MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by all2 | 2025-12-17 21:29:54+00:00
I would consider feature complete with robust testing to be a great proxy for code quality. Specifically, that if a chunk of code is feature complete and well tested and now changing slowly, it means -- as far as I can tell -- that the abstractions contained are at least ok at modeling the problem domain.

I would expect code that continually changes and deprecates and creates new features is still looking for a good problem domain fit.
by enricozb | 2025-12-17 21:29:59+00:00
Today's usage from what edits I can recall:

- I wanted to edit the visibility (pub -> pub(crate)) of most but not all functions in a class.

- I changed a macro to not require commas in a list of items it took in as input.

- I changed a function to deal with utf-8 codepoints instead of bytes, so I wanted to rename all uses of "byte" to "char".

Basically, localized find and replace, with a bit of flexibility.
by LexiMax | 2025-12-17 21:30:02+00:00
This is a non-sequitur. He didn't donate because it was the popular thing to do, he donated because it was consistent with his religious beliefs.

Christianity has never been a popularity contest. It has steadfastness in the face of rejection and martyrdom in the face of oppression baked into its fundamental fabric, borne from its oppression as a minority religion in the first centuries of its existence.
by jramos02 | 2025-12-17 21:30:09+00:00
I started journaling consistently over 14 years ago thanks to Ohlife.com. Unfortunately the website shutdown back then (even posted in HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8345881) but I continued journaling manually on my own with the help of google docs.

After a few years, managing google docs got a little crazy and not as sustainable so I decided to build myself a successor / alternative to OhLife over at https://deardiario.com

The premise is pretty much the same: the web app automatically shows you a prior entry (yesterday, last week, last month, or last year depending on what's available) so you can read your prior entry before you write today's entry. This has kept it fun and fresh for myself throughout the years and it has been really interesting to see how far I've come (or not come at all!) a year later. Puts things in perspective and just makes journaling more fun!

Let me know if you give it a try and if you have any feedback! It is completely free to use for 30 days. I added a happiness tracker and a search bar as well (with some AI assistance) to evolve the experience a little bit but the goal is to keep it minimal and approachable.

Happy journaling!
by yieldcrv | 2025-12-17 21:30:34+00:00
Nice, interstate commerce next.

Sorry Justice Sonia Sotomayer, the country is only in this quagmire because of the New Deal interpretation of the interstate commerce clause

Most of the New Deal was struck down in the 1930s, that should be cause to question the constitutionality of everything that remains. From what I can tell, everything that remains just was hard to get standing to challenge within the courts. Now we have someone who can get standing very easily, going after it, right to the jugular.
by Veserv | 2025-12-17 21:30:58+00:00
Wait, are you talking about Tesla? Since they are the ones who fabricated ridiculous claims like old versions of FSD using old hardware on arbitrary roads using untrained customers as safety drivers average ~5 million miles per collision and are thus ~2-7x safer than human drivers. Given that they present no credible, auditable evidence for that claim following your logic it should be unnecessary for anybody to refute their ridiculous claim and their systems can not be demonstrated to be safe despite billions of miles.

Despite that, the article and the public (the target of the hit piece that encourages people to endanger themselves with a system that has not been demonstrated to be safe with the direct intent of enriching the owners of Tesla) directly refute Tesla's ridiculous claims demonstrating they are off by multiple orders of magnitude using basic mandatory data reporting for their Robotaxi program which is using systems more advanced, fine-tuned, geofenced, with professional safety drivers (thus we can only reasonably assume that their normal system is worse), but which actually has scrutinized reporting requirements.

And yet now you argue that the entity fabricating ridiculous claims for their own enrichment, Tesla, is not only not responsible, but target of the hit piece, the ones that clearly and debunked Tesla's claims as deceptive, are not only responsible for refuting it but are responsible for demonstrating a level of rigor that is unimpeachable when the original fabricated claim lacks even the elements of rigor we expect out of your average middle school science fair, let alone a literal trillion dollar company.

