MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pksebben | 2026-01-07 18:44:50+00:00
Seeing this thread again scrolling through my comments, and after the holidays feeling perhaps calmer than when it was current. I'd like to make a case, invite you to look at things from a different angle, because I think we might have more common ground than it appears otherwise.

> I have zero shame for voting in favor of the interests of myself and the people that matter to me.

...and you shouldn't. It's better than fine to do so and you ought to work towards things that benefit you. This is something a lot of people seem to misunderstand when I talk about anything political, and it's likely a failing in how I communicate. I don't think that people should sacrifice themselves for the common good just because "it's the right thing to do". It isn't and that's never what I'm driving at.

When I (and perhaps others who share part of my worldview) talk about governance and lobbying and similar stuff, it's not out of a sense of pure morals or ethics - these are issues of ecosystems. Some shapes of systems are healthy and robust and others are self-destructive. Mesh networks are strong, centralized (and unreplicated) control systems are fragile - as an SWE you know this to be true.

What I'm arguing here is that it's in your interest to exist in an environment that:

- prevents an accumulation of power or control too tightly, to avoid single points of failure in decision and governance

- avoids recursive loops which have a habit of wastefully consuming resources and starving critical systems

- maintains flexible responsiveness to environmental conditions due to being reactive to the state of all constituent stakeholders / subsystems / individuals

The issue with the top 1% of the top 1% having too much power is that it breaks all those safeties, and is actually bad for those people too. What will happen in this kind of a situation is that the excessively empowered will desiccate the environment for everyone - including themselves.

You already see it playing out in the form of crumbling infrastructure, ballooning homelessness, economic shocks, and the empowerment of bad actors who take advantage of the disenfranchised masses. This is bad for you, too.
by mattgreenrocks | 2026-01-07 18:45:19+00:00
Something’s wrong when a key piece of foundational web tech is staring down unsustainability. Tailwind is almost ubiquitous these days. It needs to continue to exist.

Small businesses being eaten by AI is a net negative, because they’re in a unique position whereby they need to actually have to listen to customers vs just optimizing for a rando middle manger’s promotion in BigTech.
by wavemode | 2026-01-07 18:45:22+00:00
> Ideally the alert would only happen if the comment seemed important but it would readily discard short or nonsensical input.

That doesn't sound ideal at all. And in fact highlights what's wrong with AI product development nowadays.

AI as a tool is wildly popular. Almost everyone in the world uses ChatGPT or knows someone who does. Here's the thing about tools - you use them in a predictable way and they give you a predictable result. I ask a question, I get an answer. The thing doesn't randomly interject when I'm doing other things and I asked it nothing. I swing a hammer, it drives a nail. The hammer doesn't decide that the thing it's swinging at is vaguely thumb-shaped and self-destruct.

Too many product managers nowadays want AI to not just be a tool, they want it to be magic. But magic is distracting, and unpredictable, and frequently gets things wrong because it doesn't understand the human's intent. That's why people mostly find AI integrations confusing and aggravating, despite the popularity of AI-as-a-tool.
by larrymcp | 2026-01-07 18:46:00+00:00
Ah, I think I recall the story you're referring to: reporter Josh Renaud of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch discovered that a public web site was exposing Social Security numbers of teachers in Missouri. He notified the site's administrators, and later published a story about the leak after it was fixed.

The governor of Missouri at the time, Mike Parson, called him a hacker and advocated prosecuting him. Fortunately the prosecutor's office declined to file charges though.
by cbeach | 2026-01-07 18:46:07+00:00
Scala is a fantastic language and in fact I'd say it's the language that proves the article wrong.

Java was the language where "write libraries instead" happened, and it became an absolute burden. So many ugly libraries, frameworks and patterns built to overcome the limitations of a simple language.

Scala unified the tried-and-tested design patterns and library features used in the Java ecosystem into the core of its language, and we're better off for it.

In Java we needed Spring (urghh) for dependency injection. In Scala we have the "given" keyword.

In Java we needed Guava to do anything interesting with functional programming. FP features were slowly added to the Java core, but the power and expressivity of Java FP is woeful compared what's available at the core of Scala and its collections libraries.

In Java we needed Lombok and builder patterns. In Scala we have case classes, named and default parameters and immutability by default.

In the Java ecosystem, optionality comes through a mixture of nulls (yuck) and the crude and inconsistently-used "Optional". In Scala, Option is in the core, and composes naturally.

In Java, checked exceptions infect method signatures. In Scala we have Try, Either and Validated. Errors are values. It's so much more composable.

