MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jaggederest | 2025-12-14 06:28:04+00:00
When I was in school, before the turn of the century, we were reading Johnny Got His Gun in English class and discovered that Metallica's One is about a very similar situation (though not apparently originally inspired by Johnny Got His Gun), so we got to play it in class and do a report on the two. Received some minor kudos from the class and a reasonable grade from the teacher.

It got slightly awkward as I believe that was just before the Columbine shooting, and after that metal had a more negative reputation for a while.
by ThunderStorm70 | 2025-12-14 06:28:47+00:00
I’m a student who’s been frustrated by how fragmented collaboration tools are. Projects end up split across task boards, chat apps, documents, and forums, which makes it hard to see progress, context, or how people’s interests actually connect.

I built PassionPoint as an experiment to explore whether project work, discussion, and interest-mapping could live in one place without becoming overwhelming.

At the moment, it has three core parts:

Projects – a way to create and showcase ongoing work, not just finished outcomes

Discussions – project-linked conversations so context isn’t lost in generic chat channels

PassionGraphs – a visual way to map interests and see how people and projects relate to each other

The goal isn’t to replace tools like Slack or GitHub, but to test whether a more interest-driven structure makes collaboration feel more intentional.

Next year, I’m planning to experiment with an AI co-creation feature (Passion AI) to help with idea exploration, structuring projects, and connecting people working on related problems. This part is still very early and conceptual.

I’m sharing this mainly to get feedback from people who’ve built or used collaboration platforms:

Does this solve a real problem, or just repackage existing tools?

Are the current features pulling in the same direction, or fighting each other?

Where do platforms like this usually break down?

I’d really appreciate any honest criticism or perspective.
by grim_io | 2025-12-14 06:29:53+00:00
I don't think anyone would say that the LLMs will produce better code, but they can do it much faster.

I personally did not hit the wall where the use of LLMs would slow me down in the long run.

It has been smooth sailing most of the time, and getting better with newer models.

For me it comes down to "know what you are being paid for".

I'm not a library maintainer. My code will not be scrutinized by thousands of peers. My customer will be happy with faster completion that does the same thing like the more perfect hand crafted version.

Welcome to the industrial revolution in programming. This is the way of things.
by sahilagarwal | 2025-12-14 06:30:24+00:00
Same. AI is a good tool to use as a sounding board and conversation partner.

I only access claude and others using my browser - I give it a snippet of my code, tell it what exactly I want to do and what my general goal is, then ask it to give me approaches, and their pros and cons.

Even if someone wants to use AI to code for them, its still better to do the above as a first step imo. A sort of human in the loop system.

> It adds velocity but velocity early on always steals speed from the future. That's been the case for languages, for frameworks, for libraries, it's no different for AI.

Completely agree. I'm seeing this in my circle and workplace. My velocity might be a tad bit slower than the rest of my peers when you compare it per ticket. But my long tern output hasn't changed and interestingly, neither has anyone else's.

As an aside, I like your system of completely removing autocomplete unless you need it - may be something like that would finally get me to enable AI in my IDE.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-14 06:32:47+00:00
If you are working on something big, have AI generate intermediate artifacts before it generates code, and feed those artifacts into the code generation prompt. Then you check those artifacts, see where the AI is going with the code, and suggest corrections before a token of code is even generated. Keep those artifacts around like you would documentation, having your AI fix them when the code needs to change.
Ask HN: New user here – unable to submit a link. Do I just need to wait?
by ursAxZA | 2025-12-14 06:33:29+00:00
I’m new to Hacker News, and I’m unable to submit a link. My account is a few days old (around 5 days). Karma is still low. Is this expected for new accounts? Do I just need to wait longer, or is there something I should do (e.g., verify email, comment first, etc.)?

Thanks for any advice.
by jonahx | 2025-12-14 06:34:40+00:00
> Even in the context of written mathematics, this is a very unusual style. I feel like J fans talk about it as if it's a totally normal thing to do if only you knew a little more math.

Yes, it's very unusual. I think the argument is more that there is a tradeoff, that "inflation" (whitespace, long names, multiple classes/files/etc) has a cognitive cost too even it it's more approachable, and that this other alien-seeming style can work very well for some people. There's a lot to love in the APLs even you ultimately don't buy the fanboy arguments, if only for the lessons of just how different the world can be.
by mrieck | 2025-12-14 06:35:25+00:00
It’s additional features that are related.

For example making a computer use agent… Made the plan, implementation was good, now I want to add a new tool for the agent, but I want to discuss best way to implement this tool first.

Clearing context means Claude forgets everything about what was just built.

Asking to discuss this new tool in plan mode makes Claude rewrite entire spec for some reason.

