MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wpollock | 2025-12-07 20:13:09+00:00
> The better peer reviews are also not this 'thorough' and no one expects reviewers to read or even check references.

Checking references can be useful when you are not familiar with the topic (but must review the paper anyway). In many conference proceedings that I have reviewed for, many if not most citations were redacted so as to keep the author anonymous (citations to the author's prior work or that of their colleagues).

LLMs could be used to find prior work anyway, today.
by nickdothutton | 2025-12-07 20:13:43+00:00
I have recently been working on something "fun" in the terminal that mingles plain ASCII, ANSI "graphics", actual bitmaps (Sixel), and Nerdfonts in a TUI framework (Charm etc). After a week of smashing Claude's head against a wall, which is better than smashing my own, I've had to significantly alter my hopes and expectations.
by adityaathalye | 2025-12-07 20:13:59+00:00
Having read https://every-layout.dev (no affiliation), I cannot help but use CSS as a constraint system (ish).

My site for example, uses four "structural" elements - "the center", "the stack", "the box", and "the cluster".

That's maybe 50 lines of CSS controlling layout of the whole site, in concert with a proportional grid, much like how I do with print layouts. Except, with CSS combinators, flexbox, and semantic HTML. I don't use a "reset" CSS, nor do I use media queries.

Have a look-see. It's entirely hand-rolled CSS:

https://www.evalapply.org/static/css/style.css

nb. I'm mainly a devops/backend person. Any expert critique on said CSS is welcome. (Also site accessibility is a long-pending item... pointers there are welcome too.)
by mooreds | 2025-12-07 20:14:36+00:00
I have a friend who calls LinkedIn "a rolodex that other people keep up to date".

There is some value in posting on LinkedIn, but the real value is that you can go back and find people who are weak connections when you are looking to hire, purchase services, or ask favors.

I think everyone should join LinkedIn and connect to every one of their colleagues that they would work with again. Then, once in a while, keep that connection alive by sending a message or commenting on a post.

It's a long game, but will pay dividends should you ever need to chat with them.
by jancsika | 2025-12-07 20:14:40+00:00
> But she also was frantic and obsessive and short tempered which was off putting.

My audio subsystem behaves exactly the same way!

Sometimes I'll send it a simple email politely asking to grab the block of samples it just sent to the soundcard and replace them with different samples that I've included as an attachment. It always makes this rude clicking noise at me which I do not appreciate at all.

I guess it's too much to ask to just take a little time to fashion a polite response while also hitting soft realtime deadlines. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by astrange | 2025-12-07 20:14:59+00:00
A very common thing people do is assume a) all corporations are evil b) all corporations never follow any laws c) any evil action you can imagine would work or be profitable if they did it.

b is mostly not true but c is especially not true. I doubt they do it because it wouldn't work; it's not high quality data.

But it would also obviously leak a lot of personal info, and that really gets you in danger. Meta and Google are able to serve you ads with your personal info /because they don't leak it/.

(Also data privacy laws forbid it anyway, because you can't use personal info for new uses not previously agreed to.)
by anonymousiam | 2025-12-07 20:15:12+00:00
The same is true for the software that runs many satellites. Use of the STL is prohibited.

The main issue is mission assurance. Using the stack or the heap means your variables aren't always at the same memory address. This can be bad if a particular memory cell has failed. If every variable has a fixed address, and one of those addresses goes bad, a patch can be loaded to move that address and the mission can continue.
by spwa4 | 2025-12-07 20:15:19+00:00
A lot of governments took the side of the Nazis. Including the EU's founder, Robert Schuman, ex-Nazi collaborator of the French Vichy government. But that is nothing compared to many others.

Things get so much worse. The Dutch Child protection agency has in it's historical archives, not just that they collaborated with implementing the holocaust against children, but actually organized it. Jewish (and various other groups, like Romani) children were "invited" to summer camps, that turned out to be death camps (and the "east front", which you also didn't return from). They even set a trap to deport Jewish and mentally and physically disabled children to extermination camps, including a number of their own personnel, and even went so far as to hunt their own personnel that "chose the side of the children".

Austrian child protection agency selected children to be sent to death camps. That, Austrian psychiatry before and during the holocaust, is where Autism comes from. The first children diagnosed with Autism were not just sent to death camps, that was the only purpose of the diagnosis of Autism. To mark the child for death to "protect (something about race that I will not repeat)".

In case you ever wonder why the child protection agencies of those countries still reserve the right to lie about the death of children, even today, that is why. Because both mass-murdered children out of racism, and if a concrete case, of which there are many, were to come to court even today ...

