MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ehnto | 2025-12-09 08:39:39+00:00
That's what I see when companies cut juniors as well. AI cannot replace a junior because a junior has full and complete agency, accountability, and purpose. They retain learning and become a sharper bespoke resource for the business as time goes on. The PM tells them what to do and I give them guidance.

If you take away the juniors, you are now asking your seniors to do that work instead which is more expensive and wasteful. The PM cannot tell the AI junior what to do for they don't know how. Then you say, hey we also want you to babysit the LLM to increase productivity, well I can't leave a task with the LLM and come back to it tomorrow. Now I am wasting two types of time.
by jsmailes | 2025-12-09 08:40:10+00:00
I love the aesthetic of cassette tapes and players -- there's just something really satisfying about the size and tactility of putting in a cassette. Beyond that, it feels better to choose to listen to a particular album rather than putting endless playlists on shuffle.

There's definitely space for tape to persist as a medium, even if quality and longevity is lower -- not everything has to be audiophile level, and the listening experience is far more than just sound quality.
by russdill | 2025-12-09 08:40:21+00:00
For the "canonical" physics explanation, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_hypothesis

You can happily run physics backwards and forwards, and there's no difference. But assuming that entropy was very low in the distant past is very useful and lets us talk about fascinating things, like what happened last tuesday (or 12 billion years ago)

If you just know the current state of the a system, there isn't really any difference between running time backwards and forwards. Of course, if you know exactly the state of every particle, field, etc, and the past hypothesis is true, running time one way will lead to lowering entropy, and the other way will lead to raising entropy. But if you're a mere mortal and just know the macrostate, either way you run time, the entropy of the system will increase.
by pcrh | 2025-12-09 08:41:38+00:00
Eyeballing the chart in the OP and the French data shows them to have a comparable pattern. While OP's data is horses per person, and the French is total number of horses, both show a decline in horse numbers starting about 10 years after widespread adoption of the motor vehicle and falling to 50% of their peak in the mid- to late-1950's, with the French data being perhaps a bit over 5 years delayed compared to the US data. That is, it took 25 to 30 years after mass production of automobiles was started by Ford for 50% of "horsepower" to be replaced.

The point isn't to claim that motor vehicles did not replace horses, they obviously did, but that the replacement was less "sudden" than claimed.
by 20k | 2025-12-09 08:41:49+00:00
Pictograms let you parse a lot of information at a glance, because you can pattern match a group of differing symbols much faster than you can a block of text which all looks uniform. It lets you skip reading all the text when you're familiar with a dialogue, and you can short circuit what you need to click on without having to read

That's the reason why pictographic additions are so useful. Its the reason why we distinguish different kinds of UI elements at all, because colour and graphics are incredibly powerful shortcuts for parsing information
by SPICLK2 | 2025-12-09 08:43:41+00:00
>I'm not asking for anything, I was merely pointing out the advantages of anonymity. You don't need to consider a decision the best one to see its upsides.

You haven't given any yet. You've pointed out that anonymous messages in some circumstances can be beneficial (which they can), but haven't given any advantages for a widespread, anonymous communications network with open access.

>Privacy in mail and telephone was a commonly supported right

It really wasn't. I don't know of any time or place where mail and wire tapping wasn't legal and/or practiced.
by myrmidon | 2025-12-09 08:43:54+00:00
The big problem I see with AI is that it undermines redistribution mechanisms in a novel and dangerous way; despite industrialization, human labor was always needed to actually do anything with capital, and even people born in poverty could do work to get their share of the growing economical pie.

AI kinda breaks this; there is a real risk that human labor is going to become almost worthless this century, and this might mean that the common man ends up worse off despite nominal economic growth.
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2025-12-09 08:43:59+00:00
I don’t want to put anybody down, but I don’t get this. What does this do that sai Apple’s Notes doesn’t? Or million other applications? And why on Earth is this hosted on web, this is something you clearly do not want to leave you device?