As workaround, I tell Claude “looks good, delete the plan” before doing anything. I liked the old way where once you exit plan mode the plan is done, and next plan mode is new plan with existing context.
by steve_gh | 2025-12-14 06:36:08+00:00
>>Shops can refuse cash

>No, they cannot. Many businesses don't want to handle cash and they will make it hard and send you an invoice with a surcharge but they must accept any form of legal tender, no way around it.

Not true in the UK. The House of Commons Treasury Select Committee has been considering this issue (Apr 25): BBC News - Shops could be forced to accept cash in future,

MPs warn - BBC News https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjwvgqz3vxzo?app-referre...
by Too | 2025-12-14 06:36:10+00:00
Can someone give a tldr of what makes fil-c different from just compiling with clang’s address sanitizer?

Calling it memory safe is a bit of a stretch when all it does is convert memory errors to runtime panics, or am I missing something? I mean, that’s still good, just less than I’d expect given the recent hype of fil-c being the savior for making C a competitive language again.
by BoorishBears | 2025-12-14 06:36:12+00:00
Pretty simple sentence: a hoodie is a top (usually a sweatshirt) with a hood. The hood being a round cap-like piece of fabric that covers your head.

They went to sleep and that very same piece of fabric got jostled underneath their back and got stuck! The fabric, now constrained by a good portion of their body weight, either applied a great amount of pressure to a very small area of their body or caused them to get stuck in an unnatural sleeping position.

Either could conceivably lead to considerable localized pain.

(And I assume they don't know for sure since they were asleep as this occured)
by sahilagarwal | 2025-12-14 06:36:36+00:00
Hi Boris,

If you wouldn't mind answering a question for me, it's one of the main things that has made me not add claude in vscode.

