wrap everything up in a neatly AI sandwich. :)

[1] https://build.ms/ai
by verdverm | 2025-12-14 19:30:04+00:00
sure, but then I have to figure out what your JSON response from the API means

The reason HTML is more interesting is because the Ai can interpret the markup and formatting, the layout, the visual representation and relations of the information

Presentation matters when conveying information to both humans and agents/ai

Plaintext and JSON are just not going to cut it.

Now if OP really wants to do something about it, give scrapers a markdown option, but then scrapers are going to optimize for the average, so if everyone is just doing HTML, and the HTML analysis is good enough, offered alternatives are likely to be passed on
by dap | 2025-12-14 19:30:09+00:00
> It's a question of resource margins.

What you describe is true and very important (more margin lets you weather more disruption), but it's not the whole story. The problem we had was queueing delays mainly due to I/O contention. The disks had the extra IOPS for the maintenance operation, but the resulting latency for all operations was higher. This meant overall throughput decreased when the maintenance was going on. The customer, finally accepting the problem, thought: "we'll just build enough extra shards to account for the degradation". But it just doesn't work like that. If the degradation is 30%, and you reduce the steady-state load on the database by 30%, that doesn't change the fact that when the maintenance is ongoing, even if the disks have the IOPS for the extra load, latency goes up. Throughput will still degrade. What they wanted was predictability but we just couldn't give that to them.

> To be fair, I find oxides' continual low-info griping against postgres a bit tedious. There's plenty weaknesses in postgres, but criticizing postgres based on 10+ year old experiences of running an, at the time, outdated postgres, on an outdated OS is just ... not useful?

First, although I work at Oxide, please don't think I speak for Oxide. None of this happened at Oxide. It informed some of the choices we made at Oxide and we've talked about that publicly. I try to remember to include the caveat that this information is very dated (and I made that edit immediately after my initial comment above).

I admit that some of this has been hard for me personally to let go. These issues dominated my professional life for three very stressful years. For most of that time (and several years earlier), the community members we reached out to were very dismissive, saying either these weren't problems, or they were known problems and we were wrong for not avoiding them, etc. And we certainly did make mistakes! But many of those problems were later acknowledged by the community. And many have been improved -- which is great! What remains is me feeling triggered when it feels like users' pain is being casually dismissed.

I'm sorry I let my crankiness slip into the comment above. I try to leave out the emotional baggage. Nonetheless, I do feel like it's a problem that, intentionally or otherwise, a lot of the user base has absorbed the idea that it's okay for necessary database maintenance to significantly degrade performance because folks will have some downtime in which to run it.*
by WalterBright | 2025-12-14 19:30:28+00:00
In the D compiler, I realized that while loops could be rewritten as for loops, and so implemented that. The for loops are then rewritten using goto's. This makes the IR a list of expression trees connected by goto's. This data structure makes Data Flow Analysis fairly simple.

An early function inliner I implemented by inlining the IR. When I wrote the D front end, I attempted to do this in the front end. This turned out to be a significantly more complicated problem, and in the end not worth it.

The difficulty with the IR versions is, for error messages, it is impractical to try and issue error messages in the context of the original parse trees. I.e. it's the ancient "turn the hamburger into a cow" problem.
by iamnothere | 2025-12-14 19:30:38+00:00
To each their own. If there were a Psion that supported modern email, calendar, and task standards, with wifi sync, I would carry it most days. I basically never make phone calls anymore, and I always found the old greyscale LCDs to be very legible.

Caveat: such a device should not be infested with shitty spyware like everything else these days.
by winny314 | 2025-12-14 19:30:47+00:00
In the first example:

def create_a_file(filename, size): if len(filename) > 16: raise ValueError("Invalid filename, more than 16 bytes") account = tb.Account( id=int.from_bytes(filename.encode()), ... ...

Is `filename` a str? In which case `len(str)` returns the number of codepoints in the unicode string, not the number of bytes in an encoded representation. Yup the `filename.encode()` sounds like `str.encode()` which itself returns a `bytes` object. Not sure if it matters, but semantically it bugs the heck out of me.
by sixtram | 2025-12-14 19:30:58+00:00
When I started high school in the early '90s, there was a compulsory summer reading list of 10–12 books, each ranging from 300–800 pages. Then we had to write essays about them. This was just our summer homework before the new school year started. I didn't enjoy it at all; at the same time, I read lots of easy fiction, sometimes several hundred pages a day.

