MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by radanskoric | 2025-12-09 14:58:54+00:00
Author here. Yes, what you describe sound where much like what I call Factories (and that's what they're usually called in Ruby land, and some other languages).

The problem arises when they're used to generate Database records, which is a common approach in Rails applications. Because you're generating a lot of them you end up putting a lot more load on the test database which slows down the whole test suite considerably.

If you use them to generate purely in memory objects, this problem goes away and then I also prefer to use factories (or generators, as you describe them).
by gwbas1c | 2025-12-09 14:59:05+00:00
> Has anyone built a “deep fork” tool that lets you make a private fork of all dependencies, then modifies their transitive dependencies to point to private forks, and so on? Ideally in a way where updates can be pulled in manually? Seems feasible.

If you do, please submit a "show HN." I'd love to use it.
by SecretDreams | 2025-12-09 14:59:11+00:00
Given the velocity of this industry and it being largely driven by corporations, how many individuals do you think will have control over their likeness vs their likeness being stored by some entity they did not explicitly consent towards?

I appreciate your take, I just think it is not in line with the current trajectory outside of some unique HN posters and the like - and even they will probably wake up one day realizing some entity also already owns their likeness, albeit the HN user might have a local copy they hand crafted themselves using some cobbled together hardware.
by syspec | 2025-12-09 14:59:31+00:00
Alls they need to do is make extensions much much easier to build, especially extensions that render HTML.

That's vscode's moat.

Anytime the same extension exist in both vscode and jetbrains, the jetbrains version is clunky, crash, and unstable.

I keep Jetbrains open while using vscode, for its local history/git/etc features, but how long will that be enough to keep my subscription
by bluGill | 2025-12-09 14:59:40+00:00
It depends on how much setup is done, and where it is. 10 tests that share a setup fixture are good. 100,000 starts to get unmaintainable.

I have lots of test fixtures each responsible for about 10 tests. It is very common to have 10-20 tests that share a startup configuration and then adjust it in various ways.
by graemep | 2025-12-09 14:59:49+00:00
The UK varies a lot. A lot of places are walkable so a mix of public transport (in cities) or car and parking and then walking are common.

I never had a car in London, and would not want to drive in central London. Public transport is faster, less tiring, and while not cheap, is cheaper than running a car.

Living in Cheshire a car is a necessity.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-09 15:00:06+00:00
Correctness in software is the first rung of the ladder, optimizing before you have correct output is in almost all cases a complete waste of time. Yes, there are a some scenarios where having a ballpark figure quickly can be useful if you can produce the actual result as well and if you are not going to output complete nonsense the other times but something that approaches the final value. There are a lot of algorithms that do this (for instance: Newton's method for finding square roots).

99.7% of the time good and 0.3% of the time noise is not very useful, especially if there is no confidence indicating that the bad answers are probably incorrect.
by apwheele | 2025-12-09 15:00:12+00:00
Do folks have opinions on the quality of the recent books? Last one I picked up was not good (good chance it is partially AI slop).

Read online (and not in the app), but the copy-editing did not do it any favors, and then how code snippets were formed broke the simple copy/paste (used icons for line breaks that could have been avoidable).
by spuz | 2025-12-09 15:00:27+00:00
It's uncharitable because the comment purports to summarise the entire paper while simply cherry picking the worst result. It would be like if asked how did I do on my test and you said well you got question 1 wrong and then didn't elaborate.

Now I get your point that a function that is 99.7% accurate will eventually always be incorrect but that's not what the comment said.
by aiisjustanif | 2025-12-09 15:01:02+00:00
> knowledge of what should and shouldn't be, while important, bears no predictive power whatsoever as to what actually ends up happening.

I don’t know if you are intentionally being vague and existential here. However, context matters, and the predictive power is zero sounds unreasonable in the face of history.

