MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tlhunter | 2025-12-03 05:35:48+00:00
Great ideas!

You convinced me tonight to implement a feature: pasting content from Google Docs now gets converted into markdown. For example bold becomes *bold*, heading 1 becomes # Heading. It'll even find monospace fonts in a paragraph and add `code` ticks or monospace on dedicated lines and convert into ```code blocks```.

Faster automation would of course be nicer, e.g. providing a Google Drive directory and slurping all of the docs up, but that'll take a bit more time.
by Zambyte | 2025-12-03 05:37:11+00:00
> Performing IO, in my opinion, is categorically not an implementation detail. In the same way that heap allocation is not an implementation detail in idiomatic Zig.

It seems you two are coming at this from opposing perspectives. From the perspective of a library author, Zig makes IO an implementation detail, which is great for portability. It lets library authors freely use IO abstractions if it makes sense for their problem.

This lets you, as an application developer, decide the concrete details of how such libraries behave. Don't want your math library to cache to disk? Give it an allocating writer[0] instead of a file writer. Want to use an library with async functionality on an embedded system without multi threading? Pass it a single threaded io[1] runtime instance, implement the io interface yourself as is best for your target.

Of course someone has to decide implementation details. The choices made in designing Zig tend to focus on giving library authors useful abstractions thst give application authors meaningful control over important decisions for their application.

[0] https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/std/#std.Io.Writer....

[1] https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/std/#std.Io.Threade...
by JimDabell | 2025-12-03 05:37:34+00:00
It says that ignoring the human carbon use, just their computer use during the task far outweighs the AI energy use. So your response “are you planning on killing the human?” makes zero sense in that context. “They are wrong about the energy use of a laptop” makes more sense , but you didn’t say that until I pushed you to actually read it.

75W is not outlandish when you consider the artist will almost certainly have a large monitor plugged in, external accessories, some will be using a desktop, etc. And even taking the smaller figure, AI use is still smaller.

The human carbon use is still relevant. If they were not doing the writing, they could accomplish some other valuable tasks. Because they are spending it on things the AI can do, somebody else will have to do those things or they won’t get done at all.
by vel0city | 2025-12-03 05:37:41+00:00
You might start with actually looking at the features being implemented and the other tools the company publishes instead of ignoring them and brushing them off. You wrote off the idea of installing PowerToys, but they're literally published and fully endorsed by Microsoft. They'd cover a lot of those gaps you're complaining about and have existed for a long while.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

Instead of being so combative and proclaiming these things can't possibly exist, maybe you should look at what is actually there. And I admit, maybe I shouldn't be so rough, I'm sorry for how negative I've been in this exchange. I get frustrated when people say obviously false things. I'll try and work on that. I hope you work on growing as well.
by tlhunter | 2025-12-03 05:38:36+00:00
Each proposal has a revision history that can be viewed so that all comments have context at that point in time:

https://rfchub.app/rfchub/rfc1-org-batch-markdown-exporter-j...

Unfortunately it means there's no fancy CRDT system: no multiplayer edits for example.

I haven't looked into webhooks yet or browser notifications. That's all stuff that I would build when left to my own devices but I want more user feedback on basic functionality.
by nailer | 2025-12-03 05:39:12+00:00
> In almost no cases has someone supported a terrorist group or advocated for violence.

"We support liberations by any means necessary including armed violence"... "Violence is the only path forward" - Mahmoud Khalil

Do you live in the united states? People commonly state "all resistance is justified", demand a third intifada, demand Jewish people be driven out of their own homeland, or feature flags/flyers for Hamas/Hezbollah/PIJ at pro Palestinian marches.
by nickm12 | 2025-12-03 05:44:19+00:00
This is yet another very good critique, but it's long past time that we stop paying attention to Uncle Bob.

Not only are his ideas about how to write software patently bad, but he is willfully obtuse when asked to provide nuance or discuss trade-offs. John Ousterhout's dialog with him, published as "A Philosophy of Software Design vs Clean Code" gave him every opportunity to think critically about his own suggestions and he just doubles down.

https://github.com/johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code/blob/m...