Also, I use pen and a notebook. It is better than anything electronic, since we are monkeys and using our eye-hand coordination has proven effects on concentration and learning.
by thom | 2025-12-09 08:44:01+00:00
All of this should be familiar to the average programmer. The Creator (I call him Colin), rushed for time and bereft of more elegant ideas, has widely deployed lazy loading as a solution to the finite processing power of the universe. Almost all of physics (the speed of light, the expansion of space, quantum entanglement) is an answer to the question of how the universe (and indeed Colin himself) can avoid doing too much work.
by 47282847 | 2025-12-09 08:44:09+00:00
> I couldn't care less

You do care, otherwise you would not even have thought about it twice, let alone comment.

The most striking argument against this line of reasoning is that there is no possibility for you not to act politically. By ignoring the issue of systemic discrimination (“don’t care don’t personally discriminate”) you actively contribute to and participate in the systemic discrimination.

It’s a choice, and I find it important to leave you the choice, as I do not believe forcing anything on you will actually make you see, but it is true nonetheless that you cannot escape your responsibility: The ability to respond. “You can not not communicate.” Not responding and deciding to remain ignorant about it is also a response, and a highly privileged one.

It would be easy to at least passively support anyone’s attempt at trying to reduce systemic discrimination, but speaking out against it turns it even more into a political act supporting discrimination than doing nothing and by that delegating it to others.
by Hetzner_OL | 2025-12-09 08:44:13+00:00
Hi again, Yes, it is fine to resell our services in the form of a PaaS. However, you as the customer are ultimately responsible for everything that happens on the server. If you use our infrastructure to run your own business, you need to be responsible for what your business does. That entails monitoring your systems, vetting your customers, securing your server, and of course, communicating quickly and openly with our Abuse Team if you receive a report. We also have managed services (web hosting, managed vServers, managed servers) if you feel less confident with the sysadmin side of things and need more technical support. --Katie
by sznio | 2025-12-09 08:47:16+00:00
> One of the things I'm seeing in some of these examples is icons with the same silhouette doing nothing or less than nothing for scannability.

I have this issue with Google apps on my phone. Once they decided that all icons should have the same four blurred colors with low contrast, you just can't tell which app you're looking at without the text label below. And I'm not visually impaired.
by thetruthinside | 2025-12-09 08:47:33+00:00
Hey, it looks cool and I will try it. It looks like you are also using Base44. Nice consistent Design, do you have some tips?

Question: Is there a function to give login data for testing applications?

Edit: Looks like Base44 is not able to put the meta tag into the website, so verification is not possible this way :D (just info)
by joegibbs | 2025-12-09 08:48:11+00:00
I never ever listen to any of the stuff the people there tell you, and I never listen to any of the advice that shows up on the ads UI (suggested bid, things you can supposedly do to increase performance). I think it's all a bit of a scam to get you to pay more. What does work, I think, is to change up your targeting to get the right audience as precisely as possible, and to make the ad content work as well as possible with that audience.
by nusl | 2025-12-09 08:48:12+00:00
I don't feel that this is clutter. It's actually helpful to quickly locate the spot you're looking for, or understand the purpose of something better without having to know exactly what it does. Listing text with separators and nothing else makes the experience worse unless it's already obvious where's-what.

In terms of accessibility, too, icons are a win. Colors on top of this also help with that.
by Saline9515 | 2025-12-09 08:48:51+00:00
> collateral damage

What is the point where "collateral damage" and "killing civilians" aren't different? We saw well in Gaza how the Israeli government didn't care at all about civilians and just razed entire cities.

It's not "just this time": Israelis have been involved in terrorist killings against civilians since even before the existence of Israel, and continued the atrocities against civilians after[1], with the goal to displace them.

