MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zahlman | 2026-01-05 00:27:55+00:00
I can assure you that I am very serious and I do cut things up almost as finely as Uncle Bob suggests. Where others balk at the suggestion that a function or method should never expand past 20 or so lines, I struggle to imagine a way I could ever justify having something that long in my own code.

But I definitely don't go about it the same way. Mr. Martin honestly just doesn't seem very good at implementing his ideas and getting the benefits that he anticipates from them. I think the core of this is that he doesn't appreciate how complex it is to create a class, at all, in the first place. (Especially when it doesn't model anything coherent or intuitive. But as Jeffries' Sudoku experience shows, also when it mistakenly models an object from the problem domain that is not especially relevant to the solution domain.)

The bit about parameters is also nonsense; pulling state from an implicit this-object is clearly worse than having it explicitly passed in, and is only pretending to have reduced dependencies. Similarly, in terms of cleanliness, mutating the this-object's state is worse than mutating a parameter, which of course is worse than returning a value. It's the sort of thing that you do as a concession to optimization, in languages (like, not Haskell family) where you pay a steep cost for repeatedly creating similar objects that have a lot of state information in common but can't actually share it.

As for single-line functions, I've found that usually it's better to inline them on a separate line, and name the result. The name for that value is about as... valuable as a function name would be. But there are always exceptions, I feel.
by noduerme | 2026-01-05 00:27:57+00:00
For the 18th Amendment, we can probably mostly agree on what happened. But it only works because the wrong answers are very obviously wrong (and virtually impossible). But that forces you into answering along the path which is clearly not as wrong, even though it's full of vague sweeping generalizations. There were many small time bootleggers, for instance. I think it's a crummy idea to reduce history this way - who are you trying to teach a lesson, and why should someone trust that your interpretation of the chain of events is accurate?
by nl | 2026-01-05 00:28:14+00:00
> it was weird to me that people were comfortable operating on a codebase that they don't have locally, that they can't directly interact with.

I have a project where I've made a rule that no code is written by humans. It's been fun! It's a good experience to learn how far even pre-Opus 4.5 agents can be pushed.

It's pretty clear to me that in 12 months time looking at the code will be the exception, not the rule.
by themafia | 2026-01-05 00:28:15+00:00
On top of that there's a not insignificant chance you've actually just stolen the code through an automated copyright whitewashing system. That these people believe they're adding value while never once checking if the above is true really disappoints me with the current direction of technology.

LLMs don't make everyone better, they make everything a copy.

The upwards transfer of wealth will continue.
by LorenPechtel | 2026-01-05 00:28:31+00:00
"Faith" is fundamentally belief without knowledge. Thus you by definition have no reason to rely on it. (Although the word also gets used in situations where there is a track record to rely on but no specific evidence in the particular case.)

And you're using the wrong yardstick. What you should be looking at is the number of adverse events. STDs. Unintended pregnancies.
by chadcmulligan | 2026-01-05 00:29:07+00:00
The part of Delphi that is interesting, and isn't really mentioned much for some reason, is the component library - VCL (windows only) and Firemonkey (Cross platform). Like the language does what's needed, garbage collection would be nice, and is on iOS, but the really nice part is the ability to make things by dragging and dropping visual and non visual components, and making your own components in the same language.
by bradlys | 2026-01-05 00:30:47+00:00
People talk about this with exercise and I’ve never understood it. As someone who has exercised continuously for years - it has never gotten better.

Which, to me, makes sense because you’re supposed to always be pushing yourself. You’re not supposed to ever feel comfortable or feel better from it. You should always feel shitty because if it doesn’t hurt then you’re probably not making optimal development.

The only thing I ever “feel” good about is purely a mental thing. Eg I hit a new PR (progress), didn’t skip a lift (perseverance), or whatever. The act of exercising itself is always painful and it’s why I always dread it.
by sublinear | 2026-01-05 00:31:03+00:00
I used to be a lot more introverted until I realized the value of extroverted behavior is not so superficial.

