MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by senfiaj | 2025-12-30 16:35:34+00:00
Maybe it's better now in some distros. Not sure about other distros, but I don't like Ubuntu's Snap package. Snap packages typically start slower, use more RAM, require sudo privileges to install, and run in an isolated environment only on systems with AppArmour. Snap also tends to slow things some at boot and shutdown. People report issues like theming mismatches, permissions/file-access friction. Firefox theming complaints are a common example. It's almost like running a docker container for each application. Flatpaks seem slightly better, but still a bandaid. Just nobody is going to fix the compatibility problems in Linux.
by CursedSilicon | 2025-12-30 16:35:49+00:00
Whenever I see people decry it as "anti Tesla" or "anti Elon" I just wonder "what have they done they can be covered positively?"

While I'm an out and proud "Tesla hater" and freely admit my own bias. The defenders never actually seem to have any "look here's something good that [site] overlooked!" It's just whining about the site being anti-Tesla
by elevation | 2025-12-30 16:35:53+00:00
Even without toxicity, as a domain expert, I'm cynical about community experiments in this space in general.

Hobbyist "mesh networking" communities readily adopt suboptimal modulation, frame specification, packet format, encoding, ineffective mesh arrangements, flood-prone routing mechanisms, poor reference hardware, and bloated user interfaces, while often ignoring basic practices like forward error correction, collision detection/multiplexing, trust mechanisms. Community solutions tend to be opinionated in the worst ways ("we assumed you'd use an arduino" or "here's a mandatory packet header field to indicate whether you're currently in a hot air balloon") and under-constrained in areas where opinion would be helpful "our client UI has 75 configurable options -- get one wrong and you won't be able to communicate."

By the time there is a "community" it's too late to address these issues: network effects have already locked in the worst design decisions.
by chrsw | 2025-12-30 16:35:59+00:00
I think organization technical leadership wants to deploy AI to ship faster, not so engineering teams can do what they should have been doing all along. "Sure, we can deploy these tools, but first we need to properly document our design" isn't going to fly. The point of buying these tools is so teams ship without really understanding what they're doing, because there's a time cost to that.
by constantcrying | 2025-12-30 16:36:00+00:00
Sure, Times New Roman is not a great font and comes with many negative connotations. But having official government communication look like a highschoolers first digital essay is even worse.

The obvious solution is doing what many large companies, as well as other governments are doing. Create your own Font. (e.g. https://styleguide.bundesregierung.de/sg-de/basiselemente/sc... https://www.ibm.com/plex/)
by adonovan | 2025-12-30 16:36:13+00:00
> The one big problem: gopls. We need the first line of the script to be without spaces...

Specifically the problem here is automated reformatting. Gopls typically does this on save as you are editing, but it is good practice for your CI system to enforce the invariant that all merged *.go files are canonically formatted. This ensures that the user who makes a change formats it (and is blamed for that line), instead of the hapless next person to touch some other spot in that file. It also reduces merge conflicts.

But there's a second big (bigger) problem with this approach: you can't use a go.mod file in a one-off script, and that means you can't specify versions of your dependencies, which undermines the appeal to compatibility that motivated your post:

> The primary benefit of go-scripting is [...] and compatibility guarantees. While most languages aims to be backwards compatible, go has this a core feature. The "go-scripts" you write will not stop working as long as you use go version 1.*, which is perfect for a corporate environment.

> In addition to this, the compatibility guarantees makes it much easier to share "scripts". As long as the receiving end has the latest version of go, the script will run on any OS for tens of years in the future.
by timr | 2025-12-30 16:36:16+00:00
It’s a vague statement that I obviously cannot defend in all interpretations, but what I mean is: the performance of models at making non-trivial applications end-to-end, today, is not practically better than it was a few years ago. They’re (probably) better at making toys or one-shotting simple stuff, and they can definitely crank out shitty code for bigger apps that “works”, but they’re just as terrible as ever if you actually understand what quality looks like and care to keep your code from descending into entropy.

I think you have to parse the word “performance” finely to make the original claim stick. For example, I’m not going to argue that aspects of the process haven’t improved, or that Claude 4.5 isn't better than GPT 4 at coding, but I still can’t trust any of the things to work on any modestly complex codebase without close supervision, and that is what I understood the broad argument to be about. It's completely irrelevant to me if they slay the benchmarks or make killer one-shot N-body demos, and it's marginally relevant that they have better context windows or now hallucinate 10% less often (in that they're more useful as tools, which I don't dispute at all), but if you want to claim that they're suddenly super-capable robot engineers, you have to bring evidence, because that's a claim that defies my day-to-day experience.

