MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aeolun | 2025-12-18 16:46:18+00:00
Hmm, I’m fairly certain the ‘having children’ part is what triggers total collapse of the previous worldview. My spouse was adamant that we wouldn’t force our child to study excessively, but we’re at 7 years old and we have a 50cm stack of extra activities books that need to be worked through every morning and evening, in addition to the homework the school sets. It’s madness. The class teacher told me he’s not even involved with setting homework.

I certainly wasn’t expected to do any homework at 7. It wasn’t until middle school we were expected to do some amount of homework.
by nanomonkey | 2025-12-18 16:46:20+00:00
There are some contradictory claims here.

Boilerplate comes when your language doesn't have affordances, you get around this with /abstraction/ which leads to DSLs (Domain Specific Languages).

Matrix math is generally done on more than raw bits provided by digital circuits. Simple things like numbers require some amount of abstraction and indirection (pointers to memory addresses that begin arrays).

My point is yes, we've gotten ourselves in a complicated tar pit, but it's not because there wasn't a simpler solution lower in the stack.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-18 16:46:25+00:00
> a lot of things I consider errors based on the "middle-of-the-road" code style that it has picked up from all the code it has ingested. For instance, I use a policy of "if you don't create invalid data, you won't have to deal with invalid data"

Yea, this is something I've also noticed but it never frustrated me to the point where I wanted to write about it. Playing around with Claude, I noticed it has been trained to code very defensively. Null checks everywhere. Data validation everywhere (regardless of whether the input was created by the user, or under the tight control of the developer). "If" tests for things that will never happen. It's kind of a corporate "safe" style you train junior programmers to do in order to keep them from wrecking things too badly, but when you know what you're doing, it's just cruft.

For example, it loves to test all my C++ class member variables for null, even though there is no code path that creates an incomplete class instance, and I throw if construction fails. Yet it still happily whistles along, checking everything for null in every method, unless I correct it.
by mrec | 2025-12-18 16:46:29+00:00
> They will not outcompete Sony/MS/Nintendo in consoles because price is king for the mass market

I don't follow the console market at all, but don't its players subsidize their hardware by keeping software (game) costs high? I didn't think they had anything like Steam's level of regular discounted sales. "Price is king" can cut both ways.
by mablopoule | 2025-12-18 16:46:34+00:00
In his "Power of Simplicity"[1] talk, Alan Kay had a great illustration of this specific phenomenon using astronomy:

Before Johannes Kepler had the insight of describing the orbits of the planets with ellipsis, peoples were using the (conceptually simpler) circles which didn't completely match the observed movement of celestial body such as Mars, thus resulted in complicated circle-within-circles orbits to try to model reality. By introducing a more complex basic shape (ellipsis instead of circle) which happened to match the underlying reality more, the overall description of orbits got greatly simplified.

It's a phenomenon I've seen a few time in my career so far: that while often there's complex code because there are actually complex hedge case to handle (essential complexity), sometime it's really because the data structure used to model the thing you're handling is slightly missing the mark, making things fit almost-but-not-quite, and many operation done around to handle data can be greatly simplified (if not avoided altogether) by changing the underlying data-structure.

(Also, Alan Kay apparently did another talk called "Is it really complex, or did we just make it complicated"[2] that seems pertinent to the thread, though I haven't watch it yet)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY
by delichon | 2025-12-18 16:46:50+00:00
> Less than 1% of workers make minimum wage.

So minimum wage helps less than 1% of workers, at the expense of people who don't have skills valued at the minimum wage? Why are you confident that's a net positive trade off?

> If someone cant land a job at minimum wage it is because the employers think they are a net negative.