He's just trolling us at this point.
by hxtk | 2025-12-03 05:44:22+00:00
Blameless postmortem culture recognizes human error as an inevitability and asks those with influence to design systems that maintain safety in the face of human error. In the software engineering world, this typically means automation, because while automation can and usually does have faults, it doesn't suffer from human error.

Now we've invented automation that commits human-like error at scale.

I wouldn't call myself anti-AI, but it does seem fairly obvious to me that directly automating things with AI will probably always have substantial risk and you have much more assurance, if you involve AI in the process, using it to develop a traditional automation. As a low-stakes personal example, instead of using AI to generate boilerplate code, I'll often try to use AI to generate a traditional code generator to convert whatever DSL specification into the chosen development language source code, rather than asking AI to generate the development language source code directly from the DSL.
by calebio | 2025-12-03 05:45:40+00:00
Well respectfully your recollection is missing lots of references by people that were "knowledgeable in cryptography".

You can easily find these references in the literature, often comparing link encryption with end-to-end encryption. Some of the earliest papers outlining the plans for SSL in the 90s (Analysis of the SSL 3.0 Protocol) are based on this exact foundation from the 80s (End-To-End Arguments in System Design).

Hell, you can even go back to 1978 and see MITRE discussing this exact thing in "Limitations of end-to-end encryption in secure computer networks".
by presentation | 2025-12-03 05:46:00+00:00
Wondering where you think the extreme inefficiency is exactly - apparently Elon Musk fell on his face when he tried to root them out as part of DOGE.

If anything it seems inefficiencies tend to occur when people interfere with the government funding things, like CA high speed rail having their federal funding appear and disappear erratically depending on who's in power, throwing off all the construction plans.
by echelon | 2025-12-03 05:47:03+00:00
Google didn't raise at a $500 billion valuation.

The 25x revenue multiple wouldn't be so bad if they weren't burning so much cash on R&D and if they actually had a moat.

Google caught up quick, the Chinese are spinning up open source models left and right, and the world really just isn't ready to adopt AI everywhere yet. We're in the premature/awkward phase.

They're just too early, and the AGI is just too far away.

Doesn't look like their "advertising" idea to increase revenue is working, either.
by chanux | 2025-12-03 05:47:27+00:00
> When tech companies started giving engineers an alternative career path to management by letting them climb the ranks as individual contributors instead of having to be managers, I thought that was definitely the right move. Still do. However, the unintended consequence of that is that we’ve spent a decade normalizing senior engineers opting out of developing the next generation.

Interesting observation. I have personally tried to avoid getting into people manager positions (as I believed I'd be Peter Principled) but always took it as my duty to share knowledge and mentor the curious and the hungry (and even the ones that are not so). It's actually a very rewarding feeling when I hear good things about people who learned with me.
by wyclif | 2025-12-03 05:47:55+00:00
[Disclaimer: I'm a Gen Xer. Insert meme of Grandpa Simpson shouting at clouds.]

I think this is undoubtedly true from my observations. Recently, I got together over drinks with a group of young devs (most around half my age) from another country I was visiting.

One of the things I said, very casually, was, "Hey, don't sleep on good programming books. O'Reilly. Wiley. Addison-Wesley. MIT Press. No Starch Press. Stuff like that."

Well, you should've seen the looks on their faces. It was obvious that advice went over very poorly. "Ha, read books? That's hard. We'd rather just watch a YouTube video about how to make a JS dropdown menu."

So yeah, I get that "showing my age" remark. Used to be the discipline in this industry is that you shouldn't ask a question of a senior before you'd read the documentation. If you had read the documentation, man pages, googled, etc., and still couldn't come up with an answer, then you could legitimately ask for a senior mentor's time. Otherwise, the answer from the greybeards would have been "Get out of my face, kid. Go RTFM."

That system that used to exist is totally broken now. When reading and understanding technical documentation is viewed as "old school", then you know we have a big problem.
by calebio | 2025-12-03 05:48:41+00:00
> No, before that it was simply not a term, except in some obscure radio protocol

> no one really used the E2EE term before it got the current meaning

It most certainly was a term and no it wasn't simply limited to "some obscure radio protocol".