There's so much more - but hopefully I've made the point that there's a legitimate benefit in taking the best from a mature ecosystem and simple language like Java and creating a new, more elegant and complete language like Scala.
by soulofmischief | 2026-01-07 18:46:24+00:00
I like cooking, but many days I wish I could just eat a daily nutrition block and go back to my business :)

And I totally feel you on the taste thing. Meat tastes good, and we're used to it!

I'd recommend looking at some dishes from various Asian cuisines, for example Indian food. The problem with American cuisine is that we've been conditioned to expect meat as part of every meal, three times a day. Even just reducing your meat intake by one meal a day, or even just a few meals a week, can make a massive difference collectively.

I was a vegetarian in my teens, but I suffered from frequent fainting (this had been going on both before and after I was vegetarian, it was just worse during that period), sometimes at really unsettling moments like while shaving my face. I eventually seemed to grow out of these fainting spells, but I went back to eating meat for years.

And the entire time, I recognized the taste of meat as my main barrier to giving it back up. I finally made progress by removing or heavily reducing consumption of one meat at a time. First pork, then beef and other things, and then finally chicken.

Even today, I am a pescatarian and occasionally eat a little fish, shellfish and dairy. I also eat a lot of eggs. Dairy farming still involves what I consider torture however and I have worked to significantly reduce my intake. I really don't mind vegan cheese or even just shredded cashews as a replacement.

I don't feel bad eating mussels, oysters, etc. so I don't think I'll ever stop eating those, but I have significantly reduced the amount of fish I eat as well. I get nervous because I don't want to start fainting again, but I just track my protein and try to get it wherever I can, for example sprouted protein bread, eggs, whey, hemp and pea powders in smoothies, etc.
by Noumenon72 | 2026-01-07 18:46:46+00:00
I recently discovered that Chrome "More Tools" lets you "Name Window", so you can find the tab you want with alt-tab even if you opened some other tabs in front of it. Like I have one for "Gemini Enterprise", "AWS Console", etc. I might have some other tabs open with AWS Console but I can use this to find my main one.
by bhaney | 2026-01-07 18:47:00+00:00
I'm so tired of this topic.

"Tab hoarding" has been dead and buried for years. It's just "using tabs" now. Many people realized that what they used bookmarks for could be done with the same semantics using only tabs, and they started doing that to reduce the number of browser systems they needed to keep in their head. There was a brief gap between that, and browser vendors optimizing their tab systems to efficiently support those use cases. The tab hoarding dilemma arose during this period, and should have died with it. I currently have more tabs open than the author did, on a 15 year old laptop running an out-of-date version of Chromium, and it's using less than a gig of ram. >99% of the tabs are evicted, which is done automatically by the browser based on the presence of ephemeral data in the tab (partially filled out forms) and my typical frequency of accessing that tab. It works great. Every major browser has some form of this, as well as tab searching and tab grouping. If you want to use tabs as if they're bookmarks, like I do, you've been able to do so without problems for many years. It's time to retire the rhetoric of the scandalous tab hoarder.
by manfromchina1 | 2026-01-07 18:47:16+00:00
> I haven't been anywhere in the world that has LA beat.

I feel the same way about NYC and NOLA. Both have world class cuisine and the sheer diversity of NYC food scene can't be found anywhere in the US. And for whatever reason NYC style pizza is not as ubiquitous outside the NYC-NJ area.You can definitely find such pizza in Boston, but it cannot be found in every little corner in LA for example.
by kevin42 | 2026-01-07 18:47:32+00:00
You don't need to do much, the /agent command is the most useful, and it walks you through it. The main thing though is to give the agent something to work with before you create it. That's why I go through the steps of letting Claude analyze different components and document the design/architecture.

The major benefit of agents is that it keeps context clean for the main job. So the agent might have a huge context working through some specific code, but the main process can do something to the effect of "Hey UI library agent, where do I need to put code to change the color of widget xyz", then the agent does all the thinking and can reply with "that's in file 123.js, line 200". The cleaner you keep the main context, the better it works.
by omnimus | 2026-01-07 18:47:47+00:00
If anything it is crisis of elites in US. Since the second world war US has held dominant hand over its subjects (most of the world). But the elites were always smart enough to hide the amount of power, they marketed US well and understand to negotiate somewhat fairly and give some scraps to the rest (allow creating some elites in other countries). It was a straightforward deal.