Talk about double standards.
by lanstin | 2025-12-17 21:31:16+00:00
I have worked at a place where people were routinely criticized for asking basic questions on a big all-dev DL (which was archived and searchable, so they actually added to a growing record). The preferred solution was to ask a co-worker on the same team. People were answered a lot of questions were also criticized for being helpful. In neither case was the criticism that much from devs but from managers and given in boss feedback directly to people. Also it had a problem with spreading a good culture and common technical vision to new people, for some reason ( /s )
by lateforwork | 2025-12-17 21:31:24+00:00
> I’ve never gotten fired from a software engineering job for moving slower and building things that work well, work predictably, and are built to last.

In most companies, that’s not how it plays out. Once something works, you’re immediately moved on to the next task. If you’ve had the time and space to refine, polish, and carefully craft your code, you’ve been fortunate.
Show HN: ProjT Launcher A community-driven Minecraft launcher(single maintainer)
by yongdohyun | 2025-12-17 21:31:24+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m the sole maintainer of ProjT Launcher, an open-source Minecraft launcher fork focused on long term maintainability, modern Qt6/QML architecture, and clean cross platform packaging.

This project started as a technical rework and rebranding effort, but it has grown into a serious attempt to rethink how a launcher should be structured: – Qt6 + QML migration – Clear ViewModel separation – Cross-platform CI (Linux / macOS / Windows) – Strong focus on packaging (Flatpak, Nix, etc.)

I’m currently exploring ways to grow a contributor community around the project. I’m not asking for donations — I’m mainly looking for: – Technical feedback – Architecture discussion – Contributors interested in Qt/QML or launcher tooling

Repository: https://github.com/Project-Tick/ProjT-Launcher

I’d really appreciate honest feedback, especially on the architecture and governance direction.
by minraws | 2025-12-17 21:31:45+00:00
I think you are proposing something that's orthogonal to the OP's point.

They mentioned the training data is much higher for an LLM, LLM's recall not being uniform was never in question.

No one expects compression to be without loss when you scale below knowledge entropy that exists in your training set.

I am not saying LLMs do simple compression but just pointing a mathematical certainity.

(And I think you don't need to be an expert in creating LLMs to understand them, albeit I think a lot of people here have experience with it aswell so I find the additional emphasis on it moot).
by Analemma_ | 2025-12-17 21:31:45+00:00
Your house and the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage on it is a financial product too, and a fairly complex and risky one at that. This fact is just well-hidden from you by nested layers of government subsidies.

There is basically no way for real estate to not be a complex financial product, because almost no one can pay cash-up-front for it. If it wasn't financialized, nobody could ever afford to own anything and we'd all be feudal serfs renting from a couple landlords.
by jeffbee | 2025-12-17 21:32:11+00:00
Unmentioned in this article is the spread of small business pretend as a lifestyle, where someone signs a lease for the space, pays the rent, and never opens it or only after years of futzing around. They can do this because they have some other source of income, and it is just another aspect of wealth inequality that pretenders can outbid sincere small business operators. In my neighborhood we had a prominent corner store that was apparently vacant but actually had been leased by a restaurant that then spent 7 years intermittently remodeling the interior. Of course all the local NIMBYs spent the entire 7 years shouting about developers, but it wasn't their fault really.
by tigranbs | 2025-12-17 21:33:08+00:00
Living in SoCal, I almost always prefer to order online. Most local businesses are losing to their e-commerce competitors; no wonder commercial spaces are empty.

I have a side business of a small e-commerce shop. I would consider having physical space just for the sake of luxury, but now I would rather spend that monthly rent on marketing online rather than paying for physical space.

