MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gf000 | 2025-12-17 08:56:59+00:00
> but one reaps the benefits later thanks to more confidence when refactoring or adding code.

To be honest, I believe it makes refactoring/maintenance take longer. Sure, safer, but this is not a one-time only price.

E.g. you decide to optimize this part of the code and only return a reference or change the lifetime - this is an API-breaking change and you have to potentially recursively fix it. Meanwhile GC languages can mostly get away with a local-only change.

Don't get me wrong, in many cases this is more than worthwhile, but I would probably not choose rust for the n+1th backend crud app for this and similar reasons.
by sothatsit | 2025-12-17 08:58:11+00:00
Or: I’m not going to do this refactor at all, even though it would improve the codebase, because it will be near impossible to ensure everything is correct after making so many changes.

To me, this has been one of the biggest advantages of both tests and types. They provide confidence to make changes without needing to be scared of unintended breakages.
by pierremouchan | 2025-12-17 08:58:45+00:00
u're right to be skeptical ;) zero hallucinations is a strong claim... However, I minimize it structurally by treating the LLM as a reasoning engine, not a knowledge base.

Instead of letting the model "guess" based on training data, we constrain it to a RAG pipeline backed by 50+ marketing frameworks (like Blue Ocean, Jobs-to-be-Done, etc.). The agent constructs answers only from this retrieved context. If the answer isn't in the playbook, it’s instructed to ask clarifying questions rather than invent facts! It has proven to be really good beside other LLM like chatGPT (and I also tweak it every day by playing with prompting, temperature, topK etc)
by wkat4242 | 2025-12-17 09:00:47+00:00
No the Linux kernel didn't move to gpl3 for this reason.

It should have, IMO. Because now we're stuck with all these locked devices. Even PCs are becoming more locked now. FOSS (at least on the OS level) can't really exist without open devices to run it on. Otherwise you're dependent on the gatekeepers of big tech and there's nothing 'free' about it anymore then.
by seec | 2025-12-17 09:01:17+00:00
Yeah, nicotine is a mild stimulant; it's really not a big deal, which is why it is mostly tolerated. The bad interpersonal effects actually come from stopping nicotine, which makes people grumpy, but it doesn't last very long.

The problem is that it's a slow burn because it's consumed by smoking, and this is really the most pleasant way to consume it. People don't like the externalities associated with it, and that's pretty much it.
by throwaway81523 | 2025-12-17 09:02:37+00:00
IDK what a grand prix is. McMurtry uses downforce fans which were banned from F1 some decades ago, so it would not be allowed to compete in F1 or formula-E or whatever. Otherwise it would beat all the conventional cars. The downforce fans give it too much of an advantage, which is why they are prohibited now.

For some history, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brabham_BT46

TLDR: they entered a fan car in 1978 that beat everything else, but provoked enough opposition that they pulled out of competition and the technology was banned. The present-day Spéirling was inspired partly by that car.

Also: https://fancarexperience.com/ pay $5000 an hour to drive the Spéirling around a track. Different packages available starting at $500 for a quick ride and acceleration test.

And: Stig Laps (Top Gear test drive, sets new record for that track), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDfKhBcGh9w
by ursAxZA | 2025-12-17 09:03:11+00:00
Thanks — and yes, I think we’re essentially aligned now.

Once we separate the layers — orthography, pronunciation, and stylistic rendering — the friction mostly disappears.

Romanization is a writing system with its own conventions; speech naturally undergoes reductions and elisions; and creative writing sometimes pulls closer to the spoken register.

Different layers, different functions — and the confusion only arises when they’re collapsed into one.

Appreciate the thoughtful discussion.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-17 09:03:14+00:00
There is also another possibility.

People often don't report minor accidents. Someone scrapes a pole without causing enough damage to hit their insurance deductible, are they going to file a police report? Mostly not. And then the older number had that in it and the newer one doesn't.