And yet, it gets worse. And extremely confusing. Many things boil down to what everybody actually kind of knows. Ideas, especially implemented on the scale of a state, come from a long history and trials. Everything around WW2 was, justly and correctly, blamed on the Nazis. Nazis did those things. But they got the idea, and in many cases personnel, from somewhere. And a LOT of groups have used that to absolve themselves of what they did before, often long before, WW2. Look up "industrial psychiatry" sometime.
by panick21_ | 2025-12-07 20:15:40+00:00
I fought for a long time that ethanol and methonal up to some amount 30% or maybe 50% should have been made 'standard' fuel. For a long time a lot of natural gas was wasted that could have been turned into gas instead of blown into the atmosphere.

Granted electric cars made this less needed but before batteries as a technology broke threw, this was a great way to reduce emissions.

One of the issues is that fuel standard process were to slow, focused on only ethanol (in the US) and that car manufactures fought it.

But having a truly flexible fuel supply can do a lot for fuel prices and get them down. Specially after the natural gas boom in the US.
by btbuildem | 2025-12-07 20:15:50+00:00
> The way Bryan approaches an LLM is super different to how a 2025 junior engineer does so

This is a key difference. I've been writing software professionally for over two decades. It took me quite a long time to overcome certain invisible (to me) hesitations and objections to using LLMs in sdev workflows. At some point the realization came to me that this is simply the new way of doing things, and from this point onward, these tools will be deeply embedded in and synonymous with programming work. Recognizing this phenomenon for what it is somehow made me feel young again -- perhaps that's just the crust breaking around a calcified grump, but I do appreciate being able to tap into that all the same.
by toast0 | 2025-12-07 20:16:16+00:00
IMHO, churning is clearly profitable if you pay off your card every month, will hit the spend requirements organically and are organized enough to cancel to avoid annual fees in the second year. Some people dive into manufactured spending to hit the required spending, but then you really need to consider the time invested.

The question is more about if the rewards are meaningful. I think it's actually worth doing a bit of churning to get exposure to different banks and figure out which one you like... might as well get paid for that. But after a certain point, I value stability and routine more than $300 to jump through hoops... and I'm not going back to Chase no matter what they want to pay me.
by firefax | 2025-12-07 20:16:21+00:00
>They went up to $1.25 in '21 I think. It was extensively cover by the press.

I'd love to see a citation on that, since I think you're mistaken -- there's plenty of things that are still a dollar, mostly stuff like packages of napkins or plastic cups, cards and other sundries.

(What was extensively covered was that they were no longer a "everything is a dollar" store.)
by silisili | 2025-12-07 20:16:56+00:00
Same. My city has a Walmart, Publix, Food Lion, Kroger, and Aldi. Yet they keep building dollar stores, I think there's now 5 within 10 miles of my house. They all seem to do decent traffic, which baffles me. The stores are a mess, items disheveled everywhere, and rare to see more than a single person working. Really depressing places, I cannot figure out their appeal.
by csours | 2025-12-07 20:17:00+00:00
> I think re-planning is a failure when nothing is learned from previous assumptions not being correct

This is the exact problem, and why it is so extremely difficult to communicate about the subject.

Another way to say "learn from previous [failures]" is "bureaucracy". We did something wrong last time, so we need a rule about that failure.

It SHOULD NOT be seen as failure, we SHOULD NOT add bureaucracy, simple rules CAN NOT fix the issue.

What should happen: Line managers and developers should be able to communicate about what they are learning as they do the work of software engineering. Developers should be able to re-plan their approach to problem solutions.

This simply will not work if there is not strong trust between upper management/[the money] and the engineering/execution side of the organization.

----

The meta-problem is that you have to see things go wrong many times in many ways before you really understand what is going on, and by that point ... well everything gets very tiresome.
by secretsatan | 2025-12-07 20:17:11+00:00
AFAIK, and not technically relevant, but iOS is very strict on this when submitting to the app store, and they’re not at all clear about it either, i had some very confusing and frustrating errors with self built frameworks with dynamic libraries. You also seem to be forbidden to use .dylib and must use the .framework format.

It’s picked up on submission automatically and not at review, but is a completely undocumented requirement.
by there4 | 2025-12-07 20:18:36+00:00
The BackboneJS library and the documentation generated by Docco has always been an interesting example. Compare the annotated source with the source at GitHub:

https://backbonejs.org/docs/backbone.html https://github.com/jashkenas/backbone/blob/master/backbone.j... https://ashkenas.com/docco/
by Trasmatta | 2025-12-07 20:19:02+00:00
The thing that sucks is that when I avoid giving estimates, I'm not trying to be difficult, I'm being honest about the unknowns of the project and the inherent uncertainties and messiness of software development. I'm helping protect myself and the rest of the team from making plans based off of bad estimates.

But I get all this pushback when I do that, such that the path of least resistance is to give some bullshit estimate anyway. Or I get asked to make a "rough guesstimate", which inevitably turns itself into some sort of deadline anyway.

Garbage in, garbage out. Inaccurate estimates, unreasonable timelines, stressed devs and upset PMs.

