MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hombre_fatal | 2025-12-07 07:02:04+00:00
Link to the one that's so great, especially a Macbook contender?

He has a $2000+ Thinkpad X1 and it was basically his least favorite one in his lineup from last week except for the Framework's bad display: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M96O0Sn1LXA

The snark doesn't seem warranted.

Edit: The laptop you're talking about is also 14" 1920x1200 or am I lost in Lenovo's awful website? A 14" Macbook is 3024x1964. The more I look, the worse it gets, especially after you hyped it like that.
by majormajor | 2025-12-07 07:02:09+00:00
> On the other hand, if we're talking GDP it is basically just a trendline [0] of whether you let people better their own lives or not.

Focusing on GDP handwaves away so much around externalities that it's hard to know where to start with it.

How much worse off would people be if the US GDP was 20% lower but FB/Instagram/Google/everybody-else weren't vacuuming up ad dollars by pushing as-addictive-as-possible mental-junk-food in people's faces to make them feel bad about themselves? How much of that GDP is giving anyone optimism for improving their own individual condition?

How much of the nostalgia for the olden days is about agency and independence and perceived trajectory vs purely material wealth (from a material standpoint, many people today have more and better stuff than boomers did as kids, when a single black and white TV may have been shared by a whole family)?

Would regulation preventing the heads of big-tech advertising firms from keeping as much of that profit for themselves really be a net drain? Some suggestions for that regulation, harkening back to US history:

1) bring back super-high marginal tax rates to re-encourage more deductions and spread of salaries vs concentration in the top CEOs and execs. worked for the booming 50s! preventing the already-powerful, already-well-off from having another avenue to purely focus on "better their own lives" seemed wise there. seems like there were mega-wealthy super-tycoons both before the "soak the rich" era in US history and after it, but fewer minted during it?

2) instead of pushing more and more people into overtime or second jobs, go the other way and revitalize the earlier 20th-century trends towards limited work hours. get rid of overtime-exempt classifications while at it. Preventing people from working 100 hours a week to "better their own lives" and preventing them from sending their kids to work as early to "better their own lives" seems to have worked out ok.

3) crack down on pollution, don't let people "better their own lives" by forcing others to breathe, eat, and walk through their shit

4) crack down on surveillance, don't let people "better their own lives" by monetizing the private lives of others; focus on letting others enjoy their own lives in peace instead
by fathermarz | 2025-12-07 07:02:47+00:00
In theory this seems like a reasonable solution, but in practice, it really is impossible. Is the help documentation going to be generative too? Or can I only ask a chatbot?

Secondly, the concrete example is not generative UI, it’s just generated data getting put into a schema.

I think the hard part of design is that you must consider the trade off between a new user and a power user. Overwhelm against progressive disclosure. It’s an art form in and of itself.
by wdr1 | 2025-12-07 07:03:32+00:00
> Freedom from ads seems like a fundamental human right, and necessary for freedom of thought.

This doesn't make any sense to me.

> Given that people currently are not able to choose to be free from advertisements in any practical way, even if abstaining from luxuries

Sure you can.

You can get a more expensive Netflix tier.

You can pay for YouTube Premium.

You can choose not engage with businesses that have a monetization model you dislike.
by lelanthran | 2025-12-07 07:04:27+00:00
> In my mind, the alternative is running TypeScript while writing and at build time.

Right now, sure.

But if TS is supported natively in the browser, wouldn't your editor highlight the errors as you type? In which case the chance of deploying a broken TS file to the browser is minimal - you'll have to go out of your way to do so, like writing the TS file in plain notepad.

To go even further, having TS supported in the browser does not mean that you are forced to abandon your build step(s). You are still free to run a build step that either:

1. Does the full compilation to JS, and that's what gets deployed.

or

2. Just lints the file, and has the original TS file deployed.

Nothing in "Native TS in the browser" enforces a no-build-step dev process; it just makes it optional.

There's also the fact that, if JS is no longer the target (either browser-byte-code or native-code will be the target), then type-checking can be improved even further because there will be no requirement to allow things purely due to JS compatibility.

Finally, there's an awfully large number of optimisations that can be done if JS is not the target and native-code is.

I'm not seeing any downside here.
by don-bright | 2025-12-07 07:04:29+00:00
Also since LLM generated content is not copyrightable what happens to code you publish as Copyleft license? The entire copyleft system is based on the idea of a human holding copyright to copyleft code. Is a big chunk of it, the LLM part, basically public domain? How do you ensure theres enough human content to make it copyrightable and hence copyleftable….
by a_bonobo | 2025-12-07 07:04:36+00:00
If you can, read Robert Caro's The Path To Power (Caro's The Power Broker has been a HN favorite ever since Aaron Swartz recommended it). It's the story of the first ~30 years of Lyndon B Johnson's life.