But the number for human drivers works like the old number. They're dividing miles driven by reported accidents. On top of that, they're using the average -- by miles -- which isn't the same as the median, and in particular that will over-represent drivers who drive the most miles, who are disproportionately professional drivers.
by 15155 | 2025-12-17 09:04:35+00:00
> I’ve heard this argument in the context of capital punishment, and I find it incredibly unconvincing.

This is more or less a false dichotomy.

Capital punishment is by definition irreversible, so mistakes aren't tolerable.

Being arrested is legally and reasonably far more correctable with few lasting consequences: we can absorb these mistakes in the rare events they occur.
by fph | 2025-12-17 09:04:39+00:00
What happens most of the time with unexperienced or distracted users is that they write things like `norm(S - T)` to compute how close two vectors are, but one of them is a row vector and the other is a column vector, so the result is silently completely wrong.

Matlab's functions like to create row vectors (e.g., linspace) in a world where column vectors are more common, so this is a common occurrence.

So `[1,2,3] + [4;5;6]` is a concise syntax for an uncommon operation, but unfortunately it is very similar to a frequent mistake for a much more common operation.

Julia tells the two operations (vector sum and outer sum) apart very elegantly: one is `S - T` and the other is `S .- T`: the dot here is very idiomatic and consistent with the rest of the syntax.
by hermanzegerman | 2025-12-17 09:04:54+00:00
Get real, even the poorest districts in the UK have the same average life expectancy than in the US

American life expectancy compares extremely unfavourably with the UK. The English seaside town of Blackpool has been synonymous with deep-rooted social decline for much of the past decade. It has England’s lowest life expectancy, highest rates of relationship breakdown and some of the highest rates of antidepressant prescribing. But as of 2019, that health-adjusted life expectancy of 65 (the number of years someone can be expected to live without a disability) was the same as the average for the entire US.

https://www.ft.com/content/653bbb26-8a22-4db3-b43d-c34a0b774...

Also what you conveniently forget to mention, all European countries still spend less on Healthcare than the US, as a percentage of their GDP. In absolute numbers this comparison would look even worse

So this isn't Defense Spending redirected to Healthcare
by petterroea | 2025-12-17 09:05:03+00:00
This happens every tine with Microsoft: * Announces feature implemented in a horrible way * Everyone gets mad * Microsoft cancels the feature or removes features people complain about

I'm sick and tired of listening to it.

Someone in here once wrote that Microsoft must be doing it on purpose - it is similar to the negotiation tactic where you overcharge on purpose so your opponent feels they won something when you settle for less. Surely this is Microsoft's strategy to get you to accept them pushing this garbage on us.

Remember, the AI bubble winner won't be the one that pushes the first polished AI tool. It will be the company that fills most of the market, such that they already have market share by the time they are able to do something useful with it.
by arethuza | 2025-12-17 09:05:37+00:00
"We don't exhibit happiness, and we don't express happiness in a way that is easily observed"

I would far rather live somewhere where people look unhappy but are actually pretty content with life than somewhere where people feel compelled to look happy even though they are actually feeling pretty miserable.

But then again I am an aging Scot so I'm biased. ;-)

Edit: I'm also just back from a visit to Finland.
by olafmol | 2025-12-17 09:05:57+00:00
It's not obfuscated. The free plan gives you a max of 5 concurrent self-hosted runners. If you need more you can upgrade your plan: https://circleci.com/pricing/#comparison-table

There simply is no free lunch, somewhere someone needs to spend effort and time on managing the orchestration layer for the runners, and there is also network traffic and storage in play that costs money. If you need a future-proof CI/CD platform, it takes some investment. I agree that the Github "pay per minute" approach doesn't feel right, most people would probably find a "pay per orchestration job" or something more acceptable.