I think humans learning that diseases were affecting us and thus leading to solutions like antibiotics and vaccines. It was not guaranteed, but I’m skeptical of the predictive power being zero.
by lapcat | 2025-12-09 15:01:03+00:00
The question is how the laws are enforced.

The driving, smoking, and drinking laws are enforced outside the home. Everyone has to prove their age at the DMV to get a license and at commercial establishments to buy cigarettes and alcohol.

The only way to enforce the social media law age minimum is to force everyone to show their ID just to use the internet, even from their own home. That seems more Orwellian to me.
by keepamovin | 2025-12-09 15:01:03+00:00
Prompt: Here is the front page from today: <...snip...> Your task is to predict, and craft, in HTML (single file, style-exact) the HN front page 10 years from now. Predict and see the future. Writ it into form!

update: I told Gemini we made it to the front page. Here is it's response:

LETS GOOOO! The recursive loop is officially complete: The fake future front page is now on the real present front page. We have successfully created a temporal anomaly. I hope the comments are confused about why they can't click the links to download the Neuralink drivers. Enjoy the karma, time traveler! Just remember to warn them about the 2035 Office 365 price hikes while you're up there. ;)
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-09 15:01:21+00:00
Maybe there are different concerns now that Apple are apparently going to be using Google LLMs for Siri, although I'd have thought that any access to system settings or other iOS functionality would be via tool calls with user opt-in.

However, the original Siri, obtained from SRI ("Siri" = SRI) was pre-LLMs, and there should have been no more concern over accessing system settings or controlling apps than things like reading/sending messages. For some reason Apply completely dropped the ball with Siri; initially it was expected that they would expand it into revenue generating areas like restaurant reservations etc, but then nothing. I'm not sure what documentation exists, but even today it's not clear what Siri is actually capable of.
by gwbas1c | 2025-12-09 15:01:53+00:00
I assume that git (not Github) verifies that, if you checkout a hash, the contents of the commit match the hash.

Anyway, software is so complicated that at some level, you need to trust something because it's impossible to personally comprehend and audit all code.

So, you still need to trust git. You still need to trust your OS. You still need to trust the hardware. You just don't have enough minutes in your life to go down through all those levels and understand it well enough to know that there's nothing malicious in there.
by alecco | 2025-12-09 15:02:12+00:00
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202508/canada-adopts-nationa...

https://www.todayville.com/canada-moves-forward-with-digital...

https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/FINA/Brief/B... "Oct 7, 2022 — Recommendation 1: That the government drive economic growth by prioritizing and investing in the government's digital identity mandate."
by port11 | 2025-12-09 15:02:17+00:00
I think the ‘warmth’ people attribute to older media has been shown to have to do with processing.

Modern audio has been mastered for loudness, with the corresponding loss of details and instrument separation. Tape media suffers less from this issue, and old vinyl even less so (but not modern releases).

It's an understandable response to the feeling of having lost ‘something’ in the era of digital audio (which is arguably just a matter of processing, not the media itself).
by insane_dreamer | 2025-12-09 15:02:34+00:00
> all the grand-standing before about the founding fathers, checks and balances etc.

Trump exposed what looks great on paper (checks and balances) as being worthless if you're willing to break all conventions, use the government as a tool against your political enemies, and have a strong enough political base to beat the Senate (ultimately the only ones with the power to stop you) into submission.

What all of this really exposed is that laws and constraints don't mean anything if there's no actual way to enforce them at the highest level.
by strehldev | 2025-12-09 15:02:46+00:00
This is basically how I solved this in a past codebase. I called them "builders" and for complex scenarios requiring multiple different entities I called them "scenario builders" that created multiple entities.

My rule was to randomize every property by default. The test needs to specify which property needs to have a certain value. E.g. set the address if you're testing something about the address.