I forget which chapter it is, but Caro takes a detour where he describes the life of women during Johnson's childhood in the dirt-poor valley he was from: no electricity, no waterpower, everything in the house was done by women's hands, 24/7. There's a passage that stuck to me about how women in their 30s in that area looked like other area's women in their 70s, just a brutal life.
by nmz | 2025-12-07 07:05:08+00:00
If you think that's bad, try learning python or a verbose language while not speaking english, all of these words like while, for, if, else, break are just gibberish and your code just reeks of some weird mish mash of broken english and broken <mother tongue>, I have a hypothesis that terseness favors universality, if you don't speak english, something like $_ is equal or easier to grasp, it honestly just looks like terse and weird math.
by spankibalt | 2025-12-07 07:07:42+00:00
> "the whole pc laptop industry really is an embarrassment right now. It has been 5 years since the M1 Macbook release, and there is no real equivalent."

True. I think that's mostly because they model their merchandise after Apple's products. I find Apple's hardware utterly undesirable, tho. The only product of theirs I ever showed any interest in was their Newton line of handhelds; my dream machine is quite far removed from the stuff that's mentioned in the OP's article, let alone anything that maps to Apple's portfolio (and even more importantly, product philosophy).
by hobofan | 2025-12-07 07:07:44+00:00
At least as of now Germany has a robust enough social safety net and decent path for non-university careers that make a "poverty draft" system as it exists in the US not viable.

On top of that there is a large dislike in the society against military system. To break that you won't just need "a few years", but likely ~2 generations of compulsory military service for both men and women (e.g. how Isreal does it), that forces a personal connection with the military for everyone.
by majormajor | 2025-12-07 07:09:20+00:00
I think the purpose of optional type hinting is that you don't have to add it everywhere all at once, not that it doesn't have to be accurate. I guess you could split hairs and say "hint" doesn't imply perfect accuracy, but... adding a language feature that can lie really seems to have a lot of downsides vs upsides; whereas at least optional has obvious migration benefits.

You could have optional type hints where the runtime would still yell at you - maybe even from just an optional flag - if you returned a string out of a function that should return an int.

Because as-is, once you have those function that says it returns an int but returns a string instead, etc, in a big codebase, your editor tooling gets really confused and it's way worse to work through than if the hints weren't there at all.

(And there are tools in Python that you can use to inspect and verify the accuracy. But those tools are also... optional... And if you start to apply them to a codebase where they weren't used, it can be very time-consuming to fix everything...)
by fsckboy | 2025-12-07 07:09:27+00:00
>a lot of people think about bioluminescence in these tropical regions, but we have it right up here in this very diverse and rich environment

non tropical, colder in winter than Seattle, warmer in summer, the waters of New England have a fair amount of bioluminescence. you can see it brushing your hand through the water, at the tips of oars, etc (only in the dark)

unlike the dinoflagellates in this video (which are eukaryotes she calls algae, not sure if algae have flagella? looked it up "dinoflagellates are not classified as plants; they are unicellular protists that can exhibit both plant-like and animal-like characteristics. Some dinoflagellates are photosynthetic, using sunlight to produce energy, while others are heterotrophic, consuming other organisms for nutrients.") from somebody whoi oughta know I was told for the east coast it's ctenaphores (the c is cilent) the largest mini creatures that use cilia to move. just looking on wikipedia, apparently to cope with feeding themselves they also eat copepods which can also be bioluminescent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctenophora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copepod
by SturgeonsLaw | 2025-12-07 07:09:29+00:00
Antibiotics do one thing, and one thing only - kill bacteria. They don't do anything for viruses, fungal infection, inflammation, chemical irritants or pain relief.

In the case of poison ivy, all antibiotics would do is lower the already slim odds of a secondary infection. They wouldn't prevent the contact dermatitis/inflammation from urishiol.
by KellyCriterion | 2025-12-07 07:12:35+00:00
The thing is: You are not sure about this - lately I had an interesting experience: I was contacted by hiring firm and asked for my CV. We set up a phone call later on, she said: Since she was too lazy for the english version, she put it into ChatGPT - then we went through it and I was shocked: The system missdeclared lot of positions, esp. the one with some special legal status et.

After that, maybe this is my problem so far after 200+ applications: How often does the other side do this? Maybe this is very common, and since the auto translation misses completely the correct context, that maybe the reason why I had no luck so far and receive _only_ rejections?
by partomniscient | 2025-12-07 07:12:38+00:00
$_ was one of the things that put me off perl, because the same syntax meant different things depending on context.

The Pragmatic Programmers had just started praising Ruby, so I opted for the that over Perl, and just went with it ever since. Hated PHP and didn't like Python's whitespace thing. I never Ruby on Rails'd either. That said my first interactive website was effectively a hello world button with cgi/perl.