For some reason, and especially on HN, extroversion is seen as a simple meaningless choice at best or sociopathic and manipulative at worst. It's really about finding new ideas, updating your mental models, and making rational decisions. So many things in life depend on your surroundings. if you're not interacting with the humans in it, you are just avoiding change. If you only socialize on the internet and with groups of like-minded people you find in real life, you are being manipulated.
Ask HN: What AI systems have you adopted across your work and personal life?
by alexjray | 2026-01-05 00:31:09+00:00
I am incredibly curious what AI systems you have been adopting across your work and personal life?

It's obvious that the generation of work artifacts is largely going to be done via AI but I am finding it very hard to give up that generative control to AI.

For example I am still manually reviewing every line of code AI produces because half the time I need it to be reworked/regenerated because of gaps (context, pattern clarity, usage details etc..).

So my question to you all is; what systems and processes are you using to optimize your AI generative output and quality?
by bdcravens | 2026-01-05 00:31:23+00:00
> even Etsy is now cracking down on prints of “commodity” STLs. IIRC under their new policy, you can’t sell a print you didn’t design yourself.

Not really true. There was a lot of drama about this when it came out, but I suspect there were more videos on YouTube about the subject than there have been actual products taken down over this. You just have to disclose that you made it with design partners. (ie, an STL you didn't create)
by nkrisc | 2026-01-05 00:32:35+00:00
That’s a very different kind of cheating though. The kind of cheating this effectively makes impossible is cheating where a player has more information than they’re intended to have.

If someone makes an AI that plays the game as a good player, then it’s effectively indistinguishable from a real player who is good. If they make it super-humanly good, then it would probably be detectable anyway.

It’s still fair in the sense that all players have the same (intended) information per the game rules.
by hodgehog11 | 2026-01-05 00:32:50+00:00
I also see the shrinking sentence length celebrated among my scientific colleagues who abhor the dreaded "run-on sentence". Maybe it is because I have no formal literacy or linguistic training but I mourn this loss; older, classical novels used to have a tremendous flavor in their sentence structure by prioritizing the longform. Some English translations of Russian literature can run into the absurd (sentences at half a page long), but even then there is a beauty to it.

I see this much less in modern novels and articles. Where is the flavor from pausing. all. the. time?
by LorenPechtel | 2026-01-05 00:32:56+00:00
You're disregarding.

We have a lot of incidents frame by the press as being wrongful Israeli actions. Most of them turn out to be garbage. And even uncontested casualty numbers show Israel did better than we do.

I'm not an Israeli apologist, but I don't feel that I'm competent to tell the world's best performer that they're wrong.
by abejfehr | 2026-01-05 00:33:40+00:00
That code from your post is fairly standard image load handling, but the notable part is this line:

self.apng_supported = ctx.getImageData(0, 0, 1, 1).data[3] === 0;

Unless I'm misunderstanding, it's basically a "neat trick", like using ~~ for rounding or a fast inverse square root.

Is the intent that everyone who makes use of that trick is supposed to link back to your blog?
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-01-05 00:33:58+00:00
> Warhammer and MtG get mocked for being expensive but in reality they are comparable to cars, sports, fashion, and all the other things humans spend their disposable income on.

I guess there really is some kind of "hacker-type" personality who does spend a lot on some things, but these things are typically "not very proprietary", i.e. not things where the producing company enforced the copyright and trademarks heavily, and "highly modifiable". So I guess to such people the question "what was to stop me just printing or photocopying cards" is not absurd, but to fans of WH4k or MtG it is: because of their very different product tastes.
by gitttnwmrlg | 2026-01-05 00:34:47+00:00
The problem with automatically applying whatever crap that is stored in git, means that you cannot reverse anything without a long heavyweight process, clone code, make a branch, create a pr, approve a pr, merge to master/main.

That can take hours, and that’s not acceptable when PROD is burning.

That’s why most places don’t dare syncing to prod automatically.
by magicalhippo | 2026-01-05 00:34:49+00:00
There's lots of research that points to that the brain after addiction just isn't the same as before addiction[1][2]. So while there might have been a root cause before, the effects of addiction is still present even if the root cause isn't an issue anymore.

