MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kccqzy | 2025-12-22 16:23:46+00:00
Google certainly had a honeymoon period with Python. They hired Guido to work on some internal apps (IIRC Mondrian?). They released the original App Engine before cloud was a buzzword supporting only Python. But at some point, the default easy-to-learn language at Google became Go, and it happens to be statically typed, preventing a large class of bugs from ever being compiled. There was a manifesto about how Python and all other dynamically typed languages were unsuitable for large-scale software engineering. Only small pieces of code are still using Python.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-22 16:23:49+00:00
> Making a prompt library useful requires iteration. Every time the LLM is slightly off target, ask yourself, "What could've been clarified?" Then, add that answer back into the prompt library.

I'm far from an LLM power user, but this is the single highest ROI practice I've been using.

You have to actually observe what the LLM is trying to do each time. Simply smashing enter over and over again or setting it to auto-accept everything will just burn tokens. Instead, see where it gets stuck and add a short note to CLAUDE.md or equivalent. Break it out into sub-files to open for different types of work if the context file gets large.

Letting the LLM churn and experiment for every single task will make your token quota evaporate before your eyes. Updating the context file constantly is some extra work for you, but it pays off.

My primary use case for LLMs is exploring code bases and giving me summaries of which files to open, tracing execution paths through functions, and handing me the info I need. It also helps a lot to add some instructions for how to deliver useful results for specific types of questions.
by lukeschlather | 2025-12-22 16:23:57+00:00
It's the market for privacy violations. I'd go so far as to say that improving competitiveness in this market probably makes the world worse, by making privacy violations more profitable. If they had fined them for not allowing sideloading, or not allowing third-party payments, it would be a different story. Those are markets I want to see grow and thrive.
Show HN: I made a puzzle game without writing any code
by ediblepython | 2025-12-22 16:23:57+00:00
This is the first project I haven't written a single line of code. The entire codebase was prompt generated in Cursor using mostly Claude Sonnet 4.5.

It's also the first time I'm genuinely happy with the end result from AI coding.

What do you think?
by InitialLastName | 2025-12-22 16:24:02+00:00
"Politics as a zero-sum game" is a self-fulfilling prophecy that's only true if you see it as "competing over who gets all the power". In a more sympathetic perspective, politics is just how communities self-organize, make decisions and build compromise between the needs and interests of their stakeholders. Especially at the local level (where the feedback path between "make a decision" and "affect peoples' lives" is the shortest and most accessible), that can mostly involve people being available to do the work that needs to happen to build consensus and get anything done done to improve the lives of the community members.
by D-Machine | 2025-12-22 16:24:12+00:00
I would think it was quite clear from my last two paragraphs that I agree causal models are generally not as important as people like Chomsky think, and that in general are achievable only in incredibly narrow cases. Besides, all models are wrong: but some are useful.

> You seem unimpressed with that work

I didn't say anything about Norvig's work, I was saying the linked essay is bad. It is correct that Chomsky is wrong, but is a bad essay because it tries to argue against Chomsky with a poorly-developed distinction while ignoring much stronger arguments and concepts that more clearly get at the issues. IMO the essay is also weirdly focused on language and language models, when this is a general issue about causal modeling and scientific and technological progress, and so the narrow focus here also just weakens the whole argument.

Also, Judea Pearl is a philosopher, and do-calculus is just one way to think about and work with causality. Talking about falsifiability here is odd, and sounds almost to me like saying "logic is unfalsifiable" or "modeling the world mathematically is unfalsifiable". If you meant something like "the very concept of causality is incoherent", that would be the more appropriate criticism here, and more arguable.
by redactsureAI | 2025-12-22 16:24:51+00:00
I actually have a full browser plus AI agent containerized. Is that something you think might be a fun opensourced?

I have a product but also to build it I have some test environments I had to make to debug things.