But now the elites in US are just not very smart or savvy. Introduction of the tech class that are people who simply won a lottery (or scammed their way up) and are otherwise absolutely arrogant and clueless about the world. The deal just can't work anymore. It can't work because there is no deal with someone who thinks they deserve everything. The balance is off and you are now dealing with children with golden toilets OR self mythologizing guys whos deepest political analysis come from few scifi books they've read 20 years ago.
by camdenreslink | 2026-01-07 18:48:02+00:00
He goes into detail the motivation/decision to do lifetime pricing vs subscription pricing here: https://hackersincorporated.com/episodes/lifetime-pricing-is...

The idea is that subscription businesses have churn, and if you can capture the lifetime value of a customer with your one time price, there isn't any difference (other than people feeling grateful when you add new content for "free").
by tsimionescu | 2026-01-07 18:48:26+00:00
The so-called "Mediterranean diet" is a myth, and one of many myths that even serious "nutrition scientists" believe and perpetuate. Actual people in the Mediterranean have way different diets, and ones that include significant quantities of things like pork, lamb, fatty fish, very sugary confections, processed meats like sausages or jamon, etc.

I would be willing to bet that things like the siesta, large amounts of sunlight exposure, a more laid back culture, and lots of vacation days are much more important parts of what keeps people living around the Mediterranean healthier - much more so than the actual diet.
by worik | 2026-01-07 18:48:50+00:00
> all they did was not accept a change,

A change to make the documentation easier for LLM scrapers to inhale.

What would be the point? It would, in no way, improve anything. Probably not even for LLMs.

I am astounded the gentleman responded at all. I think all the talk of money (whilst urgent and catastrophic) is a red herring
by soulofmischief | 2026-01-07 18:49:08+00:00
People also seem to forget the impact of lead on society just a couple decades back, and how we are probably going through a similar event now with microplastics. Not to mention many artificial sweeteners, ultra-processed foods, preservatives, etc. as well as widespread use of industrial chemicals.

Plus, it's amazing how collective stress can warp a society over time.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-01-07 18:49:11+00:00
> The downside of beef isn't the "density" of nutrients: the downside is high saturated fat.

There are other downsides to beef .. such as the batshit crazy use of ecosystems and resources required to produce it at industrial scale.

Got a (beef) cow roaming in your yard, somehow getting by on whatever grows out of the ground? Enjoy your steak! Generating 6x the calories via a water-intensive cover crop to feed the cow so you can eat it later? Just say no.
by HDThoreaun | 2026-01-07 18:49:42+00:00
> if you did /init in a new code base, that Claude would set itself up to maximize its own understanding of the code.

This is definitely not the case, and the reason anthropic doesnt make claude do this is because its quality degrades massively as you use up its context. So the solution is to let users manage the context themselves in order to minimize the amount that is "wasted" on prep work. Context windows have been increasing quite a bit so I suspect that by 2030 this will no longer be an issue for any but the largest codebases, but for now you need to be strategic.
by eddythompson80 | 2026-01-07 18:49:52+00:00
Yeah, Seattle food is a lost cause. There is really no reliable-available-everyday type places here anymore. It's all becoming "super quirky and artisanal-we pretend to grow our own lettuce and provide great vibe" $25(+tip please to support our essential workers) BLT. Then, predictably, the place closes down once their lease is over. Rinse and repeat.

Even the old reliable mom and pop owned places (Tiryaki, Thai, Pho, Sichuanese) have all been hallowed out by what's been happening in the ID and have been transitioning to that "great vibe" model too as a last-ditch effort to survive. There was a bit of a resurgence of food trucks those last couple of years, but laws limit what can be made in a food truck.
by pengaru | 2026-01-07 18:49:57+00:00
> I mean protein does fill you up faster and better with fewer calories which is good for weight loss or management.

Thank you for exemplifying the problem so clearly - conflating protein with fat when we're really talking about a simple carbohydrates issue of high energy density with negative satiety.

Excess protein is excreted renally, it's easy to overdo and can cause serious problems.
by aatd86 | 2026-01-07 18:50:20+00:00
I think we agree. The subtelty is that, it is about closed and open systems.
Your partial knowledge makes things a locally open system.
You are processing new data and then acting accordingly.
That's dynamic agency. The better you can get knowledge, the better you can influence the next step.

That realization happens at the meta level and gives you agency in your actual universe.
Even though at the meta-meta level, that realization itself can be deterministic.