[1]: https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2025/08/addiction-sci...

[2]: https://www.rockefeller.edu/news/35742-newly-discovered-brai...
by coldtea | 2026-01-05 00:34:59+00:00
>Many people in Alcoholics Anonymous don't actually do the 12 steps as designed by Bill Wilson. They don't understand that it's a piece of spiritual technology designed to produce a spiritual awakening and a reorganization of personality.

That can still be OK, as what it is is a mix of empirical and arbitrary man-made alcoholism recovery program, not a God-given spiritual practice or a scientifically necessary one.

People have succesfully recovered with less, as well as more, as well as different steps taken. And inversely, people have failed even though they followed all 12 for a long time.
by inkyoto | 2026-01-05 00:35:02+00:00
> Because the attempts at segmented or object-oriented address spaces failed miserably.

> That is false. In the Intel World, we first had the iAPX 432, which was an object-capability design. To say it failed miserably is overselling its success by a good margin.

I would further posit that segmented and object-oriented address spaces have failed and will continue to fail for as long as we have a separation into two distinct classes of storage: ephemeral (DRAM) and persistent storage / backing store (disks, flash storage, etc.) as opposed to having a single, unified concept of nearly infinite (at least logically if not physically), always-on just memory where everything is – essentially – an object.

Intel's Optane has given us a brief glimpse into what such a future could look like but, alas, that particular version of the future has not panned out.

Linear address space makes perfect sense for size-constrained DRAM, and makes little to no sense for the backing store where a file system is instead entrusted with implementing an object-like address space (files, directories are the objects, and the file system is the address space).

Once a new, successful memory technology emerges, we might see a resurgence of the segmented or object-oriented address space models, but until then, it will remain a pipe dream.
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-05 00:35:33+00:00
You actually like onenote? Note taking is my primary tool at work but I really hate onenote. The web version can't even search properly in all folders. And there's no desktop Linux version.

Privately I use obsidian with self hosted livesync which is amazing. But at work I have to use Copilot. In some ways I don't mind it in onenote because it actually succeeds in finding stuff the search function doesn't. Syncing to mobile often doesn't work right either.

To me it's the worst O365 app and the one I need the most :(
by phantasmish | 2026-01-05 00:35:36+00:00
I waited what I thought (and what was suggested by enthusiasts to be) long enough for the tech to be mature and approachable, and finally bought a highly-recommended beginner printer about three years ago.

I’ll never touch the tech again. The chemicals seem sketchy as hell (I don’t really want any hobbies that make me feel like I need a dedicated area of my house that I only enter while wearing significant PPE, and with gloves that never leave that dirty-zone) and after probably ten joyless hands-on hours burned over a couple weekends, I never got the fucking thing to print a single one of its test designs.

Seems like yet another fiddly hobby for its own sake (that might eventually yield some not-remotely-worth-the-cost fruits) rather than a useful tool. I don’t need what it offers that bad, the amount of money and time I’m going to put toward it in the rest of my life is zero. It’s probably a fine activity if the act of fiddling with 3D printers is the main draw for a person. Otherwise, no.
Show HN: Turn meetings into summaries, presentations, and an AI to ask questions
by jimmydin7 | 2026-01-05 00:35:41+00:00
Notefy is an AI meeting assistant that turns recordings into notes, summaries, and ready-to-share presentations. Upload a meeting securely to get accurate multilingual transcription and an AI chatbot trained on your meeting so you can ask questions and get instant answers. Instantly share outputs with teammates and connect via integrations like Slack and Discord.
by wrs | 2026-01-05 00:36:16+00:00
Some anecdata: This weekend as a lark I asked Claude Code to design a (fairly simple) analog circuit and simulate it in LTSpice to verify. It did three edit-simulate-fix cycles and to my surprise ended up with something that seemed pretty sane.