IMHO, that's what is happening. Bank problems or anything else are secondary; if it were profitable to be at the physical location for the businesses, other factors would vanish.
by spyspy | 2025-12-17 21:33:22+00:00
The way I've set these things up, nothing talks directly to the identity service. The ID service is a backend behind your gateway like any other service and any UI would have to have the request proxied through the gateway to reach it. Now, you can carve out certain rules (if you control the gateway) where requests headed to /users/* don't require the same authN steps other requests do because it's already headed to the ID server. Internal UIs may or may not work the same, that's really up to you - they won't likely be super high scale. Often the support teams won't even be querying the real DB, but instead a view or copy so they can't affect real user data. A share code for users A->B would just be a request from the UI to the ID server via the gateway, authenticated as User A, and responding with the code for B if possible. Or, I've do it where you could have special logic in the gateway to query 2 servers and combine the responses. No need for services to make requests sideways. Hope that makes sense.
by dev_l1x_be | 2025-12-17 21:33:30+00:00
This is wild, thank you for answering!

About Fossil, I really liked how everything is integrated into the VCS.

My friends also make fun of me having some tools that only I use. Somehow understanding a tool down to the last little bit of detail is satisfying by itself. We live in an era of software bloat that does not make too much sense.

Anyways, thanks for SQLite, I use it for teaching SQL for students and for my custom small scale monitoring system.
by immibis | 2025-12-17 21:34:12+00:00
IMO the take-away from LMAX is not ring buffers - it's the knowledge of how much useful work a single CPU core can do. It's a story of playing to hardware's strengths instead of wrapping yourself up in bullshit excuses. They realized their problem was fundamentally not parallelizable, so they wrote it to run serially as fast as possible instead of wrapping themselves up in bullshit excuses, and the resulting performance was much faster than anyone would have ever guessed if they hadn't done it.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-17 21:34:17+00:00
Perhaps the power of "collecting" is even greater than "consuming"

For example, collecting the thoughts, questions, aspirations, etc. of "AI" users. Much of this appears to be personal or confidential hence the recent OpenAI anouncement about turning over "private chats" to plaintiffs' counsel in copyright infringement litigation

https://sites.google.com/view/elizaarchaeology/blog/3-weizen...

The original "AI chatbot" from the 1960's, "ELIZA", was not "trained on" (it did not consume) much data at all in today's terms. Yet it could solicit larger amounts of data from users who anthropomorphised the computer

If data collection is a goal, as it is with today's Silicon Valley companies, then this is arguably a very effective hack

The "AI" only needs to seem realistic to such individuals
by Ekaros | 2025-12-17 21:35:03+00:00
Counter party is either stupid, careless, on it or forced. I think often there is intermediaries involved. Say real estate investment fund. For which on paper in short term numbers looking good is enough. And in past environment as long as there was enough money coming in the ponzi could continue to run.

And other parties further can be say pension funds, which on paper are forced to search for anything that make their goals look good enough. Thus not doing enough due diligence.

Everything is fine until it is not. And this has been seen time after time.
Show HN: Catsu: A unified Python client for embedding APIs
by bhavnicksm | 2025-12-17 21:35:05+00:00
We open-sourced catsu, a Python client for embedding APIs.

The problem: every embedding provider has a different SDK with different bugs. OpenAI has undocumented token limits. VoyageAI's retry logic was broken until September. Cohere breaks downstream libraries every release. LiteLLM's embedding support is minimal.

catsu provides:

- One API for 11 providers (OpenAI, Voyage, Cohere, Jina, Mistral, Gemini, etc.)

- Bundled database of 50+ models with pricing, dimensions, and benchmark scores

- Built-in retry with exponential backoff

- Automatic cost tracking per request

- Full async support

Example:

```python

import catsu

client = catsu.Client()

response = client.embed(model="voyage-3", input="Hello!")

print(f"Cost: ${response.embeddings}")

print(f"Cost: ${response.usage.cost:.6f}")

```

GitHub: https://github.com/chonkie-inc/catsu

We built this at Chonkie (YC X25) because we needed it badly for our chunking library and to easily switch embeddings for our search product. Apache 2.0.
by xbmcuser | 2025-12-17 21:35:38+00:00
There will be diminishing returns though as the future models won't be thah much better we will reach a point where the open source model will be good enough for most things. And the need for being on the latest model no longer so important.