I have a custom 'code style' system prompt that I want claude to use, and I have been able to add it when using claude in browser -

``` Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. Readability counts. Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules. Although practicality beats purity. If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.

Trust the context you're given. Don't defend against problems the human didn't ask you to solve. ```

How can I add it as a system prompt (or if its called something else) in vscode so LLMs adhere to it?
by pizlonator | 2025-12-14 06:37:43+00:00
> that's a weird execution for any useful definition of "weird".

Weird execution is a term of art in the security biz. This is not that.

Weird execution happens when the attacker can control all of memory, not just objects the victim program rightly loaded from the heap.

> Your central claim is that you can take any old C program, compile it with Fil-C, and get a memory-safe C program.

Yes. Your program is memory safe. You get to access P1 if p pointed at P1.

You don’t get to define what memory safety means in Fil-C. I have defined it here: https://fil-c.org/gimso

Not every memory safe language defines it the same way. Python and JavaScript have a weaker definition since they both have powerful reflection including eval and similar superpowers. Rust has a weaker definition if you consider that you can use `unsafe`. Go has a weaker definition if you consider that tearing in Go leads to actual weird execution (attacker gets to pop the entire Go type system). Java’s definition is most similar to Fil-C’s, but even there you could argue both ways (Java has more unsafe code in its implementation while Fil-C doesn’t have the strict aliasing of Java’s type system).

You can always argue that someone else’s language isn’t memory safe if you allow yourself to define memory safety in a different way. That’s not a super useful line of argumentation, though it is amusing and fun
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-12-14 06:38:53+00:00
> that it did what I want and actually just picked one word. Each application designer decided they wanted to make their own change and made the whole system fragmented and worse overall.

This is the trouble. It's been decades of the OS becoming less and less relevant. Apps have more power, more will to build their own thing.

And there's less and less personal computing left. There's the design challenges, the UX being totally different. But the OS used to be a common substrate that the user could use to do things. And the OS has just vanished vanished vanished, receeded into the sea. Leaving these apps to totally dominate the experience, apps that are so often little more than thin clients to some far off cloud system, to basically some corporations mainframe.

The OS's relevance keeps shrinking, and it's awful for users. Why bother making new UX for the desktop, if the capabilities budget is still entirely on the side of the app? What actually needs to change is's UX of the desktop or other OS paradigm (mobile), it's a fundamental shift in taking power out of the mainframe and having a personal computer that's worth a damn, that again has more than a quantum of capability embued in it that it can deliver to the user.

(My actual hope is that someday the web can do some of this, because apps have near always been a horrible thing for users that gives them no agency, no control, that's pre baked to be only what is delivered to the user.)
by spreiti | 2025-12-14 06:39:46+00:00
It is neither of these. It's an application that processes data and is not accessible outside of the companies network. Not everything is an app.

I described my workflow that has been a game changer for me, hoping it might be useful to another person because I have struggled to use LLMs for more than a Google replacement.

As an example, one task of the feature was to add metrics for observability when the new action was executed. Another when it failed.

My prompt: Create a new metric "foo.bar" in MyMetrics when MyService.action was successful and "foo.bar.failed" when it failed.

I review the plan and let it implement it.

As you can see it's a small task and after it is done I review the changes and commit them. Rinse and repeat.

I think the biggest issue is that people try to one shot big features or applications. But it is much more efficient to me to treat Copilot as a smart pair programming partner. There you also think about and implement one task after the other.
by bjoli | 2025-12-14 06:41:01+00:00
Funny this shows up on HN now! Jean Niklas wrote his thesis about RRB trees, which is an evolution of the persistent vectors of clojure fame. I have spent many hours reading his thesis lately, because I just spent two months porting his c-rrb (https://github.com/hypirion/c-rrb) to c#, which was a fun endeavour. I wish I would have read hus thesis better since I spent two weeks debugging issues that arise from me not enforcing the leftwise dense invariant with regards to the tail.
by throwaway81523 | 2025-12-14 06:43:26+00:00
Damn, their web site is so awful. If the code for it is all in github and the token got loose, maybe the right attacker could have cleaned up the slow javascript bloat, made the search system a lot better, fixed the login bug that makes logging in fail more than half the time depending on your browser, streamlined the ordering system, etc. We missed our chance!
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-14 06:45:36+00:00
> Nobody said democracy was perfect. It's just a lot better than every other system we've ever tried.

This has bugged me for a long time: Why do people repeat this ?

I mean this on the fundamental core of it: not on the merit of the argument[0], or whether people deeply believe it, but on making the argument in these terms in the first place.

I don't remember people running around saying Christianism isn't perfect, but better than every other religion _we tried_. Or using the same rhetoric for Object Oriented programming. Or touting as a mantra that frying chicken isn't perfect but better than every other cooking method we tried.

IMHO we usually don't do that kind of vague, but short and definitive assertion. The statements would usualy be stronger with specific limitations, or an opening for what we don't know yet. Why did it take this form in particular for political system? (I am aware of the starting quote, but it wouldn't have caught on if people didn't see a need to repeat it in the first place. I think it hit on a very fundamental need of people, and I wish I knew why)

I feel understanding that would give insights on why we're stuck where we are now.

[0] We're two centuries in western democracies, and many other regimes lasted longer than that. I personally don't think there is any definitive answer that could bring such strong statements, but that's not my point.
by whatevermom2 | 2025-12-14 06:45:38+00:00
What about having an intermediate server running on the same box as the browser, that connects to CDP using a pipe, and forwards messages to the Redis server, instead of modifying Chrome s source ? It's painful to maintain Chrome patches.

Really cool project in any case, seems like working at Pikkit must've been a lot of fun ! Thanks OP for sharing.
by browningstreet | 2025-12-14 06:46:28+00:00
This is what most corporations want, esp for remote employees. I had a work supplied laptop and I couldn’t access via my machine account password. I could login via MFA but I couldn’t reset my local password. They made me initiate the account recovery, wait 8 days, and then I could change the password. I suspect my employer’s account synchronization tools mangled my password or changed it to a password in flux.

In that light, they are fulfilling a use case with greater market value than your conundrum. Is it annoying? Sure. Is it a problem? Debatable. You didn’t recover the passwords on the machine when your employee left. Maybe it’s your problem? Will you get in? Likely and eventually.