1994: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/363791

1984: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/357401.357402

1978: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA059221.pdf

> Some homemade encryption added on top of TLS is very unlikely to increase the security of the system

"Some homemade encryption" is not what I was suggesting at all. E.g. encrypted-at-the-source (client side) AWS files are still sent over TLS as an encrypted blob within an encrypted blob but remain encrypted past the TLS boundary.
by lukeschlather | 2025-12-03 05:49:33+00:00
> If we use your definition, then Gmail, Facebook, and Amazon are all "End-to-End Encrypted" because the traffic is encrypted between my client and their server.

That may or may not be the case. TLS is always terminated at a load balancer that uses TLS but it's still common to use HTTP within datacenters. So it may not be E2EE and it's a meaningful security feature.
by dcchambers | 2025-12-03 05:50:12+00:00
When companies stop hiring juniors it completely kills the employee leveling process. It all but stops the creation of skilled senior employees.

You say you can just hire from outside the company - but what do you do when there is no one left to hire because the talent pool is completely drained?

Abandoning the junior employee will slowly drain that talent pool until there are no seniors available to hire, the "just hire from outside the company" plan doesn't work any more.
by ivandalmet | 2025-12-03 05:51:00+00:00
We use Tanstack Query for data fetching with query and mutation options auto generated by oRPC.

For auth setup, Better Auth is so good that is handling everything from server to client. Better Auth is just so amazing that is the first time that using auth is enjoyable! For protected routes with just check Auth and roles with better Auth in an orpc middleware.
by ryandobby | 2025-12-03 05:51:15+00:00
Location: Norman, OK (Open to Remote)

Remote: Yes (preferred)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: PHP, Laravel, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Vue.js, Livewire, Next.js, Node, Hapi.js, Bash, Python

Résumé / Website: https://ryandobyns.com | GitHub: https://github.com/ryandobby | LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/ryandobby

Email: ryandobyns@gmail.com

Experience: 7+ years

I'm a full-stack engineer with 7+ years of experience building and scaling production systems — from early-stage startups to global enterprises with 150,000+ employees.

Most recently, I was a Senior Software Engineer at Flywheel Digital, where I helped lead backend development on Commerce Cloud, integrating data pipelines and services for Fortune 500 partners like Amazon, Walmart, and Target. Prior to that, I helped grow a seed-stage startup (WellCaddie) to a $15M+ valuation and run a consultancy focused on bespoke web applications.

I specialize in Laravel and TypeScript, with deep experience in the full product lifecycle, large-scale refactors, and reducing technical debt in complex legacy codebases.

Looking for: Full-time remote roles focused on Laravel, TypeScript, or other full-stack engineering. Particularly interested in teams modernizing legacy systems or scaling mature products.
by niteshnagpal | 2025-12-03 05:51:45+00:00
You’re right - it’s not a testing tool, and I should’ve framed it more precisely.

I’m not trying to replace unit tests or integration tests.

The problem I’m solving is much simpler and happens during development, not during automated testing.

When working on big web apps, I often spend 30-90 minutes just navigating or recreating state (auth → forms → data → steps) to reach the screen I’m actually working on.

The idea is a browser extension that lets you:

- capture the current app state (URL + local/session storage + cookies + form inputs) - and instantly restore it later - so you can jump straight back to that deep state during local development

It’s basically a workflow accelerator for manual dev, not a test framework.

Does that distinction make more sense?
by IgorPartola | 2025-12-03 05:52:14+00:00
I have no horse in this race.

I don’t think this is really a fair assessment. IBM is in fact a huge company today and it is possible that they are because they took the conservative approach in some of their acquisition strategy.

It is a bit like watching someone play poker and fold and then it turns out they had the high hand after all. In hindsight you could of course know that the risk would have been worth it but at the moment perhaps it did not seem like it given the money the first player would be risking.
by sabey | 2025-12-03 05:53:47+00:00
Location: Vancouver, Canada

Remote: Yes

Contract: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Golang (11+ years), SQL, FoundationDB, gRPC, REST, RabbitMQ, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Serverless, Networking, CI/CD pipelines

Résumé/CV: Available upon request

Github: https://github.com/sabey

Email: jackson.sabey@gmail.com
by Atheros | 2025-12-03 05:54:33+00:00
I really don't think any of that is true; it's just popular rhetoric.