But trying to learn to code from reading other peoples perl scripts was way harder than the (then) newer language alternatives.

Now I'm over 50 none of that is nearly as important. I remember being young and strongly opininated, this vs. that - its just part of the journey, and the culture. It also explains the current FizzBuzz in CSS minimisation post. We do because we can, not necessarily because we should.
by AngryData | 2025-12-07 07:12:54+00:00
They made the job suck far more than it already sucked and, big surprise, less people wanted to be truck drivers. So did they increase pay or benefits or worker protections to incentivize more drivers? No, they just lowered standards and scraped the bottom of the barrel for desperate people. And then big surprise again, the bottom of the barrel drivers don't do as well and cause extra problems that didn't exist before.
by colechristensen | 2025-12-07 07:13:02+00:00
Again, when you're building a missile nobody should "forget" a detail.

You have very clearly in the specification, "this missile SHALL not have a run time before reboot of greater than 36 hours ref. donut_count.c:423 integer counter overflows"

Seriously, there's a military standard for pop tarts and they'd get rejected if they had out of spec amounts of frosting on top. It is not the software world you live in.

It's not that they don't ever make mistakes, just an extraordinary amount of effort is put into not making mistakes and oftentimes things are done "wrong" on purpose because of tradeoffs ordinary silicon valley software engineers have no context about.
by scott_w | 2025-12-07 07:15:34+00:00
> Maybe, but really consumerism wasn’t a thing for most of history because almost no one had the money to decorate intentionally in the way we do today.

This reminds me of being a kid excitedly repeating the trope I’d just learned: “Back in your day it was nice because you didn’t need to lock your doors!”

To which she responded “Because none of us had anything worth stealing.”
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-07 07:15:44+00:00
You're probably more likely to get a response by emailing the mods directly rather than commenting on a completely unrelated thread.

That being said, one reason a domain gets banned is when they are spam or consistently a source of off-topic or low-quality articles" [0]. Given the string of [flagged] posts from that domain and the bit of the guidelines that say that original sources are preferred, I wouldn't be too surprised if that particular domain was determined to be ban-worthy, whether manually or automatically.

Of course, I'm a nobody with no special insight into how HN works, so take the above with an appropriately sized grain of salt.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23772723
by privsen | 2025-12-07 07:17:43+00:00
Yeah fair.. self-destructing is overselling it. Server drops the blob after timeout/view count.

Server sees expiry, view count, salt, iv. Content is encrypted, metadata isn't. Can't avoid this with server-managed TTL - alternative is client-only expiry but then you're trusting the recipient's browser.

Main point is credentials don't live forever in chat history. Smaller window, not magic.
by yakshaving_jgt | 2025-12-07 07:17:47+00:00
For some reason this hurts worse.

I was listening to James O’Brien on LBC, and [IIRC] he said he was serving jury duty with a woman who was convinced that Volodymyr Zelenskyy had spent hundreds of million of dollars on a super-yacht.

He asked if she had any evidence for that claim, and she produced a picture of a boat.

He said “That’s just a picture of a boat.”
by wasmainiac | 2025-12-07 07:18:51+00:00
No not really, depending on the application Cpp or python has been the language of choice in the lab. Labview was used because it was seen as easy to make UIs for operators in production facilities, but even that was a regrettable decision. We ended up rewriting LV business logic in c# and importing it as a lib into a LV front end.
by hexbin010 | 2025-12-07 07:19:21+00:00
In a extreme safety-first organisation — and the GB railway is exactly that — it's easy to exploit that weakness.

It actually had very minimal impact. An hour or two wasn't bad for an organisation which stripped staff to a bare minimum, and for the area.

And it's very much the customer's job to work for the railway these days: it's our job to report police matters we are told incessantly with announcements. It's our job to buy the right ticket as there are very few ticket staff and staff with any knowledge these days. It's our job to use third party websites during disruption and to Tweet the railway company for assistance because again there is not enough staff.

So Network Rail is not going to come out and say "it's absolutely our job to be aware of all our infrastructure at all times and our defence to this new threat is to bolster staff and CCTV and reduce our reliance on third party reports"
by gostsamo | 2025-12-07 07:20:19+00:00
I'm blind and even 50 years ago my life would be 10x more limited than now. 100 - years, outright miserable. 1000 years - beggar or a fake oracle. There is a marked difference between living with someone's help and on their mercy. Living with no modern facilities and technologies is pretty easy only when you don't encounter the reasons they are created for.
by colesantiago | 2025-12-07 07:21:15+00:00
Although this is in 2021, it's great to see that Sam Zeloof also made Atomic Semi [0].

A display of "just doing things", no permission needed and no need for barriers and red tape.

It is another reason why I have huge promise for Substrate [1] founded by James Proud (UK native moved to US) another display of "just doing things".

