MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by watersb | 2025-12-09 00:49:58+00:00
macOS Tahoe has declared war on app icons with distinctive shapes.

No silhouettes. If your icon isn't a squircle, it will be shrunk to fit inside a default shape. The penalty box.

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/6/2.html

The loss of icon silhouettes is a big step down in usability. Erases decades of design guidelines.

https://pxlnv.com/blog/roundrect-dictator/

Frankly it's senseless.

https://www.flarup.email/p/through-the-liquid-glass

Insane but still working legacy workaround:

https://simonbs.dev/posts/how-to-bring-back-oddly-shaped-app...

…

macOS isn't fun anymore.
by jmward01 | 2025-12-09 00:51:17+00:00
I am a believer in the new agentic coding tools (I wasn't 6 months ago) but the delays and time it takes to build something haven't really changed even though everyone I know is using them. What I see is what has always been there:

Product doesn't understand the product because if it was easy to understand then someone else would have solved the problem already and we wouldn't have jobs. This means you need to iterate and discuss and figure out just like always. The iterations can be bolder, bigger, etc and maybe a bit faster but ultimately software scales np so a 10x improvement in -individual- capability doesn't scale to 10x improvement in -organizational- capability.

Let me put it another way. If your problem was so simple you could write a 200 word prompt to fully articulate it then you probably don't have much of a moat and aren't providing enough value to be competitive.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-09 00:51:20+00:00
I've come to the same conclusion: If you just want a huge volume of code written as fast as possible, and don't care about 1. how big it is, 2. how fast it runs, 3. how buggy it is, 4. how maintainable or understandable it is, or 5. the overall craftsmanship and artistry of it, then you're probably seeing huge productivity gains! And this is fine for a lot of people and for a lot of companies: Quality really doesn't matter. They just care about shitting out mediocre code as fast as possible.

If you do care about these things, it will take you overall longer to write the code with an LLM than it would by hand-crafting it. I started playing around with Claude on my hobby projects, and found it requires an enormous amount of exhausting handholding and post-processing to get the code to the point where I am really happy with it as a consistent, complete, expressive work of art that I would be willing to sign my name to.
by mook | 2025-12-09 00:52:11+00:00
Yeah, I learned that using Netscape 6 with a row of blue balls for icons; going from the older Mozilla builds with the Netscape 4-style icons it was a definite downgrade. Pheonix had a row of orange balls; they later switched to IE-style icons with distinct shapes, which was better.

The recent Android releases where everything is a squircle really sucks too.
by NathanKP | 2025-12-09 00:52:13+00:00
No.

This is a real issue. If a robot is fully AI powered and doing what it does fully autonomously, then it has a very different risk profile compared to a teleoperated robot.

For example, you can be fairly certain that given the current state of AI tech, an AI powered robot has no innate desire to creep on your kids, while a teleoperated robot could very well be operated remotely by a pedophile who is watching your kids through the robot cameras, or attempting to interact with them in some way using the robot itself.

If you are allowing this robot device to exist in your home, around your valuables, and around the people you care for, then whether these robots operate fully autonomously, or whether a human operator is connecting via the robot is an extremely significant difference, that has very large safety consequences.
by shadowgovt | 2025-12-09 00:53:01+00:00
Former UI guy at Google here.

The explanation for why they do it is pretty simple: localization hinting. From country to country, the text will change but the icon pictures won't. So if you find some how-tos or guidance online that has screenshots but wasn't made in your language, you can still follow along by lining up the icons.

There are other reasons too but that's a big one.
by Muromec | 2025-12-09 00:53:24+00:00
It's a free market. Just pool some money on kickstarter and bribe the dude to make him do whatever you want. It's the new way to petition. Pool the money, buy his tokens. Make a smart contract that transfers a few mil once the law takes effect.

Do you seriously need a Ukrainian to tell you how to do corruption in the year 2025 of our Lord? In US? In this economy?