That's why I think that people should be able to work for less, for employers who think they are a net positive at a lower wage. It's better than the true minimum wage of zero. It's not like the value of labor is discontinuous, such that it is worth zero if is worth less than a minimum.
by lvl155 | 2025-12-18 16:46:52+00:00
But that basically screws over loyal Apple customers who trade in an entire family’s worth of iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, Macbooks, etc over the years. Sometimes you just take a giftcard because you don’t want to buy a new thing. Fast forward a couple of years, you basically learn that you traded in your Macbook Pro for nothing. How’s that not a controversy? Perhaps they should give customers non-transferable store credits that cannot be purchased elsewhere. Avoids the entire issue with gift cards.
by ch4s3 | 2025-12-18 16:47:05+00:00
Mossadegh was elected but was also illegally trying to dissolve parliament.

>at the very least it disproves your unspoken assertion that the Iranians are primarily to blame for their problems

I'm very clearly stating that the Shah in particular was highly likely to have removed Mossadegh either way due to a multi-decade power struggle between the Pahlavi dynasty and the parliament /prime minister. The Majlis as a rival power center was largely a result of the Anglo-Soviet invasion which deposed Reza Shah, prior to that the Majlis had functioned in more of an advisory capacity, and Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was always lookign for ways to push back against the Majlis.

It is also important to note that the constitution in place in the early 1950s gave the power to appoint and remove the prime minister to the shah, Mossadegh was recommended to the shah by the Majlis who appointed him prime minister. That is factually how the government worked. It is also important to note that in 1952 Mossadegh stopped the counting of an election that it looked like he was going to lose. In 1953 Mossadegh organized a referendum to dissolve the parliament and vest sole power in the prime minister. This gave the shah the excuse he needed to remove Mossadegh and triggered Anglo-American support for the Shah and Iranian army to remove Mossadegh.

The CIA certainly helped the Shah get generals on side and plan the coup, this is not in dispute. However the idea that Mossadegh was democratically elected is not really true, and the idea that the coup was entirely carried out for external reasons is entirely false.

Ray Takeyh a professor of Near East studies who wrote The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty (Yale University Press, 2021) holds the position that the coup was internally driven. We also know from declassified document that the CIA thought the coup had failed and that their part was rather insignificant, but Iranian on the ground under their own direction carried out the coup.[1]

[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20150603235034/https://www.forei...
by just_once | 2025-12-18 16:47:20+00:00
I don't know if there's a word for this but this reads to me as like, software virtue signaling or software patronizing. It's bizarre to me to tell an engineer what their job is as a matter of fact and to claim a particular usage of a tool as mandated (a tool that no one really asked for, mind you), leveraging duty of all things.

I guess to me, it's either the case that LLMs are just another tool, in which case the already existing teachings of best practice should cover them (and therefore the tone and some content of this article is unnecessary) or they're something totally new, in which case maybe some of the already existing teachings apply, but maybe not because it's so different that the old incentives can't reasonably take hold. Maybe we should focus a little bit more attention on that.

The article mentions rudeness, shifting burdens, wasting people's time, dereliction. Really loaded stuff and not a framing that I find necessary. The average person is just trying to get by, not topple a social contract. For that, look upwards.
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-12-18 16:47:21+00:00
Well, I actually use Unpoly, and I can assure you that LLMs don't get it, no matter how many pointers to the (excellent!) docs one includes.

Like, even just now, Claude Code with Opus 4-dot-latest, is absolutely convinced you need a bunch of fragile cascading Javascript listeners to dismiss a lower-level menu in case a dialog is opened, while the Unpoly docs, correctly and clearly, point out that 'shatter' exists for just that purpose.

And this is one of the use cases that I continue to highlight as the achilles heel of LLMs. I'm not holding it wrong: they're not reading it right.
by everfrustrated | 2025-12-18 16:47:33+00:00
Spain's airports are quite interesting. They're all owned by a monopoly which sets the same landing fee to land at any airport. So high volume airports are effectively cross subsiding building very good airports in the smaller regional areas.