Basically I have a full AI agent in one container that can control a browser in another container. Was considering open sourcing, any thoughts?
by mym1990 | 2025-12-22 16:24:53+00:00
Its kind of crazy that the knee jerk reaction to failing to one shot your prompt is to abandon the whole thing because you think the tool sucks. It very well might, but it could also be user error or a number of other things. There wouldn't be a good nights sleep in sight if I knew an LLM was running rampant all over production code in an effort to "scale it".
by tracker1 | 2025-12-22 16:25:08+00:00
Funny, I explicitly waited to see async baked in before I even started experimenting with Rust. It's kind of critical to most things I work on. Beyond that, I've found that the async models in rust (along with tokio/axum, etc) have been pretty nice and clean in practice. Though most of my experience is with C# and JS/TS environments, the latter of which had about a decade of growing pains.
by Arubis | 2025-12-22 16:25:08+00:00
Ah yes, the "fuck your feelings" reductive response.

But no, what I meant to get at is that DHH's ego is radioactive. RailsConf tried to open their keynote to having Maybe Perhaps Someone Else Talk Sometime and DHH's response was, as it were, [off the rails](https://world.hey.com/dhh/no-railsconf-faa7935e). RailsWorld started the next year and, happy to have DHH keynote, took off. RailsConf swiftly died.

If you're running an ecosystem with a vocal community, is that a fire you want to play with?
by rayiner | 2025-12-22 16:25:37+00:00
> The new policy is being carried out as the Trump administration has tightened its hold over federal science funding

Such sentences display such a weird understanding of how the federal government works. How can the administration “tighten its hold” over discretionary grants? These aren’t Congressional appropriations earmarked for specific projects. The administration is the only entity that can exercise control over these grants. It would actually be a huge problem if the administration didn’t have a tight hold on these funds. That would mean grants would be going out without close supervision by any elected officials (Congress or the President).
by kotaKat | 2025-12-22 16:25:43+00:00
Weirdly GAS was a popular channel back in the day but was offered only on higher tier cable packages (in my market, it required Digital Cable, which meant hoping your parents were willing to splurge for the extra package, the digital box (or boxes)…). I assume the income stream was more being delivered from offering GAS as a ‘premium’ channel, then eventually it became an automated vehicle that just got lumped into a “bundle” of channels being sold to the cable companies (eg “Buy Nick for your customers and we’ll throw in GAS and Jr”) once they stopped providing actual live content for it circa 2004-2005.
by ch4s3 | 2025-12-22 16:25:52+00:00
Here's a contemporary report from the NYT[1]:

>The ballot was not a secret one. Separate polling places were provided for those voters favoring dissolution and those against, and the vote had to give his name, his address and the number and place of issuance of his identity card.

Time Magazine from the same month in 1953 [2]:

> Da’s in 1946. Last week Premier Mohammed Mossadegh, the man in the iron cot, topped them all with 99.93%.

> This is the way he did it. Having unconstitutionally dissolved the Majlis, Mossadegh ordered a national referendum to judge his act, crying: “The will of the people is above law.” The 1906 Iranian constitution (which Mossadegh as a young revolutionary helped put across) requires a secret ballot.

From a 1953 article in The Middle East Journal [3]:

>Two days after the bloody confrontation of Tudeh mobs and security forces on
August 11, 1953, Mosaddeq’s government arrested a large number of its opponents
again.

So here we see Tudeh thugs attacking his opponents, and the man himself jailing the opposition.

> Two of Mosaddeq’s closest associates, Dr.Karim Sanjabi, a founder of the National Front and Minister of Education and Dr. Ghol-am-Hossein Sadiqi, the Minister of the Interior advised against dissolving the Majlis and holding a referendum. Both argued that the Majlis had supported Mosaddeq and that it had been the King who had appointed Prime Ministers since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 subject to parliamentary approval. Without the Majlis, the Shah would be free to oust the Prime Minister and appoint another. Mosaddeq’s reply to both had been the same: Shah jor’at-e in kar ra nadarad [The Shah would not dare].

We also see that Mossadegh's own advisors were cautioning him against trying to dissolve the Majlis, and reminding him that it would allow the Shah to constitutionally remove him. We clearly see a picture of a man, Mossadegh trying to become a dictator.

It would be too much to unpack here but the role of Ayatollah Kashani is also relevant in the story.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1953/08/04/archives/mossadegh-gets-9...