For example: "Buybacks concentrate cash in the hands of existing shareholders" is obviously false: the shareholders (via the company) did have cash and now they don't. The cash is distributed to the market. The quoted statement is precisely backwards.

> A big chunk of that cash just gets recycled

That doesn't mean anything.

> more financial claims (index funds, private equity, secondary shares, etc)

And do they sit on it? No, of course not. They invest it in things. Real actual things.

> buybacks

Already discussed

> M&A

If they use cash to pay for a merger, then the former owners now have cash that they will reinvest.

> balance sheets

Money on a balance sheet is actually money sitting in J.P. Morgan or whoever. Via fractional reserve lending, J.P. Morgan lends that money to businesses and home owners and real actual houses (or whatever) get built with it.

The counterfactual for AI spending really is other real actual hard spending.
by kingstnap | 2025-12-03 05:55:18+00:00
I watched Dex Horthys recent talk on YouTube [0] and something he said that might be partly a joke partly true is this.

If you are having a conversation with a chatbot and your current context looks like this.

You: Prompt

AI: Makes mistake

You: Scold mistake

AI: Makes mistake

You: Scold mistake

Then the next most likely continuation from in context learning is for the AI to make another mistake so you can Scold again ;)

I feel like this kind of shenanigans is at play with this stuffing the context with roleplay.

[0] https://youtu.be/rmvDxxNubIg?si=dBYQYdHZVTGP6Rvh
by hellotomyrars | 2025-12-03 05:56:45+00:00
You’re right. The No Surprises Act did make this a lot better. However it still doesn’t cover ground transport (and specific state laws do in some cases.)

Additionally for post-stabilization care the hospital is going to shove a lot of papers in your face and they’re probably not going to tell you that one of them is the one that says you agree to pay to whatever those services and waive your protection against balance billing. Yes they’re supposed to present it on its own and with your full consent and yes you can dispute that but people sign the forms and then still get screwed.
by zarzavat | 2025-12-03 05:57:06+00:00
Exactly, there is nothing wrong with function coloring. It's a design choice.

Colored functions are easier to reason about, because potential asynchronicity is loudly marked.

Colorless functions are more flexible because changing a function to be async doesn't virally break its interface and the interface of all its callers.

Zig has colored functions, and that's just fine. The problem is the (unintentional) gaslighting where we are told that Zig is colorless when the functions clearly have colors.
Ask HN: Has anyone made money self-publishing tech criticism?
by lucaherrorpress | 2025-12-03 05:57:23+00:00
I'm an Italian writer who published two satirical books on Amazon: 'The Algorithm Is an Asshole' and 'The Performance: 36 Portraits of Life in the Attention Economy.' Zero sales in months. I tried BookSprout ($9 for 108 fake impressions, 0 reviews). Every platform I use to promote books about algorithm manipulation... uses algorithm manipulation to bury me. The irony is crushing. Has anyone here actually sold indie books criticizing tech without getting destroyed by the systems they criticize? Or is this just Kafka's final joke?
by tombert | 2025-12-03 05:57:49+00:00
I was extremely surprised that Google+ didn't catch on. The week before Google+ launched, me and all my friends agreed that Facebook is toast, Google will do the same thing but better, and everyone has a Gmail account so there will be basically zero barrier to entry. Obviously, we were wrong; Google+ managed to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory, Google+ never got significant traction, and Facebook managed to keep growing and now they're yet another Big Evil Tech Corporation.

Honestly, I still don't really know how Google managed to mess that up.
by rossjudson | 2025-12-03 05:57:51+00:00
Exact same here. I watched that video about ten times in a row.

I learned it's more important to know how the big sound pieces fit together and what you can do by tweaking them. Have many, many different versions of the big pieces doesn't really matter.

