MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by konmok | 2025-12-08 00:01:23+00:00
Read "As I Remember London", and put on your reading comprehension hat. If you need help, try this article:

https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug...

DHH is clearly talking about people of color in London, and he's clearly expressing approval for Tommy Robinson. If you won't acknowledge that, you're either oblivious or racist. I hope it's the former.
by Teever | 2025-12-08 00:01:40+00:00
If this bubble pops spectacularly and causes financial Armageddon for people's pensions, people who never wanted this to happen or had any part in it really -- who is responsible?

Will we start to have discussions aboutt aking this kind of ability to destroy the economy away from people who are absolutely insulate from such destruction?

Or will we bail them out and restart the timer to cyclical and preventable financial destruction?
by shoo | 2025-12-08 00:01:53+00:00
"Using LLMs at Oxide" [0], as seen on the HN frontpage yesterday, had a bit to say about LLMs as writers

> LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it.

> If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?

[0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576
by jacquesm | 2025-12-08 00:02:13+00:00
Why do you believe that to be a counterexample? In fragmentary form all of these elements must have been present in the input, the question is really how large the largest re-usable fragment was and whether or not barring some transformations you could trace it back to the original. I've done some experiments along the same lines to see what it spits out and what I noticed is that from example to example the programming style changed drastically, to the point that I suspect that it was mimicking even the style and not just the substance of the input data, and this over chunks of code long enough that it would definitely clear the bar for plagiarism.
by stainablesteel | 2025-12-08 00:02:40+00:00
this brings us to a cultural divide, westerners would see this as a personal scar, as they consider the integrity of the publishing sphere at large to be held up by the integrity of individuals

i clicked on 4 of those papers, and the pattern i saw was middle-eastern, indian, and chinese names

these are cultures where they think this kind of behavior is actually acceptable, they would assume it's the fault of the journal for accepting the paper. they don't see the loss of reputation to be a personal scar because they instead attribute blame to the game.

some people would say it's racist to understand this, but in my opinion when i was working with people from these cultures there was just no other way to learn to cooperate with them than to understand them, it's an incredibly confusing experience to be working with them until you understand the various differences between your own culture and theirs
by msandford | 2025-12-08 00:03:01+00:00
I realize I didn't make the point clearly enough. This is nothing new. It's politics, always has been. The left labels people on the right they don't like with bad names. The right is absolutely going to do it back to the left. That's the game. I don't like it, but that's clearly how it goes.

Don't read what I'm saying as an endorsement of what the right is going to the left right now. Nor should you read it as an endorsement of what the left did to the right back then. They're both bad.
by andrew_lettuce | 2025-12-08 00:03:02+00:00
They could do this, but there's not enough targets of this type for the money invested in the sector. They've also proven to not have the advertised & applicable expertise to run companies any more efficiently than current management. Nostalgia had nothing to do with it unless that's one of the company's assets. I've been inside on three PE acquisitions, and 5 sales by PE to new funds. The playbook was the same for them all: predictable, decent cash flow, cut expenses, grow enterprise sales, sell on before long term cracks from lack of strategic investment showed. If anything they accelerated the decline of healthy going concerns, but at each sale the insiders did great.
by wpietri | 2025-12-08 00:03:05+00:00
Right? For those who want to check, the four values: https://agilemanifesto.org/

And the 12 principles: https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

But to my dismay, the Agile world quickly got colonized by certification schemes and consultants targeting large companies, so it rapidly turned into something that a lot of the early people were very disappointed with. I wrote about the dynamic some years back: https://williampietri.com/writing/2011/agiles-second-chasm-a...
by kevinsync | 2025-12-08 00:03:41+00:00
I've been struggling with this throughout the entire LLM-generated-code arc we're currently living -- I agree that it is wack in theory to take existing code and adapt it to your use-case without proper accreditation, but I've also been writing code since Pulp Fiction was in theaters and a lot of it is taking existing code and adapting it to my use-case, sometimes without a fully-documented paper trail.

Not to mention the moral vagaries of "if you use a library, is the complete articulation of your thing actually 100% your code?"

Is there a difference between loading and using a function from ImageMagick, and a standalone copycat function that mimics a function from ImageMagick?

What if you need it transliterated from one language to another?

Is it really that different than those 1200 page books from the 90's that walk you through implementing a 3D engine from scratch (or whatever the topic might be)? If you make a game on top of that book's engine, is your game truly yours?

If you learn an algorithm in some university class and then just write it again later, is that code yours? What if your code is 1-for-1 a copy of the code you were taught?

It gets very murky very quick!