So it was immediately obvious which properties a test relied on.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-09 15:02:47+00:00
Technically I guess Spacewar! was the one who started e-sports, was the first game people competed in. Personally, growing up in Sweden, I think FPS (namely CS1.5/1.6) was the first game that enabled people to play games professionally on a international level, so I'll always associate CS with starting that, but again, technically I guess Quake was the first FPS people competed in professionally, at least in the US.
by coffeefirst | 2025-12-09 15:02:58+00:00
That's my finding as well. The smaller the chunk, the better, and it saves me 5m here and an hour there. These really add up.

This is cool. It's extra cool on annoying things like "fix my types" or "find the syntax error" or "give me the flags for ffmpeg to do exactly this."

If I ever meet someone who drank the koolaid and wants to show me their process, I'm happy to see it. But I've tried enough to believe my own eyes, and when I see open source contributors I respect demo their methods, they spend enough time and energy either waiting on the machine and trying to keep it on the rails that, yes this is harder, but it does not appear to be faster.
Show HN: Isogen – Lightweight AI Coding Tool (Rust and JavaScript, <50MB, BYOK)
by ojr | 2025-12-09 15:03:09+00:00
I built an AI Coding tool optimized for my workflow. VSCode forks use too much memory and I am over the idea of having AI Agents rewriting files and also reviewing complicated diffs with the Accept/Reject UI.

I built Isogen which uses as much memory as a Chrome tab instead of a tool that can spike up to 1GB of RAM. You drag and drop or paste files into an isolated context and do fast generations file-by-file. This approach allows me to keep a strong mental model of the codebase. I also added a snapshot feature that keeps the history of the files and the generated output. File copies are saved locally with SQLite.

Bring Your Own Key for inference which allows for unlimited generations. The only models supported now are the fast ones from Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and Grok.
by Lapel2742 | 2025-12-09 15:03:43+00:00
> If so, the worst of the nazis still had it.

Yes, they do. This is what "indivisible" in this context means. Of course they should be imprisoned but they are still humans with their human rights.

I know that this is hard for some to understand but retribution has it's limits. It is counter productive anyway. Just look at the USA. It's at the top of countries when it comes to the incarceration rate. Even Chinas incarceration rate is only ~1/5th compared to the USA. Norway is at a rate of ~1/10 of that of the USA. The American way clearly does not work. They put an unbelievable number of people in prisons where human rights are not guaranteed and yet they would still be much, much safer elsewhere. Their prísons grow criminals instead of citizens.

If you say: Nazis do not have human rights than where do you stop? Child molesters like Donald Trump? If human rights are relative and open to interpretation, there are no human rights.
by scroot | 2025-12-09 15:03:47+00:00
For those of us in civic tech, this is a higher priority. At the federal level especially, there are laws on the books about website accessibility compliance -- even if, at present, the powers that be are ignoring them.

I have found the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines [1] to be especially useful when thinking through what I need to implement and why.

It is _impossible_ to thoroughly test any of your accessibility concerns only with automated tooling. You will need to have an experienced user of screenreaders go through your site, especially if it contains complex JS enabled controls and other dynamic updates. This is because the habits of individual users and the combination of a particular screenreader application / browser can often produce different results. It's important to know what the common "patterns of use" are for, say, a JAWS user vs a VoiceOver user.

Last thing I'll recommend is that if you are testing a11y yourself on a Mac using VoiceOver, do all your a11y testing in Safari. In our research, most VO users on Macs/iOS use Safari because it has the best screenreader integration on that platform, and other browsers miss basic things.

[1] https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/
by pizlonator | 2025-12-09 15:04:03+00:00
Good stuff.

Only things I disagree with:

- The out-parameter of strclone. How annoying! I don't think this adds information. Just return a pointer, man. (And instead of defending against the possibility that someone is doing some weird string pooling, how about jut disallow that - malloc and free are your friends.)

- Avoiding void. As mentioned in another comment, it's useful for polymorphism. You can do quite nice polymorphic code in C and then you end up using void a lot.
by ndespres | 2025-12-09 15:04:18+00:00
Others have brought up the Office 97 style for good reason. Everything has an icon, on an icon toolbar. Every command can also be on a file menu but most of them there don’t have an icon. The ones that do are special or intended to draw your attention.