I also came away wishing that Bitwig had a strudel mode. Every time anyone does anything in the grid, they'd be better off with a strudel equivalent. I think.
by echelon | 2025-12-03 05:58:31+00:00
IBM sees the funding bubble bursting and the next wave of AI innovation as about to begin.

IBM was too early with "Watson" to really participate in the 2018-2025 rapid scaling growth phase, but they want to be present for the next round of more sensible investment.

IBM's CEO is attempting to poison the well for funding, startups, and other ventures so IBM can collect itself and take advantage of any opportunities to insert itself back into the AI game. They're hoping timing and preparation pay off this time.

It's not like IBM totally slept on AI. They had Kubernetes clusters with GPUs. They had models and notebooks. But their offerings were the absolute worst. They weren't in a position to service real customers or build real products.

Have you seen their cloud offerings? Ugh.

They're hoping this time they'll be better prepared. And they want to dunk on AI to cool the playing field as much as they can. Maybe pick up an acquisition or two on the cheap.
by bobim | 2025-12-03 05:58:59+00:00
I can't tell, things like BespokeSynth are running ok with alsa or jack. I got the rt kernel, made a few things to audio priority, fiddled with governors, but no luck. Let's say that it happens quite quickly with the Stitch Angel fast trance example "the key needs to be G" supersaw synth.

Chromium is better at it than Firefox though.

Maybe this 5800X3D needs a buff up...
by NetMageSCW | 2025-12-03 06:01:11+00:00
The article would be a lot better if it was what it said on the tin, instead of being filled with lots of unnecessary (as described in the article) digressions. If you couldn’t restrain yourself to sticking to the subject, at least put the digressions behind links or footnotes or pop-ups where they don’t detract from reading about the actual claimed intended subject.
by kmeisthax | 2025-12-03 06:01:26+00:00
There used to be a meme of people thinking that the Japanese market was somehow inherently biased to domestic companies and unwilling to touch western products. When the reality is moreso that almost every western company that tries launching products in Japan assumes they can just crush the local competition and gets their shit kicked in for the trouble.

The few companies that actually did well in Japan did so specifically because they spent at least five minutes to understand the local context and adapt their business to actually make sense there. Any western companies that actually do this get embraced like nothing else by the Japanese audience. I'm reminded of Apple deliberately pushing for emoji in Unicode just so they could sell iPhones that weren't beholden to the horrible mess that was Japanese telecom emoji standards...
by roncesvalles | 2025-12-03 06:01:45+00:00
I'm still flumoxed by how IBM stock went from ~$130 to $300 in the last few years for essentially no change in their fundamentals (in fact, a decline). IBM's stock price to me is the single most alarming sign of either extreme shadow inflation, or an equities bubble.

Why do you say the market correctly prices it this way?
by cookiejest | 2025-12-03 06:02:01+00:00
It's interesting to see the variety of approaches people are taking to get consistent results from LLMs for coding. The discussion around prompt engineering, agentic workflows, and even the choice of model (Gemini, Claude, etc.) highlights a common challenge: managing the complexity of different AI integrations.

One way to streamline this is to use a universal MCP server. Instead of building and maintaining separate connections for each AI service, you can use a platform like [contextgate](https://contextgate.ai/) to manage them all from a single point. This can simplify your development process, especially when you're experimenting with different models or tools to find the best fit for your coding tasks. It's a bit like having a universal remote for all your AI services.
by Klonoar | 2025-12-03 06:02:25+00:00
HN changed, is what happened. The tech startup crowd has sadly migrated to Twitter, and I guarantee you they still love Cloudflare.

HN has become a forum where old school enthusiasts complain loudly about modern tech while refusing to examine the fact that they’re doing it on a forum that’s inherently built to stimulate the very capitalism they decry.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-12-03 06:03:41+00:00
I suspect the reality is that they missed the boat, as they have missed tens of other boats since the mainframe market dried up. I guess you could argue they came to the boat too early with their pants on backwards (i.e. Watson), and then left before it showed up. But it’s hard to tell from the outside.

Maybe that will turn out to be a good decision and Microsoft/Google/etc. will be crushed under the weight of hundreds of billions of dollars in write-offs in a few years. But that doesn’t mean they did it intentionally, or for the right reasons.