Not great for prices (Ryanair is complaining about high landing fees) but it does mean tourists have a good job being dispersed into the countryside and having a good experience.
by g947o | 2025-12-18 16:47:42+00:00
Different teams/projects have different needs and require different solutions. While it's good it worked in their favor, I am quite confident that someone else can tell a completely different story. In fact, there are some comments in this very HN discussion that detail their negative experience with htmx. I would not use one or the other to "convince" anybody to go with either solution like what this article attempts to do.
by cHaOs667 | 2025-12-18 16:47:44+00:00
"ProtonDB tracks compatibility, and counts 7000+ games that are verified to work as well or almost as well as on Windows" - I always laugh when a media outlet uses ProtonDB as an example as the reality is something different. I have a ~1500 games big Steam Library and I'm also a Linux User for 20+ years - yes, I do use Windows only for gaming and on my work pc.

When I fire up my linux workstation or steam deck and browse my library, there are countless games, marked as "platinum" in ProtonDB, but do not work OOTB. Sometimes it's a later Proton version that broke the compatibility, sometimes you still need to tinker in the settings in addition to choose the correct proton version. All in all, I've spent quite some time getting games to run I just wanted to play a single afternoon as nostaliga hitted hard.

As long as issues like this are not resolved, I don't believe in Steam Machines as alternatives for consoles in the living room space.

And yes, I'm still considering a steam machine for my living room, even though I will need to support my wife and kids in getting games to run on the TV.
by ysreddy591 | 2025-12-18 16:47:47+00:00
Correct. I am not at Google. I am an engineer who has spent the last year deconstructing the loop by analyzing debriefs from L5/L6 candidates. The friction I am highlighting is that the interview simulation often requires a different mode of thinking than daily engineering work (or standard prep). If you are on the inside—does the NALSD focus on 'physics/constraints over boxes' align with how you are currently calibrated to score? Always happy to refine the model.
by elashri | 2025-12-18 16:47:53+00:00
I think they probably have aggressive firewall with a lot of false positives. I live in Switzerland and got blocked but tried a VPN to US and it worked. Although it is usually that I get blocked for using VPN.

But I'm not sure if it is about your IP or the whole country but I guess it the former. Who knows what the firewall god at Cloudflare does.
by foxyv | 2025-12-18 16:48:14+00:00
> At the junction of Fremont Street and Victoria Park Road in South Hackney, close to his home, Inspector Neil Sharman and PC Kevin Fagan, the crew of a Metropolitan Police armed response vehicle challenged Stanley from behind. As he turned to face them, they shot him dead at a distance of 15 feet (5 m).

While it may have been an accident, it was a negligent accident. If I accidentally killed someone with a gun I would go to prison. In addition they were found guilty by the jury. It was overturned due to political pressure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Harry_Stanley
by griffzhowl | 2025-12-18 16:48:18+00:00
Yes, the suggestion that they're trolling goes too far.

However, I did a tiny bit of investigating, and according to this write-up it does seem like Brinkmann presents his work as resembling the originals

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/true-colors-1788...

But they still don't add anything without direct evidence - where there's evidence in later statues for more subtle colouring, they include that.
by calmbonsai | 2025-12-18 16:48:19+00:00
I played The Witness and didn't find it remotely fun. I've enjoyed all of Blow's other titles.

I suppose I was coming in with expectations of a modern Myst and/or Riven, but it was not that.

There was not enough active narrative to keep me engaged with the puzzles and there wasn't enough "reward" in completing them.
by H1Supreme | 2025-12-18 16:48:57+00:00
> But sometimes—and here's where it gets uncomfortable—you actually do need a button that updates part of a page without reloading the whole damn thing. You do need a search box that shows results as you type. You do need interactivity.

You can do this with plain old Javascript. Make a request, swap out the [inner | outer]HTML with the result. If you want a nice visual transition, wrap the swap in a startViewTransition(). Obviously, you need to be extra careful if you're using user-submitted HTML. Otherwise, it's fairly straight forward.
by mariusor | 2025-12-18 16:49:04+00:00
> Steam versions of the same game (e.g. Skyrim) often require Steam to be running and enforce mandatory updates that aren't always desirable with no rollback ability.

