MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TeMPOraL | 2025-12-30 11:48:50+00:00
> It would help if TV manufacturers would clearly document what these features do, and use consistent names that reflect that.

It would also help if there was a common, universal, perfect "reference TV" to aim for (or multiple such references for different use cases), with the job of the TV being to approximate this reference as closely as possible.

Alas, much like documenting the features, this would turn TVs into commodities, which is what consumers want, but TV vendors very much don't.
by DecoySalamander | 2025-12-30 11:48:53+00:00
It's all-round horrible advice. Once you have developed an understanding of 'fundamental operations', such as code formatting and file operations — and, realistically, you will already have done so if you are doing any programming — the next step is to automate them so that they take no time or mental energy, leaving you to work on things that matter. IDEs help with that.

Incidentally, the reason the tabs vs. spaces debate has died down is the proliferation of autoformatting. It really doesn't matter once you don't have to spend your precious time manually aligning code.
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-30 11:49:33+00:00
The biggest points against it being anywhere near as easy as "teaching an adult a language" are: the existence of masking, and the limited success of behavioral interventions - especially in adults.

If people find it easier to learn and apply the workarounds than to learn the thing itself, then, clearly, something prevents them from just learning the thing itself. Behavioral interventions being generally more successful the earlier you do them lines up with that too.

Maybe there are "low hanging fruits", simple interventions that work well that we are yet to discover. But it's not like no one went looking. And the fact that we are yet to find them weights against it.
by diarrhea | 2025-12-30 11:49:37+00:00
I have trouble gauging the effects of `*`, aka "will I cp/mv the dir or all contents of the dir"? Then shell expansion getting in the way, like expanding it all ("argument list too long"). I try to use rsync when possible, where intermittent `.` in paths are relevant, as well as trailing slashes... and don't forget `-a`! Then I forget if those same things apply to cp/mv. Then I cp one directory too deep and need to undo the mess -- no CTRL+Z!

The wide-spread use of `rm -rf some-ostensibly-empty-dir/` is also super dangerous, when `rm -r` or even `rmdir` would suffice, but you need to remember those exist. I find it strange there's no widely (where applicable) available `rm-to-trash`, which would be wildly safer and is table stakes for Desktop work otherwise.

Then there's `dd`...

I use terminals a lot, but a GUI approach (potentially with feedback pre-operation) plus undo/redo functionality for file system work is just so much easier to work with. As dumb as drag-and-drop with a mouse is, a single typo can't wreck your day.
by heratsi | 2025-12-30 11:49:47+00:00
I've moved to VS Code after almost 20 years of Emacs. Couldn't been happier.

Spent a little time hacking hotkeys to match my Emacs muscle memory and that's mostly it.

Now I have a debugger that's actually easy to use, ability to run the test case under the cursor in one click and support for Jupyter Notebooks.
However, still missing tab completion.
by redsymbol | 2025-12-30 11:49:51+00:00
> Is it possible to start small with Meta and then ramp up?

It depends. What kind of offer are you selling?

Generally the learning curve is massive, long, stressful and expensive. I lost tens of thousands of dollars before I could consistently make ads which were profitable.

It's not like learning coding. Imagine if every time you saw a stack trace, $250 was deducted from your bank account. Learning media buying is kind of like that.

Another path is to get hired by an ad agency. They will train you and give you a budget to manage; if you lose that bidget, the worst that can happen is they'll fire you (rather than losing all your stuff).

But that would be a switch in career path, which I do not think you are asking about.
by constantcrying | 2025-12-30 11:50:12+00:00
>After working with agent-LLMs for some years now, I can confirm that they are completely useless for real programming.

>They never helped me solve complex problems with low-level libraries. They can not find nontrivial bugs. They don't get the logic of interwoven layers of abstractions.

>LLMs pretend to do this with big confidence and fail miserably.

This is true for most developers as well. The mean software developer, especially if you outsource, has failure modes worse than any LLM and round-trip time is not seconds but days.