Don't be cheap. You can get Roe v Wade back and Kavanaught's head on a pike if you bid high enough. Independent prosecutors will for sure find a pdf file one him somewhere.
by vpShane | 2025-12-09 00:54:01+00:00
I stopped using social media even to stay connected - I look at hacker news to stay up to date with tech, and reddit for cyber security related subs but the FBPurity I installed a year or so ago, and my account was still small just friends and family of maybe ~30-50 people. Mostly, for an animal shelter I volunteer at and community events.

Installing it, scrolling down was constant sponsor ads being blocked, reels of women from bot accounts that steal influencers' videos and repost them, new-age spirituality memes 'Let go of what does not serve you' and 'Return to Source to find your real self' - quotes from philosophers who never said the quote, 'How to hack' tutorial images -- all removed from fbpurity

I'd have to scroll for a minute before getting anything from the local community groups, the shelter's posts, and rarely did I see somebody else's post, and usually it was talking about Trump or politics or 'are we in a simulation?' but for the most part it's all brain rot.

Toxic, deceptive brain rot. There's no use trying to get others to exit the psychological magnet that has them hooked and doom scrolling and posting non-stop with their views.

The botfarms would plague every local community group and most people activity were calling out the bots. Bots swaying the comments on posts' comment sections for local news, people getting LIVID in the comments over trolls/bots.

Businesses being FB exclusive only with no Google presence, no maps presence.

Delete it, trust me, you'll be happier. There is no 'purity'
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-12-09 00:54:14+00:00
If you were free to invent a completely new form of physical media for music roughly in the same space as casettes/vinyls/cds, what would you invent?

Casettes save state but you to rewind. Vinyl have a great album art, but are fragile. CDs and Casettes are small and allow saving and making mix tapes at home. Can we mix and match? How?
by tempest_ | 2025-12-09 00:54:36+00:00
Dragging out a number like that is entirely useless and makes me think you are being disingenuous.

Instead go find the accidents per 100,000 miles driven. Then make sure it takes into account that the robots only drive in fair whether places like California and Phoenix.

I think you might actually be correct in your argument but the evidence you have brought for it is poor.
by scrubs | 2025-12-09 00:55:19+00:00
I can't lay my hands on the book or regrettably recall the author but there was a university book broadly on the op's topic and simulacrum that crossed into wide spread readership ... beyond academics. One of the lines I remember ran like this: when the currency is BS in an environment of hyper symbolism there can only be one result: hyper BS until it sucks all the oxygen out of room.

How/why'd JD Vance go from cultural heroin to VP? The currency is BS symbolism. And as such doing a 180 is just fine. To all degree there is no underlying reality and little consequence in the land of symbols.
by whackernews | 2025-12-09 00:55:25+00:00
Snap. My mates kids have this modern player and I thought it was really cool. You get these cards for it and slot them in to play the different stories and music. You can even get a special card that you can make recordings with. We almost got one for our kid until we realised, wait a min, it’s a tape recorder!

You lose a bit of sound quality but there’s no internet-cloud-based crap to deal with. You don’t need to worry about the company failing and bricking the toy or the Chinese spying on your kids. Also, they’re mostly just mechanical machines with a simple circuit so actually fixable, you can pick up a 30 year old broken player off eBay and chances are a rubber belt has just perished somewhere.

The Harry Potter audio tapes are good. It’s read by Stephen Fry and he’s great!
by npalli | 2025-12-09 00:55:54+00:00
Confluent was trading at less than 50% of its IPO price when IBM made the offer. The stock and the company has been going sideways for several years now, keeps growing revenues but loses even more as most of it is in Sales and Marketing. In which world is this seen as some sort of extraordinary company that will get sabotaged by IBM. Seems Confluent management knows the writing on the wall, IBM will clean up (fire a bunch of sales and management guys) and make this a workable business. It will seem brutal for some Confluent guys but that's because their business is broken; and only someone from outside can come in and fix it as the current senior management cannot.