However in Europe and the UK, it's "this law allows you to do this, this and this", "we've changed the law, here is a massive immediate fine", "ban encryption" (this nearly happened), "ban maths", "we are the first to regulate and ban this".

It is no wonder the US will continue to be great at building things.

[0] https://atomicsemi.com/

[1] https://substrate.com/
by fastball | 2025-12-07 07:21:17+00:00
> It sets the rule that things must be actually read when there’s a social expectation (code interviews for example) but otherwise… remarks that use of LLMs to assist comprehension has little downside.

I think you got this backwards, because I don't think the RFD said that at all. The point was about a social expectation for writing, not for reading.
by magic_hamster | 2025-12-07 07:22:27+00:00
Because any resource which is thought to be safe from bombardment will be utilized. Sadly this is extremely common all over the world. In war zones, armed forces use hospitals, schools, etc, as a base of operation (which invalidates its protected status by international law), then cry fowl when their cover is eventually bombed. Not saying Ukraine used Chernobyl for military purposes, but it would definitely not surprise me if they did, or if Russia wanted to rule this out. Either way, war is awful, too bad we are only going towards more war and more conflict. We're a dumb species.
by bpbp-mango | 2025-12-07 07:22:29+00:00
I tried to learn perl a few times early in my career, we still had some old perl internal sites and a bit of tooling written in it. I really struggled to find good resources on the web at the time, and most of the perl I was exposed to was so badly written as to be incomprehensible to me. I knew C and Python at the time.

I wonder how common my experience was and why the next gen (at the time) I was part of never learned it
Open-source proxy that lets the Claude Code CLI run on Databricks Model Serving
by vishalveera | 2025-12-07 07:22:42+00:00
It emulates the Claude Code backend locally and adds: – repo indexing + CLAUDE.md summaries – symbol search + cross-file references – git automation (diffs, commit, push policies) – MCP server orchestration (JSON-RPC tools) – prompt caching layer – optional Docker sandboxing – workspace tools for tests, tasks, diffs, file ops

Useful if you're doing LLM/AI engineering in environments where you need: – Databricks as your LLM runtime – private repo access – custom agent tools – auditability and local control

Repo: https://github.com/vishalveerareddy123/Lynkr Docs: https://vishalveerareddy123.github.io/Lynkr

Would love feedback, issues, or feature ideas from folks experimenting with LLM developer workflows.
by kimixa | 2025-12-07 07:24:06+00:00
I think you're thinking of british-style "en-dashes" – which is often used for something that could have been separated by brackets but do have a space either side – rather than "em" dashes. They can also be used in a similar place as a colon – that is to separate two parts of a single sentence.

British users regularly use that sort of construct with "-" hyphens, simply because they're pretty much the same and a whole lot easier to type on a keyboard.
by dogemaster2028 | 2025-12-07 07:25:33+00:00
Something I haven’t seen discussed here is the role of capitalism as the biggest lift to the quality of humans lives (in addition to things like vaccines and health departments or generally science).

The notion of Incentives in human nature to drive innovation, with efficient allocation via prices and value, plus competition, all leading to capital accumulation that just then be efficiently allocated to generate further value was amazing.

If you think about the current situation in Venezuela, China or Russia on useless missions that led to famine or to killing of millions of people, we cannot argue that capitalism wasn’t a huge influence in the impact in humans lives

I was looking at AOC’s comments about capitalism somewhere and could not believe my ears. Then Thomas Sowell gave a masterclass rebuttal to each of AOC’s ignorant points.

Everyone should listen to it: https://x.com/cubaortografia/status/1997272611269525985
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-12-07 07:28:14+00:00
Honestly database schema management doesn't scale particularly well under any framework and i've seen those issues start to crop up in every org once you have enough devs constantly changing the schema. It happens with ORMs and with raw SQL.

When that happens you really really should look into the much maligned no-sql alternatives. Similarly to the hatred ORMs get, no-sql data stores actually have some huge benefits. Especially at the point where db schema maintenance starts to break down. Ie. Who cares if someone adds a new field to the FB Newsfeed object in development when ultimately it's a key-value store fetched with graphQL queries? The only person it'll affect is the developer who added that field, no one else will even notice the new key value object unless they fetch it. There's no way to make SQL work at all at scale (scale in terms of number of devs messing with the schema) but a key-value store with graphQL works really well there.

Small orgs where you're the senior eng and can keep the schema in check on review? Use an ORM to a traditional db, escape hatch to raw SQL when needed, keep a close eye on any schema changes.

Big orgs where there's a tons of teams wanting to change things at high velocity? I have no idea how to make either SQL or ORMs work in these cases. I do know from experience how to make graphQL and a key-value store work well though and that's where the above issues happen in my experience. It's really not an ORM specific issue. I suggest going down the no-sql route in those cases.