The promise of LLMs is not that they solve the single most difficult tasks for you instantly, but that they do the easy stuff well enough that they replace offshore teams.
by SunlitCat | 2025-12-30 11:50:14+00:00
The problem with calling it “full stack” (even if it has a widely understood meaning) is that it implicitly puts the people doing the actual lower-level work on a pedestal. It creates the impression that if this is already “full stack,” then things like device drivers, operating systems, or foundational libraries must be some kind of arcane magic reserved only for experts, which they aren’t.

The term “full stack” works fine within its usual context, but when viewed more broadly, it becomes misleading and, in my opinion, problematic.
by skywhopper | 2025-12-30 11:50:19+00:00
It’s somewhat delusional and potentially dangerous to assume that chatting with an LLM about a specific topic is self-teaching beyond the most surface-level understanding of a topic. No doubt you can learn some true things, but you’ll also learn some blatant falsehoods and a lot of incorrect theory. And you won’t know which is which.

One of the most important factors in actually learning something is humility. Unfortunately, LLM chatbots are designed to discourage this in their users. So many people think they’re experts because they asked a chatbot. They aren’t.
by 20k | 2025-12-30 11:50:38+00:00
>Every time you:

>Look up a Git command instead of clicking a button

>You're building real, transferable skills that make you a better programmer.

I'm convinced that the only reason that people think git is complicated, is because of the incredibly widespread elitist attitudes around using a GUI for git

This is a hot take, but a GUI for git is strictly better (unless you're scripting). You can do incredibly complicated operations at the click of a button, far more safely than you can through the CLI

But even then, the idea that you actually learn anything by using the CLI is just not true. The longest running meme with git is that people just learn a few commands to copypaste in without actually remembering anything. You stick to your tiny niche because you don't know what's actually happening nor is it possible for a human being to truly remember all of the syntax: This meme exists for a reason https://xkcd.com/1597/

Git via a GUI gives you the freedom to actually use all of git. You learn how git actually works, all the power of it - how to merge complex things, and you can create really nice workflows that are powerful and easy to use. You come out of using the GUI for a while with a strong understanding of what git is, not what the git CLI is. The skill I care about is the former

The CLI teaches you nothing by virtue of it being a CLI. All you learn via the CLI specifically is the ability to type accurately without making mistakes, and gain a strong fear of hitting enter. The underlying concepts are the important skill, and you absolutely do learn those via a GUI - much more effectively without the hard wall of an archaic CLI interface in the way
by symbogra | 2025-12-30 11:50:47+00:00
I can confirm that the Postfinance app doesn't work on graphene. I left some feedback and they said they're working on it so maybe there is hope. But as such I need to keep an old iphone around for banking apps.

Also being an American in Switzerland trying to do banking is eye opening. Local banks mostly tell you to pound sand when they find out you're American. Regardless of this or that administration, the US is really totalitarian when it comes to finance and taxes.
by iepathos | 2025-12-30 11:50:54+00:00
Research on calculator use in early math education (notably the Hembree & Dessart meta-analysis of 79 studies) found that students given calculators performed better at math - including on paper-and-pencil tests without calculators. The hypothesis is that calculators handle computation, freeing cognitive bandwidth and time for problem-solving and conceptual understanding. Problem solving and higher level concepts matter far more than memorizing multiplication and division tables.

I think about this often when discussing AI adoption with people. It's also relevant to this VS Code discussion which is tangential to the broader AI assisted development discussion. This post conflates tool proficiency with understanding. You can deeply understand Git's DAG model while never typing git reflog. Conversely, you can memorize every terminal command and still design terrible systems.

The scarce resource for most developers isn't "knows terminal commands" - it's "can reason about complex systems under uncertainty." If a tool frees up bandwidth for that, that's a net win. Not to throw shade at hyper efficient terminal users, I live in the terminal and recommend it, but it isn't going to make you a better programmer just by using it instead of an IDE for writing code. It isn't reasoning and understanding about complex systems that you gain from living in a terminal. You gain efficiency, flexibility, and nerd cred - all valuable, but none of them are systems thinking.