> "Most Israelis want to live in peace"

Yet support colonization and elect far-right governments which openly defend an imperialistic "Great Israel" agenda.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cast_Thy_Bread [2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/netanyahu-says-...
by rcxdude | 2025-12-09 08:49:20+00:00
Yeah, because arguably the main advantage of Ocado's warehouse is that it's extremely dense: you can pack a lot of storage in a very small area and still access it reasonably efficiently. But this only matters if space is at a premium, like near towns and cities (and for low-margin deliveries, you want your drivers to not have to go very far to your customers).
by 9rx | 2025-12-09 08:49:26+00:00
All the money in the world would not be sufficient to cover the cost of seeing human developers duplicate Salesforce on any reasonable time scale. There are simply not enough developers in existence to see that happen, driving the cost towards infinity.

The idea here, however, is that machine developers are changing the calculus. If you need more machine developers it takes, what, a few days to produce the necessary hardware? Instead of 20+ years to produce the legacy human hardware. Meaning, for all intents and purposes, there is no observable limit to how much software machine can create, driving the cost towards zero.

Yeah, sure, the tech still isn't anywhere near capable enough to reproduce something like Salesforce in its entirety. But it is claimed that it is already there for the most trivial of services. Not all SaaS services are Salesforce-like behemoths. Think something more like patio11's bingo card creator. It is conceivable, however, that technology advancement will continue such that someday even Salesforce becomes equally trivial to reproduce.

Maintenance is not a meaningful cost unless you also want to continually have the software do more and more. That could tip the favour towards SaaS — but only if the SaaS service is in alignment with the same future you wish for. If you have to start paying them for bespoke modifications... Have fun with that. You'll be wishing you were paying for maintenance of your own product instead. Especially when said machines drive the cost of that maintenance to near-zero all the same.
by georgefrowny | 2025-12-09 08:50:06+00:00
> If anyone has any recommendations I'd love to hear them

For kids: Just William (read by Martin Jarvis) and PG Wodehouse Wooster books (don't recall who read that).

Early Eddie Izzard shows were also memorably good as audio. Very quotable.

There's a gigantic, not always unofficial, archive of Just a Minute online, which is excellent car journey material. This is the first 5 series, but there's 80-plus series of it in total https://archive.org/details/Just-A-Minute
by conductr | 2025-12-09 08:50:21+00:00
The funny thing is a lot of that was never really necessary per se. Tons of stories about great projects coming out of tiny teams. They’re not likely geniuses, they just had focus and clarity and a drive to GSD without excessive unproductive activity. I’ve long been a proponent of offshore developers for cost savings. You have to manage the process and people differently, but the output per dollar (pre AI) was phenomenal and when managing them I could put my brand of low touch management in place. Usually consisting of one weekly 1 hour meeting for everyone, then emphasizing nobody spins their wheels ever for more than an hour during the week without asking for help, then just making sure everyone was crystal clear on what we were working on and the priorities. I’ve never been a fan of sprints or really any unit of time block as a milestone because I don’t think it incentivizes people to finish early. I’m also not a perfectionist. If it’s spaghetti code and it works, great, we can clean it up on the next pass (within reason of course, but spirit is build, test, operationalize, then if it’s useful and has some staying power then refactor later. For all this, hiring cheap labor overseas has always made much more sense than hiring locally (in US) based on cost but also based one working style/culture. Somehow as labor rates shot up here in last couple of decades, people found excuses not to offshore. Some of it valid if you can’t manage the project correctly as it is different, but for me the solution has been to adapt my management style versus crying about it being difficult and hiring locally to be lazy. It always struck me as odd that startups and investors hadn’t leveraged the labor rate arbitrage opportunity that exists.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-12-09 08:50:40+00:00
I have a hard time following this line of reasoning. I don't think GP's point is to "ignore systemic discrimination". Rather, it is to ignore those things on which people are discriminated. How can you discriminate against, say, race, if you don't pay attention to the person's race?

Specifically, for tech, if you happen upon a code written by someone called "didgetmaster" on github, and the author makes no comment about who they are as a person, how does this contribute to discrimination? Isn't this the whole point of anonymous resumes and such to fight discrimination against minorities for employment?
by skrebbel | 2025-12-09 08:50:46+00:00
It wasn’t renamed. If it was renamed they’d have deprecated --cached and introduced a new flag with a proper name.