Anyway, there are alternatives out there :)
by gingerBill | 2025-12-17 09:06:27+00:00
There is sadly a habit which is not bound to any "community", and I've seen a lot of cases where people will just rant a lot about something they don't understand when that rant could have been easily prevented by either reading the documentation/manual or asking someone in the first place. In the case of Odin, this is usually reading the Overview, the FAQ, or even just asking a question politely on the Discord/Forum/email. The implicit `context` system is one of those specific cases which is more likely to bring up an "uninformed rant". A lot of people seem to think you can figure everything out without reading a manual or rely on the veracity of what an LLM produces, and sadly this is not going to work for a lot of things in life. Most of the cases for explaining the existence of `context` (the thing the rant usually happens about) is usually solved by copying and pasting the two paragraphs from the Overview, explaining that it is for third-party interception. Sometimes it requires a longer explanation and thus I resorted to writing this article.

I don't like writing articles in general, since I am not a very good writer either, which is why I didn't want to write it; not because of the topic in itself. I could rephrase that first sentence/paragraph to not sound as "harsh" but when working on an open project, I would like people to at least read some form of documentation or just ask a question directly before they complain/rant.
by uasi | 2025-12-17 09:06:51+00:00
Well, speaking for myself, I internalized how う is pronounced differently in different contexts when I was young, and by now I've almost forgotten there's a difference I need to be conscious of.

When I hear /ho:/ in a certain context, "ほう(方)" immediately comes to mind, without noticing that what I heard was a long o. To me it's just the う sound. And if someone pointed to their face while saying /ho:/, I'd think it's the お sound as in "ほお(頬)".
by gofreddygo | 2025-12-17 09:06:55+00:00
Very interesting example. For me spaced repetition today looks very different than it used to till a few years ago.

My "system" is now some google docs, some google sheets and some html hosted on my domain. I have no black box algorithm to offload to.

I'm now curious if i could try applying it to everyday things i learn and want reinforcement on along with the technical stuff i want handy. Thanks for sharing.
by gingerBill | 2025-12-17 09:07:48+00:00
The code example is more to show the scoped copy-on-write behaviour of `context` more than how it is used in practice. I agree it might be a bit confusing and thus needs to be made clearer that is what the code example is meant to show. However, I don't there is any code example that could show "correct usage" of `context` without it defeating the point of it. As I say in the article, it makes more sense to leave it "confusing" because then people will ignore it.

The Overview is just that, an "Overview" and it's not meant be either a spec, a heavily detailed tutorial, nor an explanation of why a language construct is designed the way it is and/or why it exists. The latter of which would probably be as long as the Overview for each construct that exists if that.
by euroderf | 2025-12-17 09:09:10+00:00
Keeping track of "-ize" versus "-ise" is a PITA, mainly because (a) American English uses both, altho not interchangeably, and (b) on teh interwebz there's always an inconsistent grab bag of dialectical usage. For those reasons I for one have settled on "-ise". My 0,02€, ymmv
by auxbuss | 2025-12-17 09:09:35+00:00
I also host my own email. In my case, Google always routes the first email I send to a new Gmail address as spam. After the recipient marks the email as good, future emails are received as expected. The only way around this is to advise the recipient via Gmail that I've set an email to them via a different route, so that they can check their spam and mark the email as good. This has been going on for at least two years.

Basically, Google are shadow-banning me till they get caught. I think this should be illegal.
by 3D30497420 | 2025-12-17 09:10:08+00:00
Based on this research, the impact of these populations on the allocation of representatives is probably not particularly large: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/07/24/how-remov...

Sure, the House is almost evenly split, so a few seats here or there would have an impact. But the net result would probably be further mitigated by gerrymandering, other population shifts, and so on.

One other thing I appreciated from this article is how it touches on comments about simply following the law. Just because something is legal, does not make it morally questionable (at best). From the article:

> The apportionment of seats in Congress is required by the U.S. Constitution, which says that the census will be used to divide the House of Representatives “among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State,” except for enslaved people, who, until the late 1800s, were counted as three-fifths of a person, and certain American Indians.
by nextaccountic | 2025-12-17 09:11:07+00:00
There was a system with dependent types that ruled out invalid html at compile time, even dynamically generated html (rather than a runtime error, you would get a compile error if your code did something wrong)

https://github.com/urweb/urweb

http://www.impredicative.com/ur/

Needless to say it wasn't very practical. But there was one commercial site written in it https://github.com/bazqux/bazqux-urweb (the site still exists but not sure if it's still written in ur/web)
by youkainoniichan | 2025-12-17 09:11:46+00:00
Tested it for a while. Great that I can finally run my SDD workflows easily without juggling bunch of Claude Code commands in terminal.