That said, schematics (as opposed to netlists) don't seem to be a practical I/O format yet. It did generate a KiCad schematic file when asked, but it was pretty bad (penguin on a bicycle level).

Anyway, somehow there does seem to be some electronic tools training happening, becuase I tried this maybe a year ago and it was pretty hopeless.
by clickety_clack | 2026-01-05 00:36:49+00:00
If you’re relying on your system prompt for security, then you’re doing it wrong. I don’t really care who sees my system prompts, as I don’t see things like “be professional yet friendly” to be in any way compromising. The whole security issue comes in data access. If a user isn’t logged in then the RAG, MCP etc should not be able to add any additional information to the chat, and if they are logged in they should only be able to add what they are authorized to add.

Seeing a system prompt is like seeing the user instructions and labels on a regular html frame. There’s nothing being leaked. When I see someone focus on it, I think “MBA”, as it’s the kind of understanding of AI you get from “this is my perfect AI prompt” posts from LinkedIn.
by zzo38computer | 2026-01-05 00:37:01+00:00
I do not agree; I think the example that is not split is clearer and does not need comments to explain it (the variable names are helpful, although even if local variables use only one letter it still seems like clearly enough; for variables that are not local to that function, it does help to have a more descriptive names to understand them better). Comments and splitting can both be helpful in some circumstances, but neither is helpful for this one.
by wincy | 2026-01-05 00:37:10+00:00
It’s a good question though! I got into Lorcana in 2024 and spent way too much money. I became curious about the $3 “reproductions” for $50 cards on AliExpress and ordered a few, while having matching copies I had pulled myself from packs, so I knew mine were authentic.

I was shocked that even under a jeweler’s loupe, I could tell no difference. Even the microscopic ink patterns were identical, except for the very rare editions of cards that use a special holographic print (called “Enchanted” cards, which are fancier alt art prints of cards, but those have a regular equivalent for gameplay purposes in all cases). It was all just worthless paper at the point.

This “broke the spell” for me, so to speak, and I quit playing. Soon after, I’m guessing everyone else realized this too, or, more likely, were buying the same cards at full price without realizing their provenance, and card prices tanked substantially. I also quit playing because it took up a lot of time and I rediscovered why I stopped playing Magic competitively. I’m an extremely sore loser and when I get into a hobby I play to win, to the point of obsession.
by arvinsim | 2026-01-05 00:38:20+00:00
I see at least 2 reasons why we don't see proxy play in MTG.

One is the strong dependence on your peers for approval. If your group is against proxies, then you are screwed.

Second is that there are now more ways to play against each other online for free. This approach is much more convenient compared to creating proxies IRL and allows you to play with other people outside your peer group.
by ninkendo | 2026-01-05 00:38:37+00:00
I definitely do both ULA and GUA at home, but this only really works well to the degree that the OS will prefer the ULA when connecting to things. Like if I want to put hostnames in netgroups, I need reverse DNS to work (which only works if the client is using the ULA address I expect.) In fact the whole idea of reverse lookups working and having expected hostnames show up where you want them to (logs, etc) really depends on not only using ULA for connections, but using the stable address and not the privacy address, which can also cause issues.

For the most part it works today, if I stick to using ULA’s only in my zone file, and configure hosts to prefer the DHCPv6-provided ULA for connections in the ULA subnet, it’s fine. But suddenly if you connect to somehost.local instead of somehost.fqdn, the machine picks a GUA source address and you’re back to being unpredictable.

So although I say I want to use NPTv6 and be ULA-only, I don’t actually do that today, so I’m not super familiar with the downsides to the approach. But it does sound a lot cleaner to me in theory.

> if you're only using it for outbound connections then it changing isn't going to break anything.

A prefix change absolutely does break things in a lot of setups though. It happens something like:

- Your router reboots unexpectedly (no time to rescind the RA)

- Router comes up and gets a new prefix, starts advertising it

- Clients are brain dead and continue using the old prefix when making outbound connections.