For me the bigger concern which I have mentioned on other AI related topics is that AI is eating all the production of computer hardware so we should be worrying about hardware prices getting out of hand and making it harder for general public to run open source models. Hence I am rooting for China to reach parity on node size and crash the PC hardware prices.
by riku_iki | 2025-12-17 21:35:39+00:00
> But given a well specified problem, it can bruteforce search through lean tactics space at an extremely superhuman pace. What is lacks in intuition and brilliance, it will make up in being able to explore in parallel.

right, but because math is not well specified and formalized yet, it could be a problem, and that's where humans with intuition and more rigid reasoning still necessary.
by redthrow | 2025-12-17 21:35:50+00:00
As a native Japanese speaker, I find this homonyms concern kind of odd. It’s like asking how Japanese people can speak to each other and understand one another given all the homonyms -- the assumption being that speech alone clearly isn’t enough without written materials with kanji to aid their comprehension.

The obvious way people handle it in speech is by picking words that are clearer in context when homonyms might cause confusion. If you consume any Japanese video content on YouTube etc, it’s very common for speakers to say a homonym, instantly notice the ambiguity, and restate it using a clearer word or brief explanation, which they could, at least in theory, do in no- or low-kanji writing too.

同音異義語の区別に不可欠な漢字の廃止は不可能か？(Is abolishing kanji -- which is essential for distinguishing homonyms -- impossible?)

https://www.kanamozi.org/hikari932-0704.html
by hwayne | 2025-12-17 21:35:58+00:00
I've had to help a client with something not exactly like, but with similar properties as, Google Docs. One of the big properties they had to engineer in was "the doc should eventually look the same for all open browser tabs on the same computer".

The other big question: what happens if user A makes change X and user B makes change Y? There's a lot of outcomes the product can pick between, but whatever they pick it should be consistent. That consistency in conflict resolution is a good property to model.
by beloch | 2025-12-17 21:36:13+00:00
Looks like I was a little out of date.

https://itsfoss.com/news/mozilla-lifeline-is-safe/

Google pays Mozilla, basically to make Google the default search engine for everything in Firefox. Previously, it looked like an antitrust case was going to force them to stop doing that, but it didn't turn out that way.

Mozilla is still getting most of their money from Google and they shouldn't need to kneecap themselves to pay the rent. Still, you can't help but wonder what might happen if Firefox starts eating too much of Chrome's market share. Mozilla should be trying to branch out, but in a user friendly way.
by tetris11 | 2025-12-17 21:36:43+00:00
Felicia Hemans's poem He Never Smiled Again is an ode to Henry I's reaction to his son and only male heir perishing in the tragedy, that later plunged England into a tumultuous period known as "The Anarchy"

https://www.poeticous.com/felicia-hemans/he-never-smiled-aga...
by djaouen | 2025-12-17 21:36:53+00:00
Has no one considered the possibility that those with the intent of learning new things still do learn, many times because of technology? Sure, there are millions who doomscroll pointlessly, but the solution to that is simple: put down the phone and read a book.

Moreover, the fact that I now have access to international publications & journals, as well as the ability to learn foreign languages literally at my fingertips, does not somehow deplete my human needs, any more than reading a newspaper depleted the need to read long-form books did a century ago.
by Jhsto | 2025-12-17 21:37:01+00:00
On a related note, does anyone have references which would explain VRChat (and the culture around it)? I'm not quite certain if the models are primarily used for comedic effect, role-play, or more of as a 'Ready Player One'-esque alternative identity. I think I know cases for the latter, but I feel like as someone who has never understood VR as a form of self-expression or played VRChat, I feel like I can't have the conversation with them.
by epistasis | 2025-12-17 21:37:07+00:00
We were very close to repealing Prop 13 on commercial property a few years ago (via Prop 15).

One of the biggest objections to a straight repeal Prop 13 on commercial property is that most commercial leases are triple-net, meaning that the businesses directly pay the taxes. Which means that a bunch of small businesses that are just barely on the edge of profitability will shut down when they finally have to pay their fair share of property tax.