My six year old (who is still in kindergarten) reads about 70–100 pages per week of books aimed at eight to nine year olds.
by amtamt | 2025-12-14 19:31:20+00:00
> I wrote this because everyone is talking about Claude Code right now and it's all over my timeline.

Feels more like peer pressure induced post, than evaluating a tool critically for pros and cons.

> Claude Code has this effect where you KNOW it's good but can't quite say WHY.

Definitely gives the "vibe" of social media's infinite scroll induced dopamine rush.

Overall, this post just seems to be enforcing the idea that "fuzzy understanding of business domain will be enough to get a mature product using some AI, and the AI will somehow magically figure out most non-functional requirements and missing details of business domain". Thing is that figuring out "most non-functional requirements and missing details of business domain" is where most of the blood and sweat goes.
by ler_ | 2025-12-14 19:31:30+00:00
Adding to this: too many negatives before making a point, which AI text is prone to do in order to give surface level emphasis to random points in an argument. For example: "I sat there for a second. It didn't lose the thread. It didn't panic. It prioritized like a real engineer would." Then there is the fact that the paragraph ends in just about the same way, which also activates one's AI-voice-detector, so to speak: "This wasn't autocomplete. This was collaboration."

In my opinion, to write is to think. And to write is also to express oneself, not only to create a "communication object," let's put it that way. I would rather read an imperfect human voice than a machine's attempts to fix it. I think it's worth to face the frustration that comes with writing, because the end goal of refining your own argument and your delivery is that much sweeter. Let your human voice shine through.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-12-14 19:31:53+00:00
does it though? Are LLMs used to filter this stuff out currently? If so, do they filter out visually hidden content, that is to say content that is meant for screen readers, and if so is that a potential issue? I don't know, it just seems like a conceptual bug, a concept that has not been fully thought through.

second thought, sometimes you have text that is hidden but expected to be visible if you click on something, that is to say you probably want the rest of the initially hidden content to be caught in the crawl as it is still potentially meaningful content, just hidden for design reasons.
by quasigod | 2025-12-14 19:32:10+00:00
People rarely read whole books anymore. I know very few adults in my life who read books, lots of people are put off by reading in school and never give it a try in their adult life.

I think the biggest offender is summer reading assignments. I never knew a single person that actually read their book, and being expected to spend time during break reading for a school assignment definitely creates a negative association.

I loved reading as a child, up until high school. Once I graduated, it took years before I enjoyed it again.
by spankalee | 2025-12-14 19:32:23+00:00
It's a nice idea, but so few sites set up equivalent data endpoints well that I'm sure there's vanishingly small returns for putting in the work to consume them this way.

Plus, the feeds might not get you the same content. When I used RSS more heavily some of my favorite sites only posted summaries in their feeds, so I had to read the HTML pages anyway. How would an scraper know whether that's the case?

The real problem is the the explosion of scrapers that ignore robots.txt has put a lot of burden on all sites, regardless of APIs.
by Diti | 2025-12-14 19:32:42+00:00
I’m not sure what you mean by “a nightmare to set up”. You install Nix on your current OS with the determinate.systems installer, and you enter `nix run github:johndoe/project-containing-a-flake-dot-nix-file` to try out the project and have the full reproducible build taken care of by Nix.

Sure, installing packages the proper way requires a little bit more setup (Home Manager, most likely, and understanding where is the list of packages and which command to build to switch configuration), but as trivial as other complex tasks most of us hackers are capable of doing (like using `jq` or Vim).
by kyboren | 2025-12-14 19:33:31+00:00
In a free and competitive market, the price of any good trends towards the marginal cost of production.

Producing de novo some valuable information--a YouTube video, blog post, software program, news article, song, etc.--has a real cost that must be paid for each new information good created.

But making copies of information in our digital world with gigabit networks and terabyte disks is now very nearly free, so the marginal cost of production of copies of any piece of information is very nearly zero.

This is why centralization and scale are such powerful strategies for IP-based industries: They offer enormous leverage. And it's also why they are so dependent on government intervention to ensure unfree markets.