Yeah, but that's a developer choice. Steam doesn't force anyone to use their API for things like that. If that's a concern for someone as a gamer, they should probably support the companies that don't do it no matter the platform, not blame Steam for it.
by coldpie | 2025-12-18 16:49:06+00:00
Speaking only for myself, I'm very excited for the Steam Machine. A console I can plug into my TV and it just works and gives me access to all* of the Steam library is an amazing proposition. A Windows 11 box doesn't do that**.

* Almost. Anti-cheat remains a big hole.

** No, I'm not going to use a keyboard or do Windows admin crap from my couch.
Show HN: Toad. A unified terminal UI for coding agents
by willm | 2025-12-18 16:49:12+00:00
Hi HN,

Up to the middle of 2025, I was the CEO/CTO of a startup called Textualize. Somehow I had managed to land seed funding for my Python libraries for fancy terminal output. We wrapped up after three years because the funding ran dry.

I honestly thought I was sick of coding at that point. But it turns out I was sick of the stress and working all hours. A few weeks rest was all I needed.

It was about that time that coding agents exploded, and I could no longer ignore them. I wasn't impressed with the UI these tools offered. Having worked in the terminal for a few years, I knew you could get a better user experience. And so this project was born.

I had planned to create some kind of layer between the agent's SDK and the front-end. Fortunately after I started building this, Zed Industries released Agent Client Protocol (https://agentclientprotocol.com/). Which was precisely what I needed.

I've just released the code (It was a private repo for a while). Toad (a play on Textual Code) can run a large number of AI agents, which a nicer terminal UI.

Think of it as a "bring your own agent" coding CLI. Use whatever agent you want. I'm not trying to sell you tokens.

Ask me anything. I'll be hanging around for a while, if this post takes off.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-18 16:49:42+00:00
Tourists don't vote, residents do, and even if short term rentals were outlawed, Barcelona and Madrid would remain tourist hotspots (as they were before short term rentals).

Certainly, there is a tug of war between tourist dollars vs negative tourist impact, but this math is a function of how impactful tourist decline (if any) would occur by pushing out short term rentals. Hotels always remain an option. Real estate and politics are local, as the sayings go. AirBnB pushed negative externalities on local jurisdictions to achieve their valuation and economic success ("socialize the losses, privatize the gains"), and these efforts are just pushing them back in some form. Tourists should remember that they are guests in the places that host them, and it is a privilege to be hosted.
Show HN: I built a free to use logo generator using icons and colors
by teemingdev | 2025-12-18 16:49:42+00:00
I built a small tool for indie founders who just want a usable logo quickly without dealing with heavy AI generators, editors, or subscriptions.

I also added a lightweight “smart suggestions” feature where you can describe what your app does and it suggests icons and colors based on keywords. This part uses simple rules and mappings, no external AI services or image generation, so it’s fast and essentially free to run.

No accounts, no watermark, no folders of assets, just a single logo file you can download and use.

I built this as part of SmolLaunch, a launchpad for small dev tools and indie projects, but the logo generator itself is completely free.

Would love feedback on whether this is useful compared to existing logo tools!
by astrange | 2025-12-18 16:49:48+00:00
"Harvesting user data" doesn't make money. The reason people think this is that on HN people have main character syndrome that makes them think their personal data is interesting, plus an assumption that making money is evil therefore anything you can think of that is evil would make money.

(Google and Facebook don't make money by "harvesting" or "selling" user data, they make webpages you spend a lot of time on then put ads on them.)
by danaris | 2025-12-18 16:50:28+00:00
I'm choosing to leave a job in tech in academia after 15 years.

If I wanted to, I could stay here until I retire (in another 20+ years), barring the complete destruction of the university I work for.

The position I'm moving to is also in academia (this time public sector in the EU), and I'm given to understand that as long as I can make it through the probationary first year, so long as I keep doing a halfway decent job there I can stay there for as long as I want, too. (We will, of course, have to see how true that is!)