by sandreas | 2025-12-14 06:48:02+00:00
Maybe I share my story here to give you another perspective on this.

I was a higher role solution architect in a kind of start-up-ish fast growing company with a great team and great opportunities. I worked there for a long time, everything went fine. We welcomed our daughter and I kept working until one day they decided to board in an external investor. I knew this was gonna blow up (not for the company but for the employees) and it did. Within months nearly 1/4 of the good ones left the company and it was a nightmare to be in.

I decided to change things a bit and applied for a "Developer only" Job in a bigger company and also reduced my work schedule to 70% to be with my kid. I think this was probably the best decision in my life. My daugther (and now my son) are such an awesome persons and spending time with them teaching her stuff and playing around is WAY more fulfilling than a job could ever be.

And after the second child it's clear that I'm needed at home. There was so little time left for "maintaining" the relationship in the first 2 years, that I can't even think of leaving my wife alone with all this work. Now I can't think of a world where I'm not there as a father, having two awesome and cute children - sometimes it's hard, but most of the time it is very rewarding.

So the verdict is:

Work can be fulfilling in a way, but your employer is not loyal or forgiving - it's about business and you are a number, regardless if it feels like you are respected and missed, it is only good leadership and you are most likely replaceable.

On the other hand there is your family. They decided to spend their LIFE with you and are (or should be) always there for you. They are always loyal and forgiving...

Welcoming children is like putting away your ego. You are responsible for other humans now and it is time to put on the big boy panties and sail out to the deep water.

I would never prefer a career over my family unless we're totally broke and I need to take care of getting the food on the table to survive - in that case I would work my ass off but if it comes this far, a fancy AI startup your last problem.
by BoorishBears | 2025-12-14 06:51:49+00:00
A few years ago we didn't have an imprecise nondeterministic programming language that would allow your mom to achieve SOTA results on a wide range of NLP tasks by asking nicely, or I'm sure people would have taken it.

I think a lot of prompt engineering is voodoo, but it's not all baseless: a more formal way to look at it is aligning your task with the pre-training and post-training of the model.

The whole "it's a bad language" refrain feels half-baked when most of us use relatively high level languages on non-realtime OSes that obfuscate so much that they might as well be well worded prompts compared to how deterministic the underlying primitives they were built on are... at least until you zoom in too far.
by tom86150 | 2025-12-14 06:52:03+00:00
Addict reporting in. It is the wrong approach to take medication again to treat a behavioral problem. Every good therapist advises against it. In the case of addiction, behavior, living conditions, and environment must change. I moved away and, of course, stopped going to bars or concerts. You have to pay this price until you find a meaningful activity to replace the time you spent consuming. You can no longer be friends with users, and if your job was bad, you have to find another one. These drugs are also no substitute for withdrawal treatment, where you learn how to behave in risky situations, e.g., when you are pressured to drink a beer. You also have to expect relapses and accept that addiction is not curable, you can only stop it. However, many people can still live well sober. Addiction is like driving on a well-travelled road. With the substance, everything is smooth, normal, and you get where you want to go. The new, sober path is bumpy and it takes time for the road to become just as well-travelled. Normally, the craving disappears after about a year, and then you can say that the worst is over. In the meantime, you have changed something. I found a job where I have to drive sober, which keeps me from using very well. I also have an expensive, classic scooter, which I have to bring home sober, and I meet up with people and have social contact again It might be a comfy way to delegate problems you still have to medication and doctors, the most work you have to do yourself.
by belZaah | 2025-12-14 06:52:42+00:00
I was doing my 3rd 70.3 IM and I was doing badly. Something was off, I had been loosing power since the second half of the bike leg and come run time I was barely making 8 min/km. I was supposed to be doing 6. Seeing no point in continuing, I had decided to step off the course. Then a woman (older?) recognized me and asked me how I was. I told her about feeling horrible and stopping. She told me that’s stupid, that I should continue, it’s not so long any more. I did and, against all rational odds, against all logic, started feeling better and did my first ever negative split hm. It was likely dehydration and the aid stations helped. I don’t know who she was. I was so out of it, I did not recognize her and do not remember her face despite her knowing me by name. That experience of hope against all odds…
by notepad0x90 | 2025-12-14 06:56:04+00:00
maybe a dumb but wise approach is to just code as usual without thinking about "AI", and when you have difficulties or efficiency issues, look for tools to solve that. think in terms of specific tools instead of "ai" or "llm".

Do you need better auto-completion? Do you need code auto-generation? do you need test cases to be generated, and lots of them? maybe llms can are ideal for you, or not.

Personally, the best use i've gotten out of it so far is to replace the old pattern of googling something and clicking through a bunch of sites like stackoverflow to figure things out. and asking llms to generate an example code of how to do something, and using that as a reference to solve problems. sometimes i really just need the damn answer without having a deep debate with someone on the internet, and sometimes I need a holistic solution engineering. AI helps with either, but if I don't know what questions to ask to begin with, it will be forced to make assumptions, and then I can't validate the suggestions or code it generated based on those assumptions. So, it's very important to me that the questions I ask an AI tool are questions whose subject domain I have a good understanding of, and where the answers are things I can independently validate.
by ursAxZA | 2025-12-14 06:56:06+00:00
Gift cards carry a surprisingly high fraud/AML risk. If a code ends up being part of a stolen-card → resale → redemption chain (which is more common than people think), companies like Apple may actually have to lock the entire account. So the trigger might not be arbitrary—it may just be a side effect of how risky gift-card-based payments are.
by Animats | 2025-12-14 06:56:57+00:00
This paper starts to go downhill around "The easier-than-expected problem of consciousness".

The Meta paper [1] is much more useful. They claim to be reading out what someone is seeing, in a rather approximate way. The sensing is improving. One project was able to sense magnetic fields at 13 points at 1KHZ using a custom helmet fitted with sensors.[2] The technology is still in the early stages, but they got rid of the high vacuum and cyrogenics needed for SQUID sensors. Progress.

This currently has fewer data points than functional MRI, but more bandwith. fMRI, after all, is measuring blood flow. It's like trying to figure out what an IC is doing by watching its infra-red heat emissions. "Look, the FPU is working hard now."

That paper is a few years old. What's been going on since?

[1] https://ai.meta.com/blog/brain-ai-image-decoding-meg-magneto...

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6063354/