Agreed on the need to do it though (and also Texas typically has higher taxes for a normal person, with worse services than California). We might just want to pass a gradual phase in or a requirement that landowners pay it without increasing rent )and doing reach through to modify all those triple net leases... or something. Or we just let the businesses fail, but the public tends to not like lots of small businesses failing.
by johnfn | 2025-12-17 21:37:29+00:00
> The thing people miss in these “replace juniors with AI” takes is that juniors were never mainly about cheap hands on keyboards. They’re the only people in the org who are still allowed to ask “dumb” questions without losing face, and those questions are often the only signal you get that your abstractions are nonsense.

This seems almost entirely wrong to me? That anyone, at any level of seniority, can ask "dumb questions" and give signal about "nonsense abstractions" seems a property of any healthy organization. That only juniors can do this doesn't just seem wrong, it seems backwards. I would expect seniors to have the clearest idea on whether abstractions make sense, not juniors.
by Groxx | 2025-12-17 21:37:47+00:00
You say "requiring by default". That makes no sense in this context (or most) - you can either require something (which is not "by default") or you do not (at which point you can encourage something as strongly as you like, but it's still not required).

The github issue is quite clear about "requiring", not "by default", which is a restriction on what someone does with their own data. Particularly since AFAICT there is still no spec for data exchange over flat files. CXP is a probably-reasonable more-safe option to encourage, but it really shouldn't be the only option.

(arguably CXF only defines non-encrypted files, since it doesn't even recommend encryption options or provide a way to communicate what was used, except to say that it "MUST" encrypt or coordinate over CXP)
by hwayne | 2025-12-17 21:37:48+00:00
Also:

- Have a clear notion of what part of the specs represents the system under your control (the "machine"), and what part represents the broader world it interacts with. The world can do more than the machine, and the properties on the world are much more serious.

- Make lots of helpers. You need them more than you think.

- Add way more comments than you normally would. Specs are for analyzing very high-level ideas, and you should be explaining your high-level ideas.

- Make the spec assumptions clear. What has to be true about the operating environment for the spec to be sensible in the first place?

- Use lots of model values, use lots of constants, use lots of ASSUME statements. Constrain your fairness clauses as narrowly as possible.

- Understand the difference between the semantics of TLA+ as an abstract notation and the semantics of TLA+ as something concretely model-checked. For example, TLA+ is untyped, but the model checker is typed. Also, a lot of TLA+ features are not available in different model checkers. OTOH, you can break TLA+ semantics with use of TLCSet and TLCGet.

The last tip applies to whatever modeling language you use: most have the same distinction.
by kcplate | 2025-12-17 21:38:15+00:00
Sometimes the last lessee is still on the hook for the remainder of the lease due to landlord improvements for the tenant. Had a friend lease a retail storefront, his business failed, but he still was coughing up rent to the landlord until the space was leased again. He was a sole proprietor and had to personally guarantee the lease. It was in his best interests to pay it rather than take the hit to his credit by defaulting on the lease.

My guess is a already wealthy landlord would probably be motivated to ride out the remainder of an existing lease and write off any unpaid amount as a loss before lowering the price to attract another business into the space.
by spankalee | 2025-12-17 21:38:38+00:00
Land value tax mainly helps with severely under-utilized properties like parking lots. Right now a parking lot is taxed far, far lower than a lot with a building, so the owner can keep it for parking when it would be better utilized as residential, commercial, or office space.

If it didn't pencil out to just site on empty land, we'd get better development.
by roughly | 2025-12-17 21:39:00+00:00
So the problem here is the banks wrote their loans stupidly and both the bank and the property owner's willing and able to burn money to keep those chickens from coming home to roost, which has an enormous social cost on small business owners, citizens, and other businesses in the area, but the article concludes we can't really do anything about it because it might make the banks sad and cause the renegotiation of a bunch of those shitty contracts.

Since when did "taking a loss" get written out of the definition of "investing"?
by vb-8448 | 2025-12-17 21:39:06+00:00
It's tricky, but one can assume that code written once and not touched in a while is good code (didn't cause any issues, performance is good enough, ecc).

I guess you can already derive this value if you sum the total line changed by all PRs and divide it by (SLOC end - SLOC start). Ideally it must be a value slightly greater than 1.