Also why does “git restore --staged” exist if the term “staging area” isn’t from Git? And why does “git add -i” have the words “staged” and “unstaged” all over the output?

The answer to all these questions is that Git is made by people who care very deeply about data structures and very little about users. Git is needlessly difficult and this is just one of the many places where it shows.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d much rather use a VCS with good data structures than one with good naming. Git is popular for a reason. But the bad CLI design is just such a waste because it makes Git needlessly hard to learn to the benefit of absolutely nothing. It’s not a tradeoff. It’s just shitty.
by eru | 2025-12-09 08:51:02+00:00
> You're saying the third option is.. people just like working 8 hours while this guy works 1?

Nope, I don't say that at all.

I am saying that certain accommodations might feel like 10x to the person making them, but that doesn't mean they are portable.

Another personal example: I can claim with a straight face that using a standing desk and a Dvorak keyboard make me 10x more productive than otherwise. But that doesn't necessarily mean that other people will benefit from copying me, even if I'm happy to explain to anyone how to buy a standing desk from Ikea (or how to work company procurement to get one, in case you are working not-from-home).

In any case, the original commenter replied with a better explanation than our speculations here.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-12-09 08:51:29+00:00
There are instructions at the top of the link. You need to use "adb" from the command-line on a computer, but it won't wipe any of your data, so it shouldn't cause any data loss. If you don't want to use "adb", you might be able to use [0], but I haven't tested it myself.

[0]: https://flash.android.com/welcome
by chrismorgan | 2025-12-09 08:51:41+00:00
> CSS [is] not error-tolerant. A syntax error in a CSS rule causes it to be ignored.

That is error-tolerant, in basically the same way HTML is.

> An unhandled JavaScript exception is a hard stop.

A more appropriate example here is that a JS syntax error stops the entire script from running. That’s the XML parser approach.
by perihelions | 2025-12-09 08:52:13+00:00
Those pink granite cubes make that H&H look like it's built in Minecraft.

The same source has an article about the pink granite quarry involved in a lot of NYC buildings,

https://www.untappedcities.com/stony-creek-quarry-and-the-gr... ("Stony Creek Quarry and the Granite that Built New York")
by Smaug123 | 2025-12-09 08:52:23+00:00
On the layout side rather than the "what spaces are available" side, I really recommend https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/tex/1981-knuth.pdf , the paper in which the Knuth-Plass algorithm for paragraph layout is defined. (The Knuth-Plass algorithm decides how wide spaces should be on each line and which choices of hyphenation out of some predefined set should be used to lay out a paragraph.) It's super readable and generally quite joyful. Knuth describes TeX as a "labor of love", and it shines through that paper.
by anonzzzies | 2025-12-09 08:53:26+00:00
My gov is moving 100% of documents, forms, official stuff to web based without browser plugins. Of course unfortunately if you want to download/print (...) it will be pdf, but outside that, all filling in, editing, reading etc of all citizen facing materials must be possible with a modern web browser. If PDF is only the export for the final doc, I am ok with it; I can fill ut with whatever browser on whatever device. This should be the mandatory basics imho.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-12-09 08:53:33+00:00
Classic Mac OS window headers had striped or dot patterns that were kind of similar to rugged parts of various physical tool handles. So they were both decorative in a way and informational: this is a part you can hold and drag around. A typical interface will have a lot of such parts that are both functional and decorative, so it will feel just right.

Purely decorative parts are also possible (and even desirable), but they should be personal. A set of colors chosen by the user, a background texture, a picture that the user keeps on the desktop and so on.
by MaxikCZ | 2025-12-09 08:53:33+00:00
The fact that at speed of light time stops is just so bonkers to me.

A photon is, from its point of reference, at the point of creation and at the point of destination at the same "time". Its literally seeing both parts of the universe at the same time, and since its traveled some distance over that time it cannot perceive, its essentially connecting 2 points in spacetime.