[2] https://time.com/archive/6795622/iran-99-93-pure/

[3] https://www.pismin.com/10.3751/62.3.15
by dmix | 2025-12-22 16:25:55+00:00
From a post I saw on reddit:

> In 2024 EU fined US tech companies €3.8B meanwhile public internet tech companies paid only €3.2B in income tax

How is it not a major budget contribution to have fines on American companies bigger than revenue from your entire tech industry?

That is a de facto tax, particularly when they announce these new fines monthly like clockwork.
Show HN: TinyDOCX – Word/ODT library (14x smaller than docx)
by lulzx | 2025-12-22 16:26:07+00:00
After posting tinypdf here, someone opened an issue asking for Word/OpenOffice support. I understand - sometimes you need an editable document, not a PDF.

I didn't want to extend the library itself, so I built tinydocx: <1K lines of TypeScript, zero dependencies, 7.7KB minified+gzipped. The popular docx package is 108KB with 5 dependencies.

What's included:
- Text formatting (bold/italic/underline/strikethrough, colors, custom fonts)
- Headings (H1-H6)
- Tables with borders and column widths
- Bullet and numbered lists (with nesting)
- Images (PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP)
- Hyperlinks
- Headers/footers with page numbers
- Blockquotes and code blocks
- Markdown to DOCX conversion
- ODT (OpenDocument) support with the same API

What's not included:
- Table of contents, footnotes, bookmarks
- Track changes, comments
- Multi-column layouts, text wrapping
- Reading/modifying existing .docx files
- Math equations, drawing shapes

DOCX files are just ZIP archives containing XML. Once you understand the structure, generating simple documents is straightforward. The hard part is knowing which XML elements Word actually requires vs. what's optional cruft.

Works great for invoices, reports, form letters - anything where you want the recipient to edit the document. Pairs nicely with tinypdf when you need both formats.

GitHub: https://github.com/Lulzx/tinydocx
npm: npm install tinydocx
by kelnos | 2025-12-22 16:26:34+00:00
I got these around the same time frame. The funny thing is that the named CEO was for a company I'd left the year prior. I was still in touch with coworkers from that company, and they told me that it wasn't a training exercise by the infosec team. The infosec team had actually warned people about it after hearing about people getting those texts.
by hamdingers | 2025-12-22 16:26:38+00:00
Of course it can be. Nobody does it in practice because it's inconvenient.

Watts = volts * amps and the people working with batteries are already thinking in terms of voltage and amperage. It'd be painful to introduce a totally new unit and remember 1 watt for an hour is 3.6kj instead of... 1 watt-hour.
by summarity | 2025-12-22 16:26:59+00:00
Here’s something else that just started to rally work this year with Opus 4.5: interacting with Ghidra. Nearly every binary is now suddenly transparent, in many cases it can navigate binaries better than source code itself.

There’s even a research team that has bee using this approach to generate compilable C++ from binaries and run static analysis on it, to find more vulnerabilities than source analysis without involving dynamic tracing.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-22 16:27:11+00:00
> I have a standing tanning machine.

Lucky you! So convenient. Yeah, then there's probably a good chance that's developing the vitamin D you need, although bulbs do take around 60 seconds to warm up to full brightness, but I'm just basing that off visual brightness and assuming that UV warm-up time is the same. I'm sure getting your vitamin D levels tested will definitely tell you if you're getting enough or not. If not, well you can always do 2 min, but blood tests give you the definitive answer there.
by Terretta | 2025-12-22 16:27:39+00:00
Seven hours in, all comments assume this is to screw the car owner.

But FTA:

BMW really does want to use these to stop people from working on their own cars. It spells out in the patent that "the shape of the engagement recesses prevents the screw from being loosened or tightened using common counter-drive structures, e.g. by unauthorized persons." That's straight from BMW.

The second sentence is key: "unauthorized" can be woke-speak for thief, and this device doesn't seem to require a single key per car which has been a PITA for VW/BMW in the past.

The first sentence can then be edited to simply:

BMW really does want to use these to stop people from removing wheels from cars they don't own.

Before you object the thieves will just go get the tool: professionals yes, opportunistic, no.