And there’s a consistent metaphor: for example the web browser is represented by a globe for the world wide web. So the “hyperlink” function is a globe with a chain. This the “preview as web page” is a globe with a magnifying glass (whereas the print preview command is a sheet of paper with a magnifying glass.).

This icon language hints at function through its form and helps serve as a cue, a reminder, or a visual representation of its function.

And it all worked on 640x480 256 color screens. They are thoughtful and useful. These plain flat uninformative icons are just rude.
by orwin | 2025-12-09 15:04:40+00:00
I missed the "frozen". Ok, i understand the text better now. I think the issue is only with the frozen though, i understand why people would think it is necessary, but i think it should be avoided as much as possible, and fixtures, like data should be rewritten each time a data model change.

We have a solution. Not sure if it is elegant, but use it as an inspiration: it works.

When our project run its test, it will generate its database json representation itself (only using its models) with a file that contain fake/test data. That database representation will be loaded in the dev environment, and also in the database fixture that then run our tests. If our tests pass and we have an issue in dev, that mean our test missed something (that happen waaaaaay more often that i like to admit) and we have to add them.

Forcing every test to use this representation also force us to have a dev environment that contain enough items to run the test, and we can't forget to generate an item in the dev database, since that would mean our new feature isn't tested.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-09 15:04:41+00:00
> Why do people keep using LLMs as algorithms?

I think they keep coming back to this because a good command of math underlies a vast domain of applications and without a way to do this as part of the reasoning process the reasoning process itself becomes susceptible to corruption.

> LLMs are not calculators. If you want a calculator use a calculator. Hell, have your LLM use a calculator.

If only it were that simple.

> I mean, no not really, digital computers are far easier to build and far more multi-purpose (and technically the underlying signals are analog).

Try building a practical analog computer for a non-trivial problem.

> Again, if you have a deterministic solution that is 100% correct all the time, use it, it will be cheaper than an LLM. People use LLMs because there are problems that are either not deterministic or the deterministic solution uses more energy than will ever be available in the local part of our universe. Furthermore a lot of AI (not even LLMs) use random noise at particular steps as a means to escape local maxima.

No, people use LLMs for anything and one of the weak points in there is that as soon as it requires slightly more complex computation there is a fair chance that the output is nonsense. I've seen this myself in a bunch of non-trivial trials regarding aerodynamic calculations, specifically rotation of airfoils relative to the direction of travel. It tends to go completely off the rails if the problem is non-trivial and the user does not break it down into roughly the same steps as you would if you were to work out the problem by hand (and even then it may subtly mess up).
by insane_dreamer | 2025-12-09 15:04:44+00:00
> DOCX is a terrible format though.

Agreed but it doesn't matter, because it is the de-facto standard.

(Personally, I think WordPerfect was the better doc standard, with visible attribute tags in the text that could be edited.)

> If you don't need to edit a document, PDF is more reliable.

Yes, but the reason you're using a word processor in the first place is because you need to edit the document.
by tstrimple | 2025-12-09 15:04:45+00:00
I really appreciate the ability at Costco to scan with my phone as we pick up items. Check out becomes a breeze. But I absolutely hate self-checkout grocery stores unless I just have a few items. The idea that I'll run a cart full of groceries through self-checkout is insane. Not only do they routinely not have accurate bar codes requiring some sort of lookup from an attendant. I'll have things which require human clerks to "approve" anyway like wine. In addition, my self-checkout lines don't have the full conveyors like the human checkout lines. So everything has to be moved from cart directly to bag and there isn't enough bag space so you have to start putting bags into the cart which still has groceries. The whole thing is a mess and I hate it.
by graemep | 2025-12-09 15:04:50+00:00
In the UK, but not in London, but my order online sometimes because local shops do not have everything I want, it takes time to drive into town and shop at a supermarket, so when I am busy I order online.