If I understand it correctly, every photon exists, from its point of view, for only infinitely small amount of time (similar to how virtual particles do exist from our point of reference), but for us its so easy to "play" with the photon along its path, giving us plenty of time to even decide what we want to do with it after it has already been created.

Its just so bonkers that time can be perceived such differently depending on frame of reference.
by cellularmitosis | 2025-12-09 08:54:10+00:00
> but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette

It is unfortunate that cassettes are the lowest fidelity consumer medium (of modern times). But there is some room to optimize within that space. If you are curious:

The cassettes available today are Type I, Type II ("high bias") and Type IV ("metal"), each being higher fidelity than the last, but not all portable players supported these types of tape.

Dolby B/C noise reduction could improve the dynamic range of tapes a bit, but again not all portable players supported this.

The ultimate was "dbx", which dramatically improved noise reduction and dynamic range ("tape hiss" was essentially inaudible), but now you're in the territory of needing dedicated rack-mount equipment to record and play your tapes.

My dad was a bit of an audio buff, so I got to experience these things as a kid.

Edit: according to gemini AI:

* Type I had a dynamic range of about 50bB (roughly 8 bits)

* High quality tape with Dolby B, C and dbx yielded roughly 65, 75, and 85dB SNR (about 11, 12.5, and 14 bits)

So you could get pretty close to CD quality, but not quite.
by dbuxton | 2025-12-09 08:57:43+00:00
One thing I find interesting about discussions of typography in Cyrillic is how poor the overall readability of text is in most fonts compared to Latin because of the relative scarcity of risers and descenders (e.g. pqlt etc)

One of my tutors at university claimed that she was able to read 9th century manuscript Cyrillic faster than modern printed books because the orthography was more varied and easier to scan/speed-read.

(That wasn't something I found to be true)
by jakewins | 2025-12-09 08:58:01+00:00
I’m deeply sceptical. Every time a major announcement comes out saying so-and-so model is now a triple Ph.D programming triathlon winner, I try using it. Every time it’s the same - super fast code generation, until suddenly staggering hallucinations.

If anything the quality has gotten worse, because the models are now so good at lying when they don’t know it’s really hard to review. Is this a safe way to make that syscall? Is the lock structuring here really deadlock safe? The model will tell you with complete confidence its code is perfect, and it’ll either be right or lying, it never says “I don’t know”.

Every time OpenAI or Anthropic or Google announce a “stratospheric leap forward” and I go back and try and find it’s the same, I become more convinced that the lying is structural somehow, that the architecture they have is not fundamentally able to capture “I need to solve the problem I’m being asked to solve” instead of “I need to produce tokens that are likely to come after these other tokens”.

The tool is incredible, I use it constantly, but only for things where truth is irrelevant, or where I can easily verify the answer. So far I have found programming, other than trivial tasks and greenfield ”write some code that does x”, much faster without LLMs
by josters | 2025-12-09 08:58:16+00:00
This seems to be the article's author's own language Bauble[1], "a toy for composing signed distance functions in a high-level language (Janet), compiling them to GLSL, and rendering them via WebGL"[2].

[1]: https://ianthehenry.com/posts/bauble/building-bauble/ [2]: https://github.com/ianthehenry/bauble
by oracle2025 | 2025-12-09 08:58:36+00:00
I think it is important to stress that both, color _and_ shape should be visible distinctive, and as you say it is important that the color palette is chosen in a way that even if the color does not stand out for a the color-blind person, the contrast stays visible.

Making everything monochrome is surly not more accessible, because there sure are people who find it easier to distinguish by color than shape.
by thetruthinside | 2025-12-09 08:59:29+00:00
You’re absolutely right that there is a big gap between what most SAFe implementations look like and the Agile Manifesto.

My point is not “SAFe = Agile”, it is more: if an organization chooses SAFe, the usual failure mode is not the picture on the big diagram, but leadership behavior.

The manifesto is very clear and also essential part of the framework.