These creators can only make a profit if they are able to monopolize their information goods. If a new "factory" opens up down on BitTorrent Boulevard literally giving your product away for free, how can you compete with that? Moreover, what incentive do you have to produce new goods in the first place, if anyone can just offer infinite copies of your product to the market for free?

Thus, these creators rely on government intervention to make it illegal to offer copies of their information goods. But there's a fundamental tension between the twin economic realities that the marginal cost of production is ~zero yet the marginal price of consumption is nonzero. Thus, piracy.

In my opinion the copyright system is broken in the digital age. Instead of granting monopolies on information goods produced, we ought to figure out an alternative economic structure that incentivizes the production of these information goods in proportion to their consumption while accepting that their marginal cost of production is zero and abandoning any attempt to control the copying, transmission, creation of derivative works, etc.
by mr_mitm | 2025-12-14 19:34:00+00:00
The malware can wait until you authenticate and perform its actions then in the context of your user session. The malware can also hijack your PATH variable and replace sudo with a wrapper that includes malicious commands.

It can also just get lucky and perform a 'git push' while your SSH agent happens to be unlocked. We don't want to rely on luck here.

Really, it's pointless. Unless you are signing specific actions from an independent piece of hardware [1], the malware can do what you can do. We can talk about the details all day long, and you can make it a bit harder for autonomously acting malware, but at the end of the day it's just a finger exercise to do what they want to do after they compromised your machine.

[1] https://www.reiner-sct.com/en/tan-generators/tan-generator-f... (Note that a display is required so you can see what specific action you are actually signing, in this case it shows amount and recipient bank account number.)
by ianberdin | 2025-12-14 19:34:15+00:00
I hated GraphQL and all the hype around it. Until I finally got how to use it what for.

Same I thought about nest.js, Angular.

All of them hard to understand by heart at beginning, later (a few years), you feel it and get value.

Sounds stupid, but I tried to reimplement all the benefits using class transformers, zod, custom validators, all others packages. And always end up: “alright, graphql does this out of the box”.

REST is nice, same as express.js if you create non-production code. Reality is you need to love this boilerplate. AI writes this anyway.
by alazoral | 2025-12-14 19:34:41+00:00
It’s not clear to me how this idea, a decentralised place where you can access a lot of different stores, isn’t just the web. There’s a lot of mature alternatives for running web based ecommerce storefronts.

The value of Amazon and other marketplace systems, what I think many would say is their distinguishing factor, is capital L Logistics. It’s the warehouses, the return systems, quality control, customer support, international shipping and importing, inter-warehouse trucking and a network of last mile delivery, all tuned to minimise costs. An open source platform that handles all of that somehow would actually be revolutionary, but even the design of the system would require actual years of user research and mastery of systems that are truly arcane.
by dspillett | 2025-12-14 19:35:15+00:00
Interesting, I'll have to give that a detailed read later. It might be applicable to 3D prints.

To head off the people who will jump up-and-down calling me paranoid for not considering untreated printed works food safe, and accusing me of accusing them of poisoning family & friends (in some circles the discussion can get more cantankerous than the vi/emacs thing!): you keep using printed things for food without treatment if you like, and I won't judge, but I prefer to remain paranoid because if printed items were food safe it would be a selling point and I don't see any manufacturers using food based examples in their advertising.
by verdverm | 2025-12-14 19:36:36+00:00
Custom Copilot alternative / extension because I no longer believe it is a good idea to let Big Ai determine how you write code with your new helper. Big Tech f'd up a lot of things the last 25 years as we ceded control of our interfaces to them. I don't want to make the same mistake with my primary work tool.

Also, getting into the guts of how agents work and messing around with the knobs and levers is super interesting and where the real differentiating skills are

Built on ADK, CUE, and Dagger

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/tree/_next/lib/agent

(my swiss army knife for dev work, getting a rename soon(tm))
by WalterBright | 2025-12-14 19:36:37+00:00
I learned about DFA (Data Flow Analysis) optimizations back in the early 1980s. I eagerly implemented them for my C compiler, and it was released as "Optimum C". Then came the C compiler roundup benchmarks in the programming magazines. I breathlessly opened the issue, and was faced with the reviewers' review that Optimum C was a bad compiler because it deleted the code in the benchmarks. (The reviewer wrote Optimum C was cheating by recognizing the specific benchmark code and deleting it.)