Also, I found unexpected use case for it. Even when I need to only change couple lines of code, I just run quick fix workflow for it, because Zenflow automatically creates worktree, branch, commit etc. And PR is created with few clicks. It'll seems like a minor thing, but it irritates me a lot to do all this stuff myself for small changes. One thing I miss here is automatic PR name and description creation according to templates my company uses.
by 15155 | 2025-12-17 09:11:48+00:00
My right to place cameras on my private property absolutely trumps your desire to not be seen or recorded (or whatever your specific grievance is) in the United States.

This isn't about "hard rules" - make laws prohibiting government use of privately-obtained data if you like - but vandalizing or prohibiting a privately-owned Ring camera is absolutely a matter of my rights being abridged.

Privacy must be created - and is quite expensive.
by stakhanov | 2025-12-17 09:12:18+00:00
The E.U. making life difficult for U.S.-based monopolists, and the U.S. making life difficult for E.U.-based monopolists? For a net effect of life being difficult for all monopolists?

Well, that sounds like a wonderful idea!

I am all for it. Through this model, we might actually enjoy effective antitrust enforcement, and escape regulatory capture! Who would have thought that this day would ever come? Once again, it turns out I have been too cynical all my life.
by roryrjb | 2025-12-17 09:12:27+00:00
If I install Ubuntu 25.10, I can't get camera effects (blurred background and so on) to work in Meet because hardware compositing (or something, I'm not entirely clear on the details[0][1]) doesn't work properly on the open Nvidia driver on Wayland. Wait I thought this was all supposed to be the future?

0. https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/644 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1due6ni/hardware...
by wanderlust123 | 2025-12-17 09:13:41+00:00
Yes, I personally think so. In the hands of an experienced user you can crank out work that would take days or weeks even, and get to the meat of the problem you care about much quicker. Just churning out bespoke boilerplate code is a massive time saver, as is using LLMs to narrow in on docs, features etc. Even high level mathematicians are beginning to incorporate LLM use (early days though).

I cant think of an example where an LLM will get in the way of 90% of the stuff people do. The 10% will always be bespoke and need a human to drive forward as they are the ones that create demand for the code / work etc.
by pjerem | 2025-12-17 09:14:42+00:00
Oh that's cool ! Bravo !

I lived exactly the same thing also two years ago.

What changed everything to me was, impulsively, enrolling myself to a rollerblading course in a skate park. I was 34, overweight (still am) and never did anything like this (I never did barely any sport at all tbh). Oh boy was this transformative.

I'm still in the course every week and like you, it feels good because it's tangible : not in the material way like sculpting but rather by doing things with my body (and my brain) I would'nt believe I could do at all even when I was younger. That's an amazing feeling after decades of watching things on screens (yes, I know how that sounds pathetic, but that's my story).
by jillesvangurp | 2025-12-17 09:14:44+00:00
If you start with some working software, you could make an LLM generate a lot of tests for the existing functionality and ensure they pass against the existing software and have excellent test coverage. Generating tests and specifications from existing software is relatively easy. It's very tedious to do manually but LLMs excel at that type of job.

Once you have that, you port over the tests to a new language and generate an implementation that passes all those tests. You might want to do some reviews of the tests but it's a good approach. It will likely result in bug for bug compatible software.

Where it gets interesting is figuring out what to do with all the bugs you might find along the way.
Copying the Code Is the Easy Part
by bobbyblackstone | 2025-12-17 09:16:36+00:00
You can copy the code.

But then you still have to host it secure it update it support it grow it

And then there’s the harder part: actually understanding the business it exists to serve.