I'm so over working on software teams.
by biomechanica | 2025-12-07 20:19:06+00:00
> And to reiterate: C should finally be a real assembly language, something we not need to worry about.

Assembly is used quite a lot and if you're a programmer Assembly is very valuable to know _at least_ how to understand it.

I disagree, also, that C should go away. Saying it was never a good language is a bit harsh. It's a great language. One that industries are built on. I'd rather read/write C code than, say, Rust.

Edit: There are, of course, languages coming up that can absolutely compete with C. Zig could be one when it's mature, for instance.
by 9rx | 2025-12-07 20:19:16+00:00
> I should have asked whether the existence of a fully-compatible garbage collecting implementation of C change anything about whether C is a GC language.

In a similar vein, tinygo allows compilation without GC[1]. That is despite the Go spec explicitly defining it as having GC. Is Go a GC language or not?

As you can see, if it were up to implementation, a GC/non-GC divide could not exist. But it does — we're talking about it. The answer then, of course, is that specification is what is significant. Go is a GC language even if there isn't a GC in implementation. C is not a GC language even if there is one in implementation. If someone creates a new Rust implementation that leaves out Rc and Arc, it would still be a GC language as the specification indicates the presence of it.

[1] It doesn't yet quite have full feature parity so you could argue it is more like the Fil-C situation, but let's imagine that it is fully compatible in the same way you are suggesting here.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-07 20:20:06+00:00
This is one example why being a guest language isn't optimal.

They should have made use of JVM bytecodes that allow to optimize lambdas away and make JIT aware of them, via invokedynamic and MethodHandle optimizations.

Naturally they cannot rely on them being there, because Kotlin also needs to target ART, JS runtimes, WebAssembly and its own native version.
by IncreasePosts | 2025-12-07 20:21:34+00:00
Isn't it just the predators that care about stock price to enrich themselves? Couldn't a co-op exist which offered non-predatory pricing and didn't try to maximize their stock price constantly? And real estate in destitute rural areas is generally dirt cheap.

Of course this could be offered. But, no one wants to do it because it's a thankless job. And if you're going to do a thankless job, you'd probably rather get paid a lot of money to do it than very little
by nickdothutton | 2025-12-07 20:21:46+00:00
Ukraine was, and is still, one of the most corrupt developed countries in the world. Whether it is slightly more or slightly less corrupt than Russia I do not know. Both are Oligarchic in nature. In my opinion one of the reasons the various peace deals have not succeeded yet is because they fail to acknowledge the Oligarchic nature of both states and that they will both need to continue in that mode going forwards, probably as a frozen conflict or in a system where it is in neither interest to disrupt the balance (because it would end the corruption, pocket-lining, theft, etc). Of course for the ordinary unfortunate Ukrainian, well he/she matters little or not at all to rulers on either side.
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-07 20:21:53+00:00
Yeah. Why do I have to pay a plumber to install gas appliances? It's just a protectionist racket.

Point is, it's easy to screech "predation" or whatever but the problem is that every one of these things has some justification that can be used in the abstract.

It does legitimately cost more to run a store like Dollar General than Walmart so the same can of beans has to cost more on their shelf for the same margin.

How much more, how much is justified? I don't know.
by hennell | 2025-12-07 20:21:56+00:00
As a largely solo dev I found I can't estimate well unless it's a common task, and it's easy to find tasks grow exponentially if it touches too many layers.

Asking "how long do you want me to spend on this?" got better results, because I got more idea how important tasks were to the business and can usually tell if something is going to take longer than they want. (Or know when we need to discuss scoping it back, or just abandoning the feature)
by groundzeros2015 | 2025-12-07 20:22:37+00:00
I know this topic has been beat to death but this is another example of why high level language with super optimizing compiler has had less industry success.

If performance is a feature it needs to be written in the code. Otherwise it implicitly regresses when you reorder a symbol and you have no recourse to fix it, other than fiddling to see if it likes another pattern.
by arthurfirst | 2025-12-07 20:23:15+00:00
30 years ago my boss at a large defense/aviation contractor told me estimating software projects was a very valuable skill, but all estimates were always wrong because they are simplifications and to keep that in mind -- his words.

Mainly they are useful to build belief and keep a direction towards the goal.

Models of any kind in whatever domain are necessarily always something less than reality. That is both their value and weakness.

So estimates are models. Less than reality. Therefore we should not expect them to be useful beyond 'plans are useless, but planning is indispensable' -- I think thats' Eisenhower.
by isoprophlex | 2025-12-07 20:23:21+00:00
I have a very weird tangential nit to pick: gendering LLMs. I swear I'm not pushing any sort of gender agenda/discussion that can be had anytime anywhere else in the current age, but to me there is something quintessentially a-gendered about the output of a computer program.