The auto-complete point in the post is particularly ironic given how critical it is for terminal users and that most vim users also rely heavily on auto-complete. Auto-complete does not limit your effectiveness, it's provably the opposite.
by ekrapivin | 2025-12-30 11:51:14+00:00
I've spent several years developing an ad-free website with over 50 different solitaire/puzzle games:

https://inSolitaire.com

I am currently rewriting the engine for the fourth time and plan to add 400 games to the platform next year, as well as social features such as daily challenges, awards and leaderboards.

My main goal, however, is to make this project the largest collection of free modern solitaire games available for mobile devices and desktop computers.

So far, the project has been incredibly exciting, and I've learned so much!
by globalnode | 2025-12-30 11:51:45+00:00
While this issue is up, I've recently been looking for an alternative to vscode for personal use because it runs so slow now with a few other programs running in the background. My main requirement is copy paste needs to be ctrl+c, ctrl+v and text selection needs to be ctrl shift + arrow keys or some combination of those. Using geany for a week or so hasn't been terrible but its not great either.
by jraph | 2025-12-30 11:52:44+00:00
Yes you will, because Bitcoin doesn't solve anything correctly (notably, its value is so volatile it can't be relied upon), while consuming an absurd amount of energy.

By design, it made its first users stupidly rich, which is not a good characteristic.

More importantly, it's a technical solution for a societal issue (aka, it's not at all a solution).
by mk89 | 2025-12-30 11:53:02+00:00
I have no idea, but don't you think that the driver would have rather stopped at that station, instead of traveling an additional 50km or whatever?

The situation is rather an indicator of how bad public transportation has become due to lack of investments, maintenance, expansion, etc. For years they didn't care a bit about this.

Why should a driver risk his life and/or job to save the day, when the issue is bigger than him/her?
by vnglst | 2025-12-30 11:53:38+00:00
The year is coming to an end, and looking back I had a lot of fun building quirky, fun, and insightful visualizations. Agentic coding agents have been hugely empowering for me. In 2024 it was “just” autocomplete on steroids. Now it feels more like conducting, directing the agents to go where I please. Often they’re impressive; sometimes they fail at the simplest tasks.

What worked particularly well here was a test-driven (TDD) approach. I asked Claude Code to focus only on the algorithm for selecting the next Tetromino (the Tetris blocks), starting with tests. After that, things went smoothly, though it still took many follow-up prompts (around 100) to reach the final result.
by abc123abc123 | 2025-12-30 11:53:46+00:00
Strange. Articles like this remind me never to hire vibe coding brogrammers who have no idea about basics such as cp, mv, find etc. Usually they leave behind a mess which soon breaks.

The cynical and pedantic engineers however, do excellent work, and their software never breaks. It takes longer, you pay a bit more, but it is worth every cent.
by bawolff | 2025-12-30 11:54:12+00:00
> Sadly, I fear that the U.S. may have need of such a defence relatively soon.

When it really comes down to it, usa is a super power. Might makes right in international politics. The ICC has had quite a lot of successes when it comes to small and even medium sized countries, but at some point pragmatism has to win out. Nobody is going to war with the USA on behalf of the ICC. I highly doubt the ICC is going to push any issue with america unless the evidence against them is extreme. Its simply not powerful enough.
by SpEd3Y | 2025-12-30 11:54:57+00:00
> I can't think of a game available on GoG that sells on Steam for > $20. I am sure one exists, but in general these are older, cheaper games.

Fair point but I think there are quite a few of those: Baldur's Gate 3 comes to mind. Expedition 33, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II even Cyberpunk, but it's true that nowadays Cyberpunk is a ~20$ title.

But not sure these were on GoG day 1. Or they added them after ~1 year after they got most of their sales on Steam and already the piracy of the games started.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-12-30 11:55:03+00:00
> That was the principle many years ago, you had to leave the world exactly in the state you found it in.

This doesn't make sense; no show I know from that time followed that principle - and for good reason, because they'd get boring the moment the viewer realizes that nothing ever happens on them, because everything gets immediately undone or rendered meaningless. Major structural changes get restored at the end (with exceptions), but characters and the world are gradually changing.