Obviously I would encourage proper citation, but I also recognize the reality of this stuff -- what if you're fully rewriting something you learned decades ago and don't know who to cite? What if you have some code snippet from a website long forgotten that you saved and used? What if you use a library that also uses a library that you're not aware of because you didn't bother to check, and you either cite the wrapper lib or cite nothing at all?

I don't have some grand theory or wise thoughts about this shit, and I enjoy the anthropological studies trying to ascertain provenance / assign moral authority to remarkable edge cases, but end of the day I also find it exhausting to litigate the use of a tool that exploited the fact that your code got hoovered up by a giant robot because it was public, and might get regurgitated elsewhere.

To me, this is the unfortunate and unfair story of Gregory Coleman [0] -- drummer for The Winstons, who recorded "Amen, Brother" in 1969 (which gave us the most-sampled drum break in the world, spawned multiple genres of music, and changed human history) -- the man never made a dime from it, never even knew, and died completely destitute, despite his monumental contribution to culture. It's hard to reconcile the unjustness of it all, yet not that hard to appreciate the countless positive things that came out of it.

I don't know. I guess at the end of the day, does the end justify the means? Feels pretty subjective!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break
by grouchy | 2025-12-08 00:03:49+00:00
Good question. When I think about how people actually discover features, it's usually:

1) clicking through menus 2) reading docs/watching tutorials 3) getting hands-on help from a coworker or support person

Some apps try to do progressive disclosure as you get better at using them, but that's really hard to scale. Works okay for simpler apps but breaks down as complexity grows.

With generative UI, I think you're basically building option 3 directly into the app.

Users learn to just ask the app how to do something or describe their problem, and it surfaces the right tools or configures things for them.

Still early days though. I think users will also have to adopt new behaviors to get the most out of generative apps.
by BHSPitMonkey | 2025-12-08 00:05:02+00:00
You don't just accept the review as-is, though; You prompt it to be a skeptic and find a handful of specific examples of claims that are worth extra attention from a qualified human.

Unfortunately, this probably results in lazy humans _only_ reading the automated flagged areas critically and neglecting everything else, but hey—at least it might keep a little more garbage out?
by chongli | 2025-12-08 00:05:18+00:00
Just like crows! People hate crows even though they play a valuable role in ecosystems.

I would argue that moribund businesses who maintain a competitive moat but are otherwise extremely unproductive and inefficient are the real blight on society. If PE firms can liquidate those businesses and open up the market while freeing up capital for more productive investment then I fully support them.

I would love to hear some counterexamples though. Productive and innovative businesses with really solid fundamentals (balance sheets) that were acquired and dismantled by PE.
by harrall | 2025-12-08 00:05:37+00:00
As I’ve gotten older, I find this to be untrue.

Estimating the unknown is itself a skill.

It’s like choosing to crash random parties everyday — at first, exceptionally novel but facing the unknown becomes itself mundane. Humans adapt. They build mental modals to approach the unknown and these mental modals are predictable.

I just don’t think most people get much practice.
by christophilus | 2025-12-08 00:05:48+00:00
In the pro-macro camp, if languages like JS had macros, the language could be kept much simpler, leaving things like pipeline operators, async / await, etc to developers.

In the anti-macro camp, they’re hard to write, reason about, and debug stack traces. They are also tempting to use when you shouldn’t, and I think a lot of software shops would run into trouble with them.

Regarding Clojure, I wouldn’t call Clojure a write-only language, but I did find that my Clojure code was more inscrutable than my code in other languages— roughly as inscrutable as my Haskell code. Something about it makes me want to code-golf my way into tiny little clever solutions.

Also, I’ve been burnt by various pitfalls of dynamically typed languages— upgrading dependencies in large dynamically typed projects, etc. I’ll take static types over macros any time.

Also, Clojure’s start up time was off-putting, and would probably be even more so today, coming from Bun and Go.

These days, most of my work is in TypeScript, and it’s just fine. Not perfect, but fine. I haven’t missed macros much.

All that said, I do like Clojure. I miss the baked in immutability, the ability to omit commas in arrays / lists / maps / etc, keywords, and the threading macros.

In summary, some of us have given it a shot, and ended up choosing a different path, and that’s ok.
by fracus | 2025-12-08 00:05:55+00:00
This quote in a comment after the article from a pseudo stake holder or relevant consultant was disturbing..

> I believe it is unfair to benefit - especially financially - from a community effort, then turn your back on said community. It is your right, you are correct in saying so, but it is also a bridge that you are burning and you must be aware of that.