IBM has been around for over a hundred years, maybe they know a thing or two about running a software business :-)
by robot-wrangler | 2025-12-09 00:56:07+00:00
Claims about agentic workflows are the new version of "works on my machine" and should be treated with skepticism if they cannot be committed to a repository and used by other people.

Maybe parent is a galaxy-brained genius, or.. maybe they are just leaving work early and creating a huge mess for coworkers who now must stay late. Hard to say. But someone who isn't interested in automating/encoding processes for their idiosyncratic workflows is a bad engineer, right? And someone who isn't interested in sharing productivity gains with coworkers is basically engaged in sabotage.
by michaelt | 2025-12-09 00:57:05+00:00
It depends on your business model.

If a basket of groceries brought online costs $15 more than the in-store prices, then you can pick in-store profitably, very easy. That's the instacart model.

But if a basket of groceries brought online costs about the same as buying in-store? With the retailer bearing the costs of picking, packing and delivery instead of the customer?

Well then you need something more efficient than a store.
by DrewADesign | 2025-12-09 00:57:41+00:00
As I said in a previous post:

I think the 90/90 rule comes into play. We all know Tom Cargill quote (even if we’ve never seen it attributed):

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.

It feels like a gigantic win when it carves through that first 90%… like, “wow, I’m almost done and I just started!” And it ‘is’ a genuine win! But for me it’s dramatically less useful after that. The things that trip up experienced developers really trip up LLMs and sometimes trying to break the task down into teeny weeny pieces and cajole it into doing the thing is worse than not having it.

So great with the backhoe tasks but mediocre-to-counterproductive with the shovel tasks. I have a feeling a lot of the impressiveness depends on which kind of tasks take up most of your dev time.

If your job is pumping out low-effort websites that are essentially marketing tools for small businesses, it must feel like magic. I think the more magical it feels for your use case, the less likely your use case will be earning you a living 2 years from now.
by carbarjartar | 2025-12-09 00:57:58+00:00
One example off the top of my head...

In The Building Blocks Of The Universe's section on Calcium:

> Another way of getting round the problem of hard water is to manufacture compounds that behave like soap but don't form insoluble compounds with calcium. Many types of such detergents have been put on the market in the last ten years, and hard water is far less of a problem for the housewife than it used to be.

Reads like '90s era comedy, ala "women be cleaning, amirite?", without even the lazy backdoor of "its just a joke".
by markbao | 2025-12-09 00:59:08+00:00
I don’t like them either. The UX is annoying and it’s way too large. The benefit is that I get to see more options than can fit on the screens and they have photos, but still in person just seems better.

But I’ve read they’re effective, apparently, in consistently upselling compared to a human, so I’m guessing that’s their play.
by zzo38computer | 2025-12-09 00:59:41+00:00
I agree that there should not be icons in menus (with the exception of those indicating the status, like is shown in the 2005 guidelines). (Arrangements, shapes, etc might also sometimes be useful to indicate, but these should be separate from status indicators if they are present, and should be a part of the text instead in the few cases where they are applicable; in most cases they should not be needed.)

Showing a check mark for if something is active can make sense, and other status indicators, but then it should also indicate if the status is currently absent. (On Windows, some menu items can have a check mark, but if there isn't, it does not tell you if it is one that could have a check mark or not. Indicating this could be useful.)

Another thing that the menus do have, and which they should have because it is good to have, is specifying which keys are used to operate those commands. Windows also has one underlined letter so that you can select it when the menu is displayed, which can also be useful (especially since not all commands have keys assigned normally, so using the keys to activate the menus can be used in this case).

My own programs with menus do not use icons (and do not usually use icons outside of menus either).
by martinald | 2025-12-09 01:00:12+00:00
I think we are mixing up two things here.

Robotics for picking and the general feasibility of grocery delivery in the US.

Ocado is good because their stock levels are far more accurate than the other supermarkets for online ordering, so you don't get as many substituted/missing items. This is sort of a side effect of having dedicated picking facilities Vs "real" supermarkets. I would not be surprised if they "lose" less stock as well compared to in supermarket fulfillment.