Calling Claude (or GPT-5 or Gemini or my bash terminal for that matter) a "he" seems absurd to the point of hilarity.

In my mind, they've always firmly been "it"s.
by mjd | 2025-12-07 20:23:23+00:00
“The number of pageviews on your website and the number of likes on your tweets are fun to look at and sound impressive, but optimizing for them completely misses the point if they don’t lead to something more important (e.g. profit).”

Profit is fun to look at and sounds impressive, but optimizing for it completely misses the point if it doesn't lead to something more important (e.g. human flourishing, or net societal gain)
by roryokane | 2025-12-07 20:23:28+00:00
The section “Utility Classes: Yes, They Still Exist” is unfair in its comparison of Tailwind with pure CSS. It doesn’t take into account Tailwind’s recommendation in https://tailwindcss.com/docs/styling-with-utility-classes#us... that “if you need to reuse some styles across multiple files, the best strategy is to create a component” in your front-end framework or templating language. So its example of a “typical Tailwind component” is incomplete.

A better comparison would use, for example, a React component:

function Button({ children }) { return ( <button className="inline-flex items-center gap-2 px-4 py-2 rounded-full border border-gray-300 bg-white text-gray-900 hover:bg-gray-50 focus:ring-2 focus:ring-blue-500" > {children} </button> ); } // Usage: <Button>Save</Button>

This would counter all of the article’s arguments in favor of pure CSS. If the website used a `Button` component like this, it would also be true that the “HTML stays readable”, that “changes cascade”, that “variants compose”, and that “media queries live with components”.

A better argument against Tailwind would be the added complexity of having a build system and a front-end framework or templating language, if your project doesn’t already have those for other reasons.

(adapted from my better-formatted comment at https://lobste.rs/c/oznzzj)
by foxfired | 2025-12-07 20:23:39+00:00
I disagree. When the tool promises to do something, you end up trusting it to do the thing.

When Tesla says their car is self driving, people trust them to self drive. Yes, you can blame the user for believing, but that's exactly what they were promised.

> Why didn't the lawyer who used ChatGPT to draft legal briefs verify the case citations before presenting them to a judge? Why are developers raising issues on projects like cURL using LLMs, but not verifying the generated code before pushing a Pull Request? Why are students using AI to write their essays, yet submitting the result without a single read-through? They are all using LLMs as their time-saving strategy. [0]

It's not laziness, its the feature we were promised. We can't keep saying everyone is holding it wrong.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/none-of-us-read-the-specs
by johnfn | 2025-12-07 20:23:40+00:00
Is it really that uncharitable? Yes, it's slightly hyperbolic, but I argue only slightly. Whether intended or not, the tone of the article is patronizing. Here are some examples.

> The programmers who live in Flatland

> Likewise, you cannot comprehend a new programming dimension because you don’t know how to think in that dimension

> the sphere is unable to get the square to comprehend what “up” and “down” mean.

All of this is patronizing. It implies that I am incapable of understanding the benefits of Lisp. If only I were able to lift myself out of the dull swamp I find myself in! But I am capable, and I do understand them, and I still don't like it! And I think most Lisp detractors do as well! I would argue that it is the Lisp proponents that live in Flatland - they need to understand that there's another dimension to criticisms of Lisp that aren't just "I don't like parentheses" and that there is substantive feedback to be gleaned.
by rendall | 2025-12-07 20:23:57+00:00
There’s a well-established Agile technique that in my experience actually succeeds at producing usable estimates.

The PM and team lead write a description of a task, and the whole team reads it together, thinks about it privately, and then votes on its complexity simultaneously using a unitless Fibonacci scale: 1,2,3,5,8,13,21... There's also a 0.5 used for the complexity of literally just fixing a typo.

Because nobody reveals their number until everyone is ready, there's little anchoring, adjustment or conformity bias which are terribly detrimental to estimations.

If the votes cluster tightly, the team settles on the convergent value. If there’s a large spread, the people at the extremes explain their thinking. That’s the real value of the exercise: the outliers surface hidden assumptions, unknowns, and risks. The junior dev might be seeing something the rest of the team missed. That's's great. The team revisits the task with that new information and votes again. The cycle repeats until there’s genuine agreement.

This process works because it forces independent judgment, exposes the model-gap between team members, and prevents anchoring. It’s the only estimation approach I’ve seen that reliably produces numbers the team can stand behind.

It's important that the scores be unitless estimates of complexity, not time. How complex is this task? not How long will this task take?

One team had a rule that if a task had complexity 21, it should be broken down into smaller tasks. And that 8 meant roughly implementing a REST API endpoint of complexity.

A PM can use these complexity estimations + historical team performance to estimate time. The team is happy because they are not responsible for the PM's bad time estimation, and the PM is happy because the numbers are more accurate.

A clear description with background appears in Mike Cohn’s original writeup on Planning Poker: https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/agile/planning-poker