> If John dumped Jane at the beginning of the episode, they had to get back together at the end, otherwise the viewer who had to go to her son's wedding that week wouldn't know what was going on.

This got solved with "Last time on ${series name}" recaps at the beginning of the episode.
by petcat | 2025-12-30 11:55:06+00:00
Protons email encryption is mostly snakeoil and marketing. Their guarantees of strict encryption at rest is really only relevant to a certain class of people with a very specific threat model. Everyone else that uses the service is just leaking plain text email with everyone they converse with who uses a service that does not offer the same encryption guarantees.

So basically they sacrifice a usable search function for a security service that isn't relevant to 99% of people and isn't even effective half the time.
by wolvoleo | 2025-12-30 11:55:46+00:00
I ignore the news a lot too. For the reasons you mention, I can't change anything and it only makes me angry seeing all the far right nonsense happening. There's no point anymore. I just follow the tech news now. It does lead to me being out of touch with some local stuff though but who cares. I'm in some pretty niche communities anyway so what goes on in the mainstream isn't that relevant to me.
by dontlaugh | 2025-12-30 11:57:24+00:00
There is no such thing as the soap opera effect. Good quality sets and makeup and cameras look good at 24 or 48 or 120 fps.

People like you insisting on 24 fps causes people like me to unnecessarily have to choose between not seeing films, seeing them with headaches or seeing them with some interpolation.

I will generally choose the latter until everything is at a decent frame rate.
by dgl | 2025-12-30 11:57:25+00:00
I don't actually get any warning from gopls for the "//", but I think something like:

/*dev/../usr/bin/true; exec /usr/bin/env go run "$0" "$@" # */

Might be better anyway, at least if we're going down this awful path; it avoids any overlap with directives through abuse of a glob. This also switches to exec so the exit status is passed back. (And using env, although hardcoding a particular install of go may make sense in some environments.)
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-30 11:57:28+00:00
AC propulsion was founded in 1992 and began developing an AC electric powertrain then, using lead acid batteries. By 2003 they had three prototypes built, and in 2003 they converted to lithium ion. At this point they were encouraged to commercialize.

Tesla was founded in 2003, and licensed the power train developed above. Musk bought into the company in 2004. Tesla teamed up with Lotus in 2004. The first Tesla Roadster prototype was shown in 2006 and delivery of production cars began in 2008. By 2009 they had made 500 of them.

I don't like the man very much either, but exaggerating the state of Tesla before Musk was involved is silly. Before the Model S, Tesla was very small and it wouldn't have surprised anybody if it dried up and blew away in the wind.
by Youden | 2025-12-30 11:57:33+00:00
I use GrapheneOS in Switzerland and am yet to find a bank or financial app that doesn't work. ZKB, UBS, Cembra, BEKB, SGKB, WIR, N26, Revolut, debiX+, SaxoTrader, Swisscard, various TWINT apps, YAPEAL and Yuh are all installed on my phone right now and all work. Most of them don't use the Play Integrity API at all and the few that do are satisfied with the minimal level that's satisfied by GrapheneOS.

The catch is that you need Google Play Services installed and for many, you need to disable GrapheneOS' "Secure App Spawning" feature, which often trips root detection heuristics.

I know many Russians living here and when sanctions came in, their accounts became unable to receive deposits until they provided evidence of a valid residence permit. Some have problems during permit renewals as well but overall, it's nothing like as bad as it is for Americans.
by Yizahi | 2025-12-30 11:57:35+00:00
Do you realize that phones, tablets, laptops, most PCs don't have an option of "just add speakers"? You are technically correct, yes full Dolby Duper Atmo 9.2.4.8.100500 system is better. But people without them are not using their setups incorrectly, they have valid setups they have valid use case and they don't get basic level of quality which IS possible and WAS possible just a few years ago with proper channel mixing.
by fpoling | 2025-12-30 11:58:01+00:00
In Barcelona it is impossible to get an appointment for the residence card. There is online booking system, but it never shows any available slots. But then there are few companies that for 50-100 euros can get an appointment.

But then even with appointment one only gets a temporary permit unless one already got a job offer. One gets the permanent card only after starting a business or buying a property or getting a work.