I was really, really angry that the review had not attempted to contact me about this.

But the other compiler venders knew what I'd done, and the competition implemented DFA as well by the next year, and the benchmarks were updated.

The benchmarks were things like:

void foo() { int i,x = 1; for (i = 0; i < 1000; ++i) x += 1; }
by intended | 2025-12-14 19:36:38+00:00
>People were offended when Google launched YouTube Premium because it encroached on their right to "free" everything from Google.

Markets outcomes are not a prophecy.

If it was so simple - why put the unsubscrube or privacy rules behind UI/UX features that required A/B testing and behavioral analysis to make it as onerous as possible?

People aren't happy that they to sell their privacy, and had to be reassured that this is the best option.

Not to mention, this was during an era of camraderie between the US and Europe, not a potential opponent. The idea of a taxpayer funded EuroTube and EuroGram or CountryThing will pick up steam. Why have your information farmed by a nation which acts in a hostile manner to its erstwhile allies?
by foldr | 2025-12-14 19:36:49+00:00
What I mean is, what’s to stop us saying that C upholds all the same guarantees that Rust does and that it’s the programmer that’s responsible for upholding them (just as the programmer is responsible in the case of Rust code marked ‘unsafe’)? This seems like a semantic game to avoid acknowledging that unsafe Rust comes with some of (though not all) of the same risks as C code.

In short, the definitions are not important. What matters are the risks that you do or don’t run. And if your Rust code contains unsafe blocks, you are running risks that you wouldn’t be if you used Fil-C, which has no such escape hatch. (Of course this goes both ways – your Fil-C code is more likely to fail, safely, with a runtime error due to a mistake that Rust would have caught at compile time.)
by PeterHolzwarth | 2025-12-14 19:36:49+00:00
The technically unnecessary due to pluto.tv, twitch streams etc. if you want to relive that early 2000's period of pre-youtube Shoutcast streaming, a guy has kept a number of low-rez streams going for posterity and nostalgia - including two MST3k streams. You can control-n these right into VLC:

https://www.pracdev.org/channel99/pls_files/channel_3000.pls

https://www.pracdev.org/channel99/pls_files/channel_3000_hal...

from his site: https://www.pracdev.org/channel99/
by techblueberry | 2025-12-14 19:37:07+00:00
Do you think independent thought and deep thought are correlated or uncorrelated? When you say most people copy their perspectives do you think that’s bad?

A lot of the thinkers I’ve been interested in lately seem to deeply embed their thoughts in a tradition, so I’ve been thinking that in order to have better thinking I should copy more.

> why do you care so much about me?

Sad question, but what is life but a series of attempts to connect to other people. Having a discourse makes it real. Tell me I’m wrong! Maybe having independent thoughts has real value. Usually “think different” is about as deep as an apple ad.

Yes yes, I started this as a bit of a gotcha, I have a bias against people who proclaim to be independent thinkers, and decry others as sheep (“copiers”), but I would love to be wrong!
by C6JEsQeQa5fCjE | 2025-12-14 19:37:18+00:00
> Saudi didn’t normalize because Hamas prevented it. October 7 was designed to radicalize and prevent normalization of relations

Hamas prevented it because Israel has no free will? Israel is doomed to only react to Hamas?

Israel had an option to preserve their normalization and gain and keep the sympathy of the entire world. Instead they prefered to do annihilation and genocide.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-14 19:37:26+00:00
> how is it absurd?

Humans build identities around their homes. It’s why any plan that involves relocation implicitly or explicitly requires violence.

It’s absurd to suggest Israelis should effectively “self deport” from their homes. It’s unrealistic to the point that it’s effectively dismissing the problem instead of honestly engaging it.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-12-14 19:38:03+00:00
No. The original UNIX utilities were under proprietary licenses for an extremely long time, before eventually they broke free under BSD. The BSD tools are descendants of the originals and are also the versions used by macOS.

BSD wasn’t under an open license when GNU got started, so GNU reimplemented the proprietary UNIX utilities with their own enhancements and their own GPL license.

As such, complaining about the license is rich, considering GNU basically stole it themselves from the first round. And to this day, HN complaining about macOS’s utilities is also rich considering they are actually more standard and authentically UNIX than GNU.