Job security does exist; you just have to be willing to leave the Silicon Valley bubble.
by nairboon | 2025-12-18 16:50:28+00:00
The incentives are alright. Publishers who now start publishing too much low quality slop will lose readers (who has time to read all those low quality publications). Less readers leads to less citations, which will drag dawn their impact factor resulting in less authors willing to pay a high publication fee.

For those fields with an existing market, meaning there is more than one high quality journal, the market will provide the right incentives for those publishers.
by davidhariri | 2025-12-18 16:50:35+00:00
HTMX is a great choice for an app that only needs forms, validation and partial template rendering, though CSS view transitions are making partials less relevant for server side web applications.

For things with heavy interaction (drag and drop, chat etc.), I find the code to make it work with HTMX is just too clumsy to work with as a mental model.
by tokai | 2025-12-18 16:50:56+00:00
Open Access is not a business model for the publishers. They have build different ways of sucking fees out of authors when shifting to Open Access. But its FUD to claim that it's an issue with Open Access. OA is a question of licensing and copyright, nothing more. Muddling the publishers business practices with the movement to ensure free and open access to research literature is destructive and ultimately supporting the publishers, whom has been working hard for decades to dilute the concept.
by fsckboy | 2025-12-18 16:51:01+00:00
>The problem is that there is no "missing data" color

they should use "green screen green" and give you viewing glasses that fill in the colors to your own historical preference (e.g. rose colored? blood-soaked?). then if you point a finger with your "anhistorical" complaints, there will be 3 fingers pointing back at you!
by 0x500x79 | 2025-12-18 16:51:02+00:00
I believe it is getting close to this. Things like this just take time though, and when this person talks to management/leadership they talk about how much they are producing and how everyone is blocking their work. So it becomes a challenging political maneuvering depending on the ability of certain leadership to see through the BS.

(By my organization, I meant my company - this person doesn't report to me or in my tree).
by alexfoo | 2025-12-18 16:51:35+00:00
> One thing that stopped me from seeking the vanity plate

I'm sure it differs between countries but in the UK vanity plates have become reasonably contentious.

As a gross generalisation they're fine if the car is worth hundreds of thousands or the plate itself is worth hundreds of thousands.

The UK plate "F1" last sold for just under £1m (about US$1.3m) over 10 years ago and it's rumoured that there are offers for ten times that from someone who wants to buy it now.

It comes down to a classic British issue of "class", which is inherently difficult to explain.

If you have the money to have, say, a Ferrari 250 GTO then you can do what the hell you like with it, including getting a vanity plate for it. You are rich enough that you don't care what anyone else thinks about you. Anyone seeing you and that car will know you are rich.

If you have the money to spend close to £1m on a plate like "X1" and decide to put it on beat up 15 year old 1.2 litre Ford Focus then, again, it shows you have stupid amounts of money and some delicious irony in putting it on an old beater of a car.

But if don't have a supercar and you get a relatively cheap vanity plate like "RMZ 1327" and stick it on a Range Rover Evoque that's only a couple of years old then it just shows that you're trying too hard and just aspire to be seen as rich. You don't have enough money for a really nice car, or a really exclusive vanity plate.

I guess the other way of looking at it is that people who don't have the money to get a vanity plate aspire to being able to do so as it would mean they have more money than they have now. Once they get to having that amount of money most realise that the money is best spent elsewhere (or not spent at all). Once they have so much money that having a vanity plate is inconsequential to their finances they may as well do it. So it's natural that some people want to pretend they've reached the "rich" state by buying a vanity plate preemptively - the problem is that this is so easy to spot it just looks gauche.

All of this obviously doesn't apply to countries where vanity plates aren't traded for stupid amounts like famous pieces of art.
by philistine | 2025-12-18 16:51:41+00:00
On a fundamental level you're absolutely right. Unfortunately, you're complaining about a model that has existed for decades at this point: the cable model. You pay an arm and a leg for cable, and yet you get ads.

Companies seem incapable of imagining a world where they don't double dip, since they've built the whole house of cards on the cable model and they want nothing else than to recreate it.