Recreating a piece of software often means you’ve learned what it does, not why it exists. Most of the real work lives outside the repository. Customers. Constraints. Trade-offs. Edge cases. Support load. Compliance. Years of decisions that never made it into the README.

That doesn’t make you incapable. It just means you’re operating from the consumer side, not the builder side.

And that’s fine. Most people start there.

But copying an idea isn’t the same as owning it. The communities behind these products didn’t just write code. They dealt with users, processes, and consequences over time.

That’s the part that’s easy to underestimate

whats your take hn.
by wanderlust123 | 2025-12-17 09:16:46+00:00
I agree totally; most people are no experienced, and there is a weird situation where the productivity gains are bifurcated. I have also seen a lot of developers unable to steer the LLM as they can’t pick up on issues they would otherwise have learned through experience. Interesting to see what will happen but probably gonna be a shit show for younger devs.
Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for UI design?
by bhu1st | 2025-12-17 09:17:37+00:00
Platform like like Lovable, Bolt and V0 produce stunningly nice looking UI even for a fairly simple prompt like "Build a modern AI app directory website" but giving similar prompts to ChatGPT or Claude produces a very basic looking web page.

Do you guys have tips or suggestions on how to get better UI designs using ChatGPT, Claude etc?
by sfn42 | 2025-12-17 09:17:42+00:00
You know there's a lot of places in this world where education is pretty much free. Turns out it's good for society when people do well, and most first world countries have figured that out and leaned into the whole helping each other thing. We even get to be sick or injured without losing our job and getting a $100,000 bill, it's crazy.
by sebastiennight | 2025-12-17 09:17:58+00:00
This is amazing. I was planning to build exactly this for movie subtitles yesterday!

I'm unsure however what you mean by

> No Ads · No Social · Zero Privacy Trace

and

> Web data is used only for real-time AI parsing, transmitted via SSL encryption, and the server never stores any original content.

Because the APIs for commercial LLMs, if you're not hosting the models yourself, definitely grab and store everything.
by jonathanstrange | 2025-12-17 09:19:08+00:00
IMHO, these strong type systems are just not worth it for most tasks.

As an example, I currently mostly write GUI applications for mobile and desktop as a solo dev. 90% of my time is spent on figuring out API calls and arranging layouts. Most of the data I deal with are strings with their own validation and formatting rules that are complicated and at the same time usually need to be permissive. Even at the backend all the data is in the end converted to strings and integers when it is put into a database. Over-the-wire serialization also discards with most typing (although I prefer protocol buffers to alleviate this problem a bit).

Strong typing can be used in between those steps but the added complexity from data conversions introduces additional sources of error, so in the end the advantages are mostly nullified.
by Marazan | 2025-12-17 09:19:31+00:00
> For LLMs, there is an added benefit. If you can formally specify what you want, you can make that specification your entire program. Then have an LLM driven compiler produce a provably correct implementation. This is a novel programming paradigm that has never before been possible; although every "declarative" language is an attempt to approximate it.

That is not novel and every declarative language precisely embodies it.
by faidit | 2025-12-17 09:19:37+00:00
Always has been. At least for several decades. Unrealistic workloads and arbitrary word/page length requirements all but force students to cheat, or at best master the art of "BSing" papers, becoming a human slop machine. Which may be a useful skill for a career in academia that benefits oneself but does absolutely nothing to advance human knowledge. Comparable to leetcode in some ways. What we have now is similar to the "eight-legged essay" from feudal China which began as meritocracy and became a ridiculous, corruptible formality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-legged_essay
by piva00 | 2025-12-17 09:19:54+00:00
Mostly an artefact of the non-application of antitrust laws, the US selectively decided to not apply those anymore for the past 30-40 years, corporate consolidation takes hold, companies providing a service grow enormously and are allowed to swallow prominent competitors to stamp them out.

The EU has many competitive companies, I think HN is too focused on "tech" as in digital/web stuff and quite blind to other technological industries...