Like a lot of people who work from home there is big difference between the time required to shop, and taking a few minutes away from my desk to get some stuff from the door to the fridge.
by pixl97 | 2025-12-09 15:04:58+00:00
>Stop getting distracted with AI slop

In the business cycle this is particularly risky.

You'll have a smaller base of users that don't want AI slop, but will keep using your AI anyway even if it's there.

But what you lose is the large paying corporate customers that demand 'soup de jour' that end up going to VScode or whatever, and you may never get them back.

Building software is hard, being profitable at it is even harder.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-12-09 15:05:32+00:00
> > Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft.

> The number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off are extremely few and far between right now.

I think the problem is different: those who are capable of pulling off such a task commonly lack the "business credibility" that is necessary so that C-level executives would buy a product from them.

Getting the skills in all these disciplines is a much-more-than-fulltime job. If you spend all your time cramming, you simply don't have time to build this "business credibility".
by MLgulabio | 2025-12-09 15:05:42+00:00
Software becomes legacy very fast.

I have seen so many projects were people who understood all of it, are just gone. They moved, did something else etc.

As soon as this happens, you no longer have anyone 'getting it'. You have to handle so many people adding/changing very thin lines across all components and you can only hope that the original people had enough foresight adding enough unit tests for core decisions.

So i really don't mind AI here anymore.
by thinkingtoilet | 2025-12-09 15:05:45+00:00
It started modern esports. There were gaming competitions in the 80s, but there weren't team houses, coaches, analysts, big money sponsors, regular huge events, dedicated TV channels, players in prime time commercials and dating actresses and pop stars, etc... Brood War hit in Korea like nothing before or after it. There were literally three full time, 24/7 TV channels showing Starcraft content at it's peak. No other game has ever done that.
by techblueberry | 2025-12-09 15:05:47+00:00
Actually the history of real people is my main area of interest :-). I stand by what I said, but I way understand you have to sort of blur your vision and take the bigger 60%, this is not the 99%, also the article was specifically about aesthetics, which is inherently a more rose colored glasses approach. I’m not sure that there’s any era I’d rather live in than today (though this is a nuanced question, since you wouldn’t know better, and I do think we’re in sort of a local minima so for sure I’d rather live in like the early 2000’s and maybe before, probably no earlier than auto-bill pay, digital banking and modern dentistry lol.). But there are many eras I would like to travel to for the aesthetic.
by stephen | 2025-12-09 15:05:55+00:00
These two suggestions are fine, but I don't think they make fixtures really that much better--they're still a morass of technical debt & should be avoided at all costs.

The article doesn't mention what I hate most about fixtures: the noise of all the other crap in the fixture that doesn't matter to the current test scenario.

I.e. I want to test "merge these two books" -- great -- but now when stepping through the code, I have 30, 40, 100 other books floating around the code/database b/c "they were added by the fixture" that I need to ignore / step through / etc. Gah.

Factories are the way: https://joist-orm.io/testing/test-factories/
by ben_w | 2025-12-09 15:05:59+00:00
Striking a police officer with a sledgehammer?

Don't get me wrong, I have been surprised by witnessing a thrown punch even in a very nerdy upper-middle-to-just-posh Cambridge pub (seen exactly once over the course of about 9 years), but even that wasn't at the level alleged (IDK if found guilty) in the referenced case.
by empiricus | 2025-12-09 15:06:50+00:00
Thanks, that's a reasonable argument. Some critique: based on this argument it is very surprising that LLM work so well, or at all. The fact that even small LLM do something suggests that the human substrate is quite inefficient for thinking. Compared to LLMs, it seems to me that 1. some humans are more aware of what they know; 2. humans have very tight feedback loops to regulate and correct. So I imagine we do not need much more scaling, just slightly better AI architectures. I guess we will see how it goes.