This is enough of a real issue in some places there's a discount on theft insurance for car contents and parts when you have wheel theft prevention devices (e.g. wheel or hub locks). Granted, the insurers might not see this as actuarially meaningful, it might just be extra revenue from people who care about their wheels, but then you'd expect to see it everywhere.
by robrenaud | 2025-12-22 16:28:06+00:00
I learned Python circa 2000 as a 17 year old.

It felt pretty easy to read and write, had minimal surprises, and it made writing simple programs easy. The batteries-includedness was great.

It felt like it was designed by a smart guy for practical programming, rather than by a brilliant academic who was wed to purity for maximum elegance. It accepted some warts, but them in mostly ergonomic places.

It was dictated by people who could relegate map, filter, and reduce from builtins to the library. As much as I personally even liked map in particular (I am not super anti functional programming), it's nice to realize the designer had the taste to prefer longer but more explicit programs.

ys = [f(x) for x in xs]
ys = map(f, xs)

As much as I disliked that particular decision, there is no doubt to me that it is just designed for lower cognitive burden when doing simple/common things.

If you show both of those lines of code to a person in cs101 who has studied Java for a couple months but hasn't seen Python, I am pretty sure they are gonna understand the first line way quicker. Mostly consistent decision making like that leads to ergonomic, practical languages. And they win.

It fits in people's brains better. See also, pytorch vs tensorflow.
by djoldman | 2025-12-22 16:28:18+00:00
> It's the news, it's supposed to report on the uncommon.... It was commonly understood that news represents the unusual, not the usual.

News organizations could report on people dying of extremely rare diseases and these are rarely reported on compared to terrorism/homicide.

Rarity is not the best predictor of whether a news organization will cover something. "Likelihood of engagement/rage/shock/fear/anxiety" is the best predictor of story coverage, although this overlaps well with "uncommon happening."

There's absolutely nothing special about news organizations (beyond engaging in 1st amendment activity regularly): they want to make money, they're businesses.
by habinero | 2025-12-22 16:28:20+00:00
Python ultimately won because of its community.

The Python leadership group is friendly towards beginners and people with non-traditional backgrounds, and they actively reach out and recruit those folks to participate. It's also one of the least toxic developer communities I know of.

That matters a lot in a field like data science or cybersecurity, which has a lot of people who don't have traditional SWE backgrounds.

The language is pleasant and readable to use and has a lot of features built in, which Perl did not, but I think that's much less critical than the network effect of being a (1) welcoming and pleasant community who (2) actively recruits new fields of people.
by ffuxlpff | 2025-12-22 16:28:40+00:00
The solutions requiring constant internet connection are pushed by states and companies because they help cutting costs and gathering information. However, the users are often more vulnerable to the risks if the technology fails but have relatively little say.

The solutions that do much the same but require internet connection only once a day or even once an hour would be much more resilient and safe but currently there are few incentives for providers to develop and offer them.

The extreme situations like war or dictatorship are good awakening calls but it is easy to see there are lots of risks involved even if things would go rather smoothly otherwise.
by thewebguyd | 2025-12-22 16:28:41+00:00
Those stupid MFD machines have been the bane of my existence as a sysadmin ever since I started in this career many, many years ago.

It's these machines, plus a few really old windows-only apps deep in basement of enterprises that keep this old tech around. There's usually no budget to remedy, and no appetite to either from leadership

Its also what happens when the people buying the tech are disconnected from the ones implementing. Microsoft caters to this.
by CPLX | 2025-12-22 16:28:59+00:00
I'm with you on that, but I have to say I have been doing that aggressively, and it's pretty easy for Claude Code at least to ignore the prompts, commands, Markdown files, README, architecture docs, etc.

I feel like I spend quite a bit of time telling the thing to look at information it already knows. And I'm talking about when I HAVE actually created various documents to use and prompts.

As a specific example, it regularly just doesn't reference CLAUDE.md and it seems pretty random as to when it decides to drop that out of context. That's including right at session start when it should have it fresh.
by shkkmo | 2025-12-22 16:29:24+00:00
I can't quite follow your comment.