Correct is correct. It isn't their fault the rules didn't explicitly state rights in perpetuity. Retaliation based on vibe logic is not only childish but also in this case, illegal.

This person suggested the request for prize money returned and and awards rescinded. And from the tone and logic, no doubt they are doing more behind the scenes.
by phyzome | 2025-12-08 00:06:12+00:00
Yup. My local Star Market was pretty bad about this, so I started paying close attention to prices on the shelf and at the register. Pretty soon I was taking home free items every shopping trip. (I also reported them to Inspectional Services when aisle scanners were broken or prices were particularly egregiously missing or wrong.)

Some of the cashiers had to have it explained to them with much pointing to the sign that hangs on every register; others knew the drill and called a manager over right away.

After about 6 months they started shaping up. Maybe the store manager got fed up, or maybe corporate stopped having them skimp on sticker hygiene.

From the article:

> In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”

...but in my experience, they're perfectly capable of doing the right thing, given appropriate incentive and enforcement. In particular I noticed that this really varies from store to store, even in the same chain.
by fabian2k | 2025-12-08 00:07:28+00:00
There are many different ways to use the Aeropress. I'd assume that the recipe the author is following simply asks for a 30 second steep time.

I personally found that the time actually doesn't matter that much, you control extraction by grind size, water temperature and agitation. It might be that if you grind too fine you can still reduce extraction by cutting the time short, but that seems rather inconvenient for this method.

I usually let it steep for 5 minutes, but the exact time doesn't change much. Shorter times aren't that desirable for me anyway as the coffee is still too hot then as I start with boiling water.
by joeevans1000 | 2025-12-08 00:08:16+00:00
I use both approaches. One thing is that Clojure code bases are comically hard for anyone to mentally parse if they didn't write it. At least the bulk of programmers... like you'll find on an actual team. Great to write, sure, but not useful in terms of onboarding new team members. Clojure programmers are typically great thinkers. And veterans. But if you are actually trying to build a company, then beware. Your handful of expensive brilliant programmers will build something that you can't bring people in to expand or maintain. Also watch out for the fact that the companies making the awesome tools that COULD be used by noobs often keep them closed source (Datomic and, I think here, Rama). They intend for you to hire them as consultants and pay licenses. Which is all fine... except the 2D languages have real open source libraries with huge adoption and ecosystems.
by no_wizard | 2025-12-08 00:09:08+00:00
If only it actually played out that way[0][1][2][3]

Whatever legal and theoretical role they play in the economy does not match the actual, real role they are playing: PE firms are by and large, economic vampires. They have a well documented history of sucking the life out of a sector at the expense of workers and consumers alike

[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/megan-greenwell-bad-company-priv...

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/10/slash-and-b...

[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/private-eq...

[3]: https://doctorow.medium.com/the-long-bloody-lineage-of-priva...
by mmooss | 2025-12-08 00:09:38+00:00
Those effective strategies were developed through the same method of research and development as OLPC. At one point, we didn't know about those benefits; should we have not experimented with those strategies?

The nature of research is that some things succeed/fail to different degrees than others, and some that have not sufficiently succeeded will in the future, or will inform other successes. If we already knew the answers, it wouldn't be research.
by wat10000 | 2025-12-08 00:09:41+00:00
You’re confusing clickbait articles with reality.

There have been over 1,200 F-35s built so far, with new ones being built at a rate of about 150 per year. For comparison, that’s nearly as many F-35s built per year as F-22s were built ever, and 1,200 is a large amount for a modern jet fighter. The extremely successful F-15 has seen about that many built since it first entered production over 50 years ago.

That doesn’t mean it must be good, but it’s a strong indicator. Especially since the US isn’t the only customer. Many other countries want it too. Some are shying away from it now, but only for political reasons because the US is no longer seen as a reliable supplier.

In terms of actual capabilities, it’s the best fighter jet out there save for the F-22, which was far more expensive and is no longer being made. It’s relatively cheap, comparable in cost to alternatives like the Gripen or Rafale while being much more capable.

There have been a lot of articles out there about how terrible it is. These fall into a few different categories:

* Reasonable critiques of its high development costs, overruns, and delays, baselessly extrapolated to “it’s bad.”

* Teething problems extrapolated to “it’s terrible” as if these things never get fixed.

* Analyses of outcomes from exercises that misunderstand the purpose and design of exercises. You might see that, say, an F-35 lost against an F-16 in some mock fights. But they’re not going to set up a lot of exercises where the F-35 and F-16 have a realistic engagement. The result of such an exercise would be that the F-16 gets shot out of the sky without ever knowing the F-35 was there. This is uninformative and a waste of time and money. So such a matchup will be done with restrictions that actually make it useful. This might end up in a dogfight, where the F-16 is legitimately superior. This then gets reported as “F-35 worse than F-16,” ignoring the fact that a real situation would have the F-35 victorious long before a dogfight could occur.