Also to open a permanent bank account one needs to have at least a temporary residence. Otherwise banks can only open a tourist account valid for few months.
by sirmarksalot | 2025-12-30 11:58:14+00:00
I wanted to like The Hobbit in 48, but it really didn't work for me. It made everything look fake, from the effects to the acting. I lost suspension of disbelief. If we want high frame rate to be a thing, then filmmakers need to figure out a way to direct that looks plausible at a more realistic speed, and that probably means less theatrics.
by constantcrying | 2025-12-30 11:58:32+00:00
>But that's exactly the promise of LLMs by the hypepeople behind it.

I do not know and do not care what the "hypepeople" say. I can tell you that, by pure logic alone, LLMs will be superior at simple and routine tasks sooner, which means they will compete with outsourced labor first.

LLMs need to be measured against their competition and their competition right now is outsourced labor. If an LLM can outperform an offshore team at a fraction of the cost, why would any company choose the offshore team? Especially when the LLM eliminates some of the biggest problems with offshore teams (communication barriers, round trip times).
by shafyy | 2025-12-30 11:58:50+00:00
> This is almost hilariously false. "Oh yeah, those words on paper? Well, they actually physically stopped me from running the red light and plowing into 4 pedestrians!"

It's very clearly proven that hitting a pedestrian with 50 km/h is exponentially more dangerous than hitting them with 30 km/h. It's very clearly proven that having physically separted bike lines prevents deaths. It's very clearly proven that other measure like speed bumps, one-way streets, smart traffic routing prevents deaths.

And I am not even going to respond to your idiotic "leftist" statement.
by masklinn | 2025-12-30 11:59:14+00:00
The entire "its initial value could be anything" is one of the possible consequences of UB. It is not the most dire but in C and C++ it is an outcome from an UB.

Could a language define un-initialized variables as readable garbage? Sure, but that would be a different language with different semantics, and such languages can also define declaration such that

> defining a local int and getting surprised that its initial value is not always zero.

is in fact reasonable. That is what Java and Go opted to do, for instance.
by abc123abc123 | 2025-12-30 11:59:15+00:00
I've been a happy infomaniak customer for many years. They only had 1 or 2 outtages that lasted more than 1 day during all this time.

They are on my watch list however. The CEO is pro-surveillance, but was forced to back down due to the outrage of their customers, but he seems to be ethically quite questionable. But for the moment, I think they do a good job, but they should change their CEO to someone who unquestionably is against surveillance.
by merek | 2025-12-30 11:59:40+00:00
I recently came across Open Web Advocacy (OWA) who summarize my mobile-platform concerns well. They "advocate for the future of the open web by providing regulators, legislators and policy makers the intricate technical details that they need to understand the major anti-competitive issues in our industry and how to solve them."

Their top 3 priorities:

1. Apple's ban of third party browsers on iOS is deeply anti-competitive

2. Web Apps need to become just Apps. Apps built with the free and open web need equal treatment and integration. Closed and heavily taxed proprietary ecosystems should not receive any preference.

3. All artificial barriers placed by gatekeepers must be removed. Web Apps if allowed can offer equivalent functionality with greater privacy and security for demanding use-cases.

Website: https://open-web-advocacy.org/en/
by viaconecta | 2025-12-30 12:00:26+00:00
Hi HN,

I got tired of installing bloatware apps and registering accounts just to get internet access when traveling. Roaming fees are outdated, and physical SIM cards are a hassle.

I built ViaConecta to solve this for myself and others. It’s a lightweight, web-based eSIM provider.

The stack & philosophy:

Web-First: No app required. You buy on the site, get a QR code via email, scan, and go.

Privacy: No KYC, no account registration needed. Just email for delivery.

Tech: Built on a lightweight PHP stack with Stripe integration. Focused on speed and simplicity.

Coverage: Recently updated to support 5G in 140+ countries.

I'm currently bootstrapping this from Barcelona. Would love to hear your feedback on the UX and pricing.

I made a promo code for the community: HACKERNEWS (15% off).

Thanks!