If you have a predetermined number of things that can be "searched" for, that is a filter box, not a search box. Even if you want to stretch the semantics and call it a search box, it is still a solution that only works for a very small subset of the search box problem space. Your criticism that this semanically stret hed snall subset wasn't explicitly excluded is just silly.
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-22 16:29:41+00:00
It seems like an expectations mismatch to me? At what point did "soon to be making his debut at Disney Parks" switch from "as a background character in a ride somewhere" or "seen in the distance surrounded by handlers" versus "hanging out in the middle of crowds to get directly pushed/touched?"

There definitely are some marketing mistakes that have led to that, and certainly a lot of these projects seem to be in the direction of "one day, maybe, these will be crowd pleasers", but it still seems to me a bit funny how often casual intepretation seem to be "I can't wait to touch and play with the new Lincoln animatronic at the Hall of Presidents". It's not an R&D failure for Imagineering to keep building cooler animatronics even if most guests will only ever see them behind glass or rope or in other areas just out of touch. That's always been Disney's way of using robots for magic. The dream of "one day I can touch them and play with them" certainly lives on, of course, and these projects seem walking a few steps at a time towards that dream, but it seems weird to dismiss them as failures when they turn out to be just "normal" Disney tools for magic that try to create an illusion of being right next to you but don't allow for touching.
by alnwlsn | 2025-12-22 16:29:58+00:00
In my area there are now just enough Meshtastic nodes that I can (somewhat unreliably) talk between my office and home, about 5 miles.

However, it does heavily relay on the internet for setup and distribution (app stores, or else lots of pip install, git clone, pnpm install, etc.)

I've been working on a virtual machine with all the dependencies preinstalled just so I'll have offline access, and it's surprisingly difficult (though I'm not super familiar with typical webdev stuff). I'd have to think a regular user who really needs to rely on it doesn't stand a chance, which doesn't seem to mesh(ha) that well given how loudly the "off gridness" of it is touted.

Then again, you probably need the internet to be able to obtain the hardware in the first place, but that's another problem.
by im_down_w_otp | 2025-12-22 16:30:56+00:00
I often consider how many total human lifetimes must have been spent on nothing other than dealing with and/or mitigating something as seemingly banal as Python versioning & dependency management or line ending encoding snafus.

After all these years, I assume it must measure in the tens to hundreds of thousands?

It’s in those moments of consideration that I understand humanity hasn’t done a very good job grappling with its frailty and mortality. If we had, then we’d have a crowned a winner that didn’t subjugate us endlessly to the most vapid and Sisyphean aspects of programming. Python is a lesson in managing existential angst, which I now assume was the point of it from the very beginning.
by spenrose | 2025-12-22 16:31:09+00:00
1. Python was designed by testing syntax with novice users to see what they could adopt easily.[1] > 90% of current Python users weren’t born when it was created. They all had to learn, and Python is the easiest language to learn because Guido and his teammates, unlike $LANGUAGE_DESIGN_GOD, approach the problem as experimental scientists rather than auteurs.

2. Python is conceptually compact, dominated by hash tables with string keys. The initial leader in the ecosystem, Perl, is conceptually sprawling and difficult to reason about.

3. Python also took lessons from the Unix shell, a mature environment for accommodating beginners and experts.

4. Python had a formal process for integrating C modules from early on.

5. Python’s management has an elegant shearing layer structure, where ideas can diffuse in from anywhere.

6. $NEXT_GENERAL_PURPOSE_LANG (Ruby, Go) weren’t enough better to displace Python. Both were heavily influenced by Python’s syntax, but ignored the community-centric design process that had created that syntax in favor of We Know Best.

7. Speaking of open source entrepreneurialism, JavaScript has become a real rival thanks to the Web (and node), but it is handicapped by the inverse failure mode: where Go is dominated by a handful of Googlers, JavaScript was effectively unmanaged at the STDLIB level for a crucial decade, and now it can’t recover. (I’d also guess that having to write a module system that works well in the chaos that is Web clients and simultaneously the Unix world is a daunting design problem.)

8. Python got lucky that data science took off.

[1] https://ospo.gwu.edu/python-wasnt-built-day-origin-story-wor...