* Completely legitimate arguments that fighter jets are last century’s weapons, that drones and missiles are the future, and the F-35 is like the most advanced battleship in 1941: useful, powerful, but rapidly becoming obsolete. This may be true, but if it is, it only means the F-35 wasn’t the right thing to focus on, not that it’s a failure. The aircraft carrier was the decisive weapon of the Pacific war but that didn’t make the Iowa class battleships a failure.
by buchwald | 2025-12-08 00:09:49+00:00
Claude is surprisingly bad at visual understanding. I did a similar thing to OP where I wanted Claude to visually iterate on Storybook components. I found outsourcing the visual check to Playwright in vision mode (as opposed to using the default a11y tree) and Codex for understanding worked best. But overall the idea of a visual inspection loop went nowhere. I blogged about it here: https://solbach.xyz/ai-agent-accessibility-browser-use/
by grouchy | 2025-12-08 00:09:52+00:00
Forcing chat for every action when direct UI interactions worked fine is definitely not what I'm advocating.

I'm arguing for isn't chat-only interfaces. It's giving users both options: use the UI directly for quick changes you already know how to make, chat when you don't know where to find something or you have a complex multi-step task.

Different users will prefer different methods for different tasks. The goal is software that works how the user wants it to work, not just optimized for one interaction style.

Remote LLMs is a real constraint right now.

I'm hoping for a class of generative apps that can be run entirely locally. I believe it will exist, just not right now.
by joe117 | 2025-12-08 00:10:49+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a Python PoC to turn raw log streams into structured Root Cause and Actionable Steps using an LLM, drastically reducing MTTR.

I'm an independent developer and before building the full system, I want to validate the market need.

- Pain point validation: How much time does manual log analysis cost your team? - Next step: Which platform should I integrate with first (Datadog/Splunk)?

If you’re in SRE/DevOps, I’d really appreciate your feedback via this 60-second survey: https://forms.gle/k7Hj6F7bYvgqrqZc6

All technical feedback on the PoC is welcome!
by dev1ycan | 2025-12-08 00:11:18+00:00
What did anyone expect? really, many children especially in the Andes suffer from lead intoxication from mining, fruits and vegetables for export are premium quality while the ones for local consumption are bathed in pesticides and other chemicals, kids in the amazon suffer from parasites and other illnesses, tons of regions have malnutrition... etc.

Then there's the fact that Peru is massive (compared to Europe) and most of it lacks internet connectivity, only just recently Starlink started giving newer phones SMS capabilities outside of coverage, but that's as far as it'll go and only for modern expensive phones.

Those kids are not going to open a laptop and have a good time attempting to learn something (if they can even reach the internet), I myself have ADHD and it took me so long to even search and discover khan academy (let's not even begin with how much worse sites like Khan Academy are when you don't have the primary instructor, giving said lessons), add in low energy/inability to concentrate or want to do academic work with memory issues due to intoxication and or malnutrition and... yeah, good luck with that.

There is high amount of talent in Peru, you can tell because there's government programs to give gifted students from public schools free scholarship to private universities and they all end up top of their class, the hardest university to enter into in Peru happens to be a public university too (national university of engineering), it's exam is pretty fucking hard for someone who just graduated high school and even then the vast majority of students who enter come from poor backgrounds.
by bhawks | 2025-12-08 00:11:20+00:00
| Android being Google's .NET, after Google being sued by coming up with Google's J++, Android Java dialect.

The Oracle v Google was specifically over copyright infringement concerning the Java APIs used in Android's original implementation (Dalvik/ART), not about creating a "J++" dialect.

Android never ran a JVM on mobile because it cannot be optimized for resource constrained devices a solution like DalvikVM was necessary. If you want to level critiques about creating fragmented dialects of Java I would recommend starting with J2ME. The only nice thing I can say about J2ME is at least it died.

The Android ecosystem was far too mature for Fuchsia/Dart to be successful without a very compelling interop story that was never produced.

As a technology Kotlin met Android's platform and community needs. Advocacy and politicking played a minimal, if any, role.
by scrame | 2025-12-08 00:11:21+00:00
people still use make for things. how many stand-alone utilities require npm?

i don't know graalvm, but I've used too much ant, buldr, gradle and maven. I'm not really convinced Graal VM would make anything better just because you are more familiar with it.

The author even says to just use what you like because that part doesn't matter.