FWIW, this line of argument usually turns into a mott and bailey fallacy, where someone makes an outrageous claim (e.g. "models have recently gained the ability to operate independently as a senior engineer!"), and when challenged on the hyperbole, retreats to a more reasonable position ("Claude 4.5 is clearly better than GPT 3!"), but with the speculative caveat that "we don't know where things will be in N years". I'm not interested in that kind of speculation.
by witte | 2025-12-30 16:37:03+00:00
It really depends on what you mean by geoengineering. Dumping things into the atmosphere has been easy to detect for a while now, but with NASA spinning down their space assets focused on climate data [1] there’s definitely dimensional data that’s being lost. However, there’s still plenty of data being supplied via the EU Copernicus team [2] to track a lot of those things that hopefully will be able to fill some of the gaps.

All of this to say, with enough stable overhead assets then most things can be detected that would cause possible impacts in climate.

1. https://www.npr.org/2025/08/04/nx-s1-5453731/nasa-carbon-dio...

2. https://dataspace.copernicus.eu/explore-data
by Cyph0n | 2025-12-30 16:37:13+00:00
The problem isn't undefined behavior per se; I was using it as an example for strncpy. Rust is a no - in fact, the goal of (safe) Rust is to eliminate undefined behavior. Zig on the other hand I don't know about.

In general, I see two issues at play here:

1. C relies heavily on unsized pointers (vs. fat pointers), which is why strncpy_s had to "break" strncpy in order to improve bounds checks.

2. strncpy memory aliasing restrictions are not encoded in the API and can only be conveyed through docs. This is a footgun.

For (1), Rust APIs of this type operate on sized slices, or in the case of strings, string slices. Zig defines strings as sized byte slices.

For (2), Rust enforces this invariant via the borrow checker by disallowing (at compile-time) a shared slice reference that points to an overlapping mutable slice reference. In other words, an API like this is simply not possible to define in (safe) Rust, which means you (as the user) do not need to pore over the docs for each stdlib function you use.
by kuerbel | 2025-12-30 16:37:28+00:00
The premise is off. These aren’t "everyone else’s problems", NATO, the UN, trade stability, and foreign aid exist because they serve US interests too: security, markets, alliances, and predictability. The US isn’t benevolently carrying the world; it’s investing in systems that reduce the cost of conflict and instability later.

The question isn’t whether the US is allowed to stop spending, but what it wants the world to look like if it does.

It's just the case that some people at the top don't seem to understand that.
by Supermancho | 2025-12-30 16:37:56+00:00
There seems to be a lot of news around about digital devices paired with some age group leading to emotional or mental damage. TVs have been around 70 years. I'm not convinced devices are a relatively damaging factor in mental health development. Would I rather my child be using a phone or drinking lead-laced water or smoking? The evidence for chemical and biological consequences are more clear-cut and those took decades of measurable evidence. Studies, like these, seem more like trying to fit an assumed conclusion by plausibly random selection bias. Are these studies narrowing the field at all?
by kashyapc | 2025-12-30 16:37:58+00:00
The article on "effortocracy"[1] is pretty very well done. Quoting the end of the article:

"... if you take anything away from this, it is to recognise that if meritocracy is based on achievement only, then we must be sure not to confuse it with effortocracy when it comes to its moral weight."

Related reading: The Tyranny of Merit, by Michael Sandel (I was hoping the article would reference this, and it does.)

[1] https://nonzerosum.games/effortocracy.html
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-30 16:38:02+00:00
Depends on the purpose?

If you get your enjoyment from the process of cooking, by all means cook. But if you enjoy being with people and just eating food, catering is better.

Is your goal to efficiently get your thoughts to a medium as fast as possible, use a stylus or a keyboard. Do you enjoy the process of writing your thoughts down, use a fountain pen.

Or the easiest comparison: coffee. Do you want your fix of caffeine as fast as possible? Grab some gas station slop on the go for .99€. But if you're more about relaxing and slowly enjoying the process of selecting the optimal beans for this particular day, grinding them to perfection and brewing them just right with a pour-over technique or a fancy Italian espresso machine you refurbished yourself - then do that.

Same with code. I want to solve a problem I have or a client has. I get enjoyment from solving the problem. Having to tell the computer how to do that with a programming language is just a boring intermediate step on the way.
by bko | 2025-12-30 16:38:07+00:00
Cool, sounds like you discovered a life hack. Build something that can get $100m ARR while losing money, sell it, become billionaire.

Build something that can get 1k users. No in fact, build something that can get 100 users!