Then you have "is online grocery good in the US"? There's a lot of areas of the US that have reasonable density for this kind of service imo, and the road infrastructure is generally far superior to the UK which negates any loss of density (as you care about time between deliveries, not distance per se). I imagine the much better parking options in most suburbs in the US also helps efficiency (it's an absolute nightmare for a lot of the online delivery cos when there isn't off street parking in the UK and they have to park pretty far from the drop).

It sounds to me that Kroger just messed up the execution of this in terms of "marketing" more than anything.
by Pannoniae | 2025-12-09 01:00:54+00:00
And the loss of skeuoumorphism. As much as designers chide it, skeuoumorphic interfaces are, when done well, a massive improvement in usability compared to flat/monochrome ones, both for new and experienced users.

It's not really visual "clutter", the shadows / pseudo-3d elements help the brain distinguish between different types of elements, providing contextual information.
by nephihaha | 2025-12-09 01:01:45+00:00
Like most Python material that ceased to be funny decades ago thanks to people quoting it endlessly...

The Romans were true imperialists. They considered their opponents to be barbarians, and claimed they lived in wastelands. The truth is more complex. In many places — yes, including Judaea — they inherited infrastructure and buildings. Judaea was previously occupied by the Greeks and a number of other civilisations had left behind remains. The idea that it was terra nullis or a tabula rasa is nonsense. Even Gaul which was considered to be a frontier already had a road system (some of which has been only rediscovered in recent times), and what is now Marseilles was a Greek city going way back before the Roman conquest.

Romanes eunt domum indeed.
by rglover | 2025-12-09 01:02:28+00:00
You really don't need to overthink the reality that the op costs far surpass the funding available and the value being created isn't significant enough (in future cash flow terms) to outpace the costs (though, this is tech so while I don't expect it, a miracle advancement would invalidate this).

Open to being corrected on this stance as I'm armchair qb'ing this (on a legitimate, factual basis, not a "but dude this is how I'm going to eat for the next few years" basis).
by jonahbenton | 2025-12-09 01:02:37+00:00
I think "prompts" are a much richer kind of intellectual property than they are given credit for. Will put in here a pointer to the Odd Lots recent podcast with Noetica AI- a give to get M&A/complex debt/deal terms benchmarker. Noetica CEO said they now have over 1 billion "deal terms" in their database, which is only half a dozen years old. Growing constantly. Over 1 billion different legal points on which a complex financial contract might be structured. Even more than that, the representation of terms in contracts they see can change pretty dramatically quarter to quarter. The industry learns and changes.

The same thing is going to happen with all of the human language artifacts present in the agentic coding universe. Role definitions, skills, agentic loop prompts....the specific language, choice of words, sequence, etc really matters and will continue to evolve really rapidly, and there will be benchmarkers, I am sure of it, because quite a lot of orgs will consider their prompt artifacts to be IP.

I have personally found that a very high precision prompt will mean a smaller model on personal hardware will outperform a lazy prompt given to a foundation model. These word calculators are very very (very) sensitive. There will be gradations of quality among those who drive them best.

The best law firms are the best because they hire the best with (legal) language and are able to retain the reputation and pricing of the best. That is the moat. Same will be the case here.
by philipkglass | 2025-12-09 01:04:58+00:00
Are you on a mobile device? Ampacity charts for aluminum conductor steel-reinforced cable are pretty easy to find but most of them appear to be PDFs, like this one:

https://www.prioritywire.com/specs/acsr.pdf

Cables in that table are rated for between 105 to 1,751 amps under these conditions:

"Current ratings based on 75˚C conductor temperature, 25˚C ambient temperature, emissivity 0.5, 2ft/sec wind in sun"
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-09 01:05:18+00:00
I've seen some apps that have icons on menu items when those icons are used for the same functions in other UI elements (shortcut bars, etc.) that don't require digging into the menus, functioning as kind of a reminder that "you can do this elsewhere where you see this symbol". It is kind of like an inverse tooltip (where a tooltip you get by checking the icon and discovering the action description, this you get to by going to the action in the menu and discovering the icon.)