I’ve had this happen and both Apple devices and Linux devices (I had no Windows machines) kept using the old prefix until I went around and rebooted them. So connecting to any IPv6 WAN address would fail, and only IPv4 was saving me from my internet being down until I went and manually rebooted everything.

There have since been RFC’s that come up with recommendations for routers to keep a stateful log of old prefixes, so that they can rescind them (advertise a zero TTL) when a new prefix arrives… but afaict none of them actually do this.
by DavidPiper | 2026-01-05 00:39:29+00:00
> 13. The work that makes other work possible is priceless - and invisible.

> Glue work - documentation, onboarding, cross-team coordination, process improvement - is vital. ... The trap is doing it as “helpfulness” rather than treating it as deliberate, bounded, visible impact. Timebox it. Rotate it. Turn it into artifacts ... make it legible as impact, not as personality trait.

I see my own experience in this, but I don't think he's identified the problem correctly. Timeboxing, rotating, etc, is easy. Convincing management that it is as important as non-glue work and therefore worth allocating your time for it is the hard part. And if you can't do that, you end up stuck in the situation described.

The other option is to just let things fail of course, but then you have to convince both management AND the rest of your team to do this, otherwise someone else will just pick it up between the cracks too.
by bradlys | 2026-01-05 00:39:31+00:00
Nah, it’s actually a studied thing. Exposure therapy can work for some subjects but it’s quite controversial due to it quickly becoming “trauma therapy”. It can easily reinforce someone’s existing beliefs and make someone actually weaker and traumatized. Happens a lot. Imagine an ugly kid asking every girl out at school, you think maybe he just needs to get a single success but it’s possible he gets completely rejected and/or the rejections are so immense that it overpowers any single acceptance. He won’t be resilient from this - it will haunt him for the rest of his life. Plus, there can be social consequences (and consequences with other exposure therapies) that will be lasting from making such a brute force strategy.

Exposure therapy can make sense if it always resorts in good outcomes but that’s the issue - bad things do happen. And sometimes bad things happen more often to those who are “needing” exposure therapy.
by squibonpig | 2026-01-05 00:39:46+00:00
I don't think that's possible to analyze for most technologies. How could we determine the effect of, say, OLED technology specifically on workers' real wages across the economy? Even doing the same for a particular seller's margin, say LG, would be difficult and wouldn't tell the full story. If you have an idea of how to do that for something let me know.
by TheCleric | 2026-01-05 00:40:21+00:00
I do things for free all the time. I love my kids for free. I serve the less fortunate for free. If I have the time and resources and it makes the world a better place free is my default price.

That being said I also produce software for a living as well and there’s nothing wrong with that either. It’s not either or. It’s yes and.
by yujzgzc | 2026-01-05 00:40:43+00:00
"Laid off" may be more appropriate than "fired", but in essence, removing the need for costly labor is often the main "value" of any technology. Society as a whole comes out ahead from it, I mean for all the ice transporters and merchants put out of a job by electric refrigeration, and all the sailors put out of a job by modern cargo ships I think we're better off for it. But at the individual level it does make one uneasy about the prospects of individuals affected by it. My personal conclusion is that people have a personal duty to anticipate and adapt to change, society might give them some help along the way but it doesn't owe them that their way of life will be maintained forever.
by wolttam | 2026-01-05 00:41:11+00:00
OP’s looks a lot more inspired by k9s than what you produced.

Sorry but ideas (and now-a-days implementations) are cheap. Let the best tool win (or more practically, just use what suites you and don’t worry about it if others prefer another tool over yours. Especially don’t worry about it if someone uses an LLM to reproduce what you already did; that’s just the rising tide of LLM capabilities.)
by spankibalt | 2026-01-05 00:41:38+00:00
> “If I’m not the man who can [...] build working programs… WHO AM I?”

Oh, that's a very easy one:

Anyone who cannot by themselves build working programs through coding is by defintion a non-coder, i. e. coding illiterate. That means you.

So people like you need slop generators, or other forms of outsourcing, to pretend that the very solution to the problem (!), i. e. "writing code", "isn't super useful".