No offense, but you sounds like someone who has never actually had to build a business or product. It's hard to build something people use, even if its free. This isn't moviepass concept where they're literally selling $10 for $5, but even that's hard to sell! There are plenty of companies that try and fail to get tracking with moviepass economics.
by deaux | 2025-12-30 16:38:34+00:00
Kudos. We're finding it hard to migrate away from Google Sheets in particular due to all the plugins and integrations around them. For the other things you listed we also don't rely on Big Tech. Not keen on Proton though, they seem dodgy and IMO the number one candidate for being the next Crypto AG. Besidea that, it's still "all your eggs in one basket".
by reactordev | 2025-12-30 16:38:40+00:00
Not quite. I want a story. I want that story to unfold as I play in an organic way.

I played Eve a lot when it first came out up until about 2010 or so. The Alliance politics isn’t my cup of tea. The sandbox is great though. It’s just sad that gamers no longer see that and only want quests or missions or some direction on what to do next.

I’m hoping that with LLMs and AI, we’ll break free of this “waiting to be instructed” mentality of the youth and we can make games that are more diverse and open. Rock Star Games does some wonderful little scripted events and things in their games, they know how, but they still force you down this linear story arch. RDR2 was as close to the kind of game I’m talking about except for that fact. The fact that each “chapter” was a linear progression across the open world map.
by sorcercode | 2025-12-30 16:38:57+00:00
Not sure how you would define successful though. I built a Firefox addon almost entirely through vibe coding and I know at least 5 other random souls on the Internet who have used and thanked me for it. But it is by now stretch popular it makes money if those are the measures.

I was trying to test the theory if it's even possible to release something production grade with vibe coding. Wrote about the experience here https://kau.sh/blog/container-traffic-control/
by pydry | 2025-12-30 16:38:58+00:00
The lesson I learned is that agentic coding uses intermittent reinforcement to mimic a slot machine.

It (along with the hundreds of billions in investments hinging on it), explains the legions of people online who passionately defend their "system". Every gambler has a "system" and they usually earnestly believe it is helping them.

Some people even write popular (and profitable!) blogs about playing slots machines where they share their tips and tricks.
by amber_raza | 2025-12-30 16:39:18+00:00
This is a fantastic critique. Spot on. Freshness without appraisal is just an accelerated firehose of noise.

1. The Garbage Filter: Right now, I rely on a strict Hierarchy of Evidence to mitigate this (prioritizing Cochrane/Meta-analyses over observational studies), but you are absolutely right that LLMs can miss fatal methodological flaws in a single, high-ranking paper.

2. The 'Critic' Agent: I’m currently experimenting with a secondary 'Critic' pass. This is an LLM agent specifically prompted to act as a skeptic/methodologist to flag limitations before the main synthesis happens.

3. Multi-discipline prompting: The prompt you provided is a great case study in persona-based auditing. I’d love to learn more about the specific 'disciplines' or archetypes you’ve found most effective at catching these flaws. That is exactly the kind of domain expertise I’m trying to encode into the system.
by df0b9f169d54 | 2025-12-30 16:39:38+00:00
See also https://blog.cloudflare.com/using-go-as-a-scripting-language... and https://gist.github.com/posener/73ffd326d88483df6b1cb66e8ed1... . They explained the direct use of "go run" was not good in some scenario. Is that still applied today?

> go run does not properly return the script error code back to the operating system and this is important for scripts, because error codes are one of the most common ways multiple scripts interact with each other and the operating system environment.
by evanmoran | 2025-12-30 16:40:16+00:00
In a similar way I changed all of my build and deployment scripts to Go not long ago. The actual benefit was utility functions used by the service could be shared in deployment. So I could easily share code to determine if services/dbs were online or to access cloud secrets in a uniform way. It also improved all the error checks to be much clearer (did the curl fail because it’s offline or malformed).

Additionally, it is even more powerful when used with go modules. Make every script call a single function in the shared “scripts” module and they will all be callable from anywhere symmetrically. This will ensure all scripts build even if they aren’t run all the time. It also means any script can call scripts.DeployService(…) and they don’t care what dir they are in, or who calls it. The arguments make it clear what paths/configuration is needed for each script.
by jesuslop | 2025-12-30 16:40:22+00:00
That is the price you pay. If you refuse to pay you are left to express a potentially complex state machine in terms of a flat state-transition table, so you have a huge python cases statement saying on event x do this and on event y do that. That obscures evident state-chart sequentiality, alternatives or loops (the stuff visible in the good old flow-charts) that otherwise could be mapped in their natural language constructs. But yes, is not honest flow. Is a tradeoff.
by troyvit | 2025-12-30 16:40:34+00:00
I'm not a TUI developer but I'm about to become one after my experience with Tauri on a simple project. But focus on why I'm a TUI user. Maybe these reasons are why people develop TUI apps:

* Speed: Work gave me an i5. It has lots of RAM after I begged for it, but it's pretty slow. Having TUI apps for programming (vim+aider-ce/opencode), git wrangling (lazygit), music (pyradio), etc. saves a ton of RAM and cpu for me.