I think this is a useful pattern, but I'm not convinced that having specific distinct icons for menu items to highlight them as important is useful. Presentation order and/or simply a consistent difference in presentation for the highlighted items makes more sense.
by jameshilliard | 2025-12-09 01:05:47+00:00
> Sorry but that's plain false.

What exactly are you claiming is false?

> Palestinians living in the West Bank, where there is no Hamas

Now this is just blatantly false, while Hamas might not be the rulers of the West Bank they certainly have a significant presence and high popularity there. If the PA were to hold free and fair elections in the West Bank Hamas would almost certainly win those elections.
by sylens | 2025-12-09 01:06:51+00:00
> It doesn’t have to be this way. You can walk away , and find more fulfilling activities that you control.

For some people, they may their particular hobby/form of entertainment a core part of their identity. So walking away feels a huge indictment of themselves in particular. It can be hard for people to find something else to "pivot" their identity to in many cases.
by aydyn | 2025-12-09 01:08:35+00:00
> Second, you're ignoring the possibility of other treatment options. It isn't always the binary life-or-death you're making it, so SAEs do matter.

A common reason for a drug (especially a cancer drug) going to trial is because other options have already failed. For example CAR-T therapies are commonly trialed on patients with R/R (relapsed/refractory) cohorts.

https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidan...

> "In subjects who have early-stage disease and available therapies, the unknown benefits of first-in-human (FIH) CAR T cells may not justify the risks associated with the therapy."
by thebadkraft | 2025-12-09 01:08:46+00:00
He tried ... but, no ... it still sucks. Brassy claims? Yeah, prob'ly so ... but, the claims are supported. Has issues? Sure ... but for most use cases, easy enough to work through. Covers all types of memory pools? Nope, didn't make that claim ;)

Besides, mine is intended to be a non-invasive memory counter, that's all. Want more invasive memory scoping? Write a MemCheck hook and generate all the metrics you want. Want to make sure your memory pool doesn't leak, you have to find another way. Oh well.

Thanks for checking it out, though. I've got a lot on my plate so issues with SigmaTest are expected. The core library I'm working on is putting SigmaTest through it's paces ... it's doing it's job and letting me know if I miss freeing something here or there. It's just a tool and it's helpful.
by citizenpaul | 2025-12-09 01:10:29+00:00
>shitting out mediocre code as fast as possible.

This really is what businesses want and always have wanted. I've seen countless broken systems spitting out wrong info that was actively used by the businesses in my career, before AI. They literally did not want it fixed when I brought it up because dealing with errors was part of the process now in pretty much all cases. I don't even try anymore unless I'm specifically brought on to fix a legacy system.

>that I would be willing to sign my name to.

This right here is what mgmt thinks is the big "problem" that AI solves. They have always wanted us to magically know what parts are "good enough" and what parts can slide but for us to bear the burden of blame. The real problem is same as always bad spec. AI won't solve that but it will in their eyes remove a layer in their poor communication. Obviously no SWE is going to build a system that spit out wrong info and just say "hire people to always double check the work" or add it to so-so's job duties to check, but that really is the solution most places seem to go with by lack of decision.

Perhaps there is some sort of failure of SWE's to understand that businesses don't care. Accounting will catch the expensive errors anyway. Then Execs will bull whip middle managers and it will go away.
by tombert | 2025-12-09 01:11:13+00:00
About three years ago, I had a Macbook and I wanted to play with Flash/Animate again.

I went to Adobe's website, and couldn't find a non-subscription version to just buy, so I actually contacted customer support about it, and they said "nope, you have to pay for a subscription".

I could have of course sailed the high seas, but I opted to just buy a copy of Toonboom Harmony, which is fairly different than Flash but close enough and still offers perpetual licenses (and shockingly works pretty well with Wine/Proton on Linux).