* Availability: I use yakuake as my main terminal, so when I don't need those apps they aren't cluttering up my desktop, but when I need them they are immediately available with a tap to F-12. No matter what desktop I'm on, there's my workspace.

* Configurability: Most of these apps are ridiculously theme-able, and that's really fun.

* UX: Most of the apps I use use vim bindings. That makes it super easy to get around. I rarely have to touch a mouse.

* Simplicity and portability: My coworkers spend at least a day setting up a new laptop. Yeah they're probably milking it but I'm up and running in a few hours.

* Potential: I've barely touched the surface, but I think there's a lot of compartmentalization of projects to be done with multiplexers like tmux that would be difficult-to-impossible to do with regular GUIs.

* Speed: Apps start and stop in fractions of seconds vs watching a spinner go 'round

* Cool factor: My girlfriend thinks I'm pretty disgusting when she sees how many browser tabs I have open but she thinks I'm pretty hawt when she sees how many terminal tabs I have open.
by fancyfredbot | 2025-12-30 16:40:35+00:00
That's certainly an impressive month! However, it's conceivable that you are an outlier (in the best possible way!)

I liked the way they did that study and I would be interested to see an updated version with new tools.

I'm not particularly sceptical myself and my guess is that using Opus 4.5 would probably have produced a different result to the one in the original study.
by pcthrowaway | 2025-12-30 16:40:39+00:00
> Many members of the UN are openly biased against Israel, many are officially against the very existence of Israel and have always been, and they happily vote on any condemnation of Israel regardless of what Israel does.

"regardless of what Israel does" they haven't tried ending the occupation yet; do you really think they would be condemned for doing so?

> and countries that do not allow Jews to enter.

Which countries are these exactly?
by compsciphd | 2025-12-30 16:40:48+00:00
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/10/gaza-un-expe...

This is her statement essentially saying Israel bombed a hospital that we now know as close to a fact as we can, that they did not and that in fact it was a palestinian rocket that fell on the hospital.

But lets say we can't know that for a fact.

She was still parroting Hamas's line without any ability to validate the statement.

This statement amongst many demonstrates that UN "Experts" have zero credibility in the statements they make.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-12-30 16:41:57+00:00
You should read about Baumol cost disease if you want to understand why what you just said is totally misguided

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

If I pay somebody to dig a ditch and I pay somebody else to fill it in was something of value created? Unequivocally no.

Whether or not that allowed somebody to survive and feed their family is entirely orthogonal to the question of the zero-sum nature of the universe

Nothing is free

energy comes from somewhere and you have to eat food which takes from the environment, that somebody else can’t eat or some other process can’t utilize, so by a function of your existence you cost energy to maintain that would’ve otherwise gone to some other mechanical process

No free lunch theorem describes this mathematically and you can go all day reading about that
by square_usual | 2025-12-30 16:42:16+00:00
> you claim that I am wrong - but you provide no evidence whatsoever.

You didn't provide any evidence either, so before you cry foul start with an actual argument.

> In Hinduism, dharma is prescribed based on the person's caste and so also the punishments

How is this implying "truth and morality [is] extremely subjective"? If one's dharma varies by caste, does that mean "truth" is "extremely subjective"? The degree to which one's duty, and therefore morals, vary by caste is also not such that murder is good for anyone. In the Gita, Arjuna's caste is mentioned as why killing in war is his duty, but it is also clearly stated that doesn't mean any murder is allowed. There is a clear and consistent undercurrent to the morality in Hinduism. Does dharma changing by caste mean the sun doesn't rise in the east for some castes? You're implying corruption is caused by "truth and morality" being subjective, but does Hinduism therefore imply that being corrupt is okay for some castes?

> may i point out that people have gone to jail even recently for "disrespecting" the Manusmiriti.

This is straight up false - your article itself says that they were arrested for the confrontation that followed the event, not for any religious intolerance.

E: I just want to add - caste and casteism are evil and vile.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-30 16:42:35+00:00
While true, people should pay attention that WinRT, the technology infrastructure for UWP, nowadays lives in Win32 and is what is powering anything CoPilot+ PC, Windows ML, the Windows Terminal rewrite, new Explorer extensions, updated context menu on Windows 11,....

It is a moving target, Proton is mostly stuck on Windows XP world, before most new APIs started being a mix of COM and WinRT.

Even if that isn't the case, almost no company would bother with GNU/Linux to develop with Win32, instead of Windows, Visual Studio, business as usual.