Not to be confounded with someone who would be external to the system and could watch your life as if it was a video tape, being omniscient.
They would not have agency in your system as they can't interact with you and for them everything is predetermined, and they could compute the next state of the system from the past state.
You can't but the system is impredicative enough that by recognizing this, by self-consciousness, the system effects itself toward its own favored state.

The meta level person doest just observe how the video. It observes the fact that people realize they are characters in a video and how that realization affects the choices they make. Given the initial conditions.

Should you have regrets in life? You had the choice of knowing more and be more able so it makes sense. Could things have happened differently given that they did and obviously you wanted back then for them to be different and wish they had been? Or did it happen because the conditions were set to happen?

Basically the question is whether we control our odds?
Doing anything is controlling some odds so I'd say yes. Requires increased self consciousness. Being able to imagine what is not there. Animals seem to have that capacity. Especially humans.
We can make sure that certain things don't happen by virtue of our own existence. This is our agency.
by ribosometronome | 2026-01-07 18:50:36+00:00
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-vows-us-in-charge-ven...

>"Don’t ask me who’s in charge because I’ll give you an answer, and it’ll be very controversial," Trump told a reporter.

>He was then asked to clarify, to which Trump replied, "It means we’re in charge."

Whether or not he's right, the US President's words seem to reveal an intent for the actions to result in the US being in control of Venezuela.
by ashleyn | 2026-01-07 18:50:37+00:00
It really begs the question of, how much is this obsession with controlling others' gender actually going to end up negatively impacting the US's competitive edge in higher education? Between this and firing qualified TAs who did their job, we're well beyond just impacting gender studies majors at Evergreen College. How much longer until it cuts into mathematics, merely because an author was part of the reigning administration's monster of the week?
by ixxie | 2026-01-07 18:50:37+00:00
I've recently migrated to Zen [0] and its a breath of fresh air.

I agree with comments arguing bad bookmark UX is part of the problem. Zen's approach is a vertical tab sidebar with workspaces and folders. Crucially, it distinguishes pinned and ephemeral tabs.

The approach is much more natural to me than either bookmarks and tradition tabs.

[0] https://zen-browser.app/
by mbreese | 2026-01-07 18:51:11+00:00
I wouldn’t be so sure about the LLM not helping. The LLM doesn’t need to know about the edge cases itself. Instead, you’d be relying on other client implementations knowing about the edge cases and the LLM finding the info in those code bases. Those other implementations have probably been through similar test cycles, so using an LLM to compare those implementations to yours isn’t a bad option.
by devalexwells | 2026-01-07 18:51:17+00:00
For your first question, IMO the purported advantage is mainly convention at scale. There's nothing inherently wrong with raw CSS in style tags or other authoring models (well, except CSS-in-JS at runtime...). Tailwind is one simple authoring model that works at scale without fuss and bikeshedding. Wrote up my experience with the advantages and disadvantages on this though a bit ago to be able to point to[1].

For the second question, depends on your definition of "meaningful" I guess. I doubt the original goal was to make money. There's OSS less prolific than Tailwind that makes money. Is it unreasonable for those projects to seek ways to compensate their projects?

[1] https://wlls.dev/blog/on-tailwind
by athenot | 2026-01-07 18:51:54+00:00
> You can write boring code in Scala, but in my (limited) experience, Scala developers don't want to write boring code. They picked Scala not because it was the best tool for the job, but because they were bored and wanted to flex their skills. Disregarding the other 95% of programmers that would have to work with it.

Intersting observation.

So basically Scala is to the JVM what Perl is to scripting?
by InitialLastName | 2026-01-07 18:51:56+00:00
It doesn't have to be advertising; if policies were enacted to either restrict supply (by making it more difficult to produce in favor of some perceived public good) or to raise the price by reducing (currently significant) subsidies or imposing taxes on the supply chain, that might make your fridge less likely to contain those things.

Policy and advertising both work at the margins; if something affects consumer choices such that they swing 10% to or away from a sector, that has a huge impact on the sector. Can you imagine no changes that would convince you to eat 10% more or less meat?
by zahlman | 2026-01-07 18:52:04+00:00
Yes. The problem is that the model was questions open by default, so you had exposure to the question before it could be properly be considered for inclusion. The Staging Ground fixed this, but too little (only applied to a small random sampling of questions) and way too late.

It's considered part of your responsibility, as someone answering questions, to understand the standards for closing questions (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476) and the motivations behind those standards, and to skip over (better yet, flag or vote to close) those not meeting those standards (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808).

You complain, but actually the deck is heavily stacked in your favour: there is a 5-minute grace period on answers; plus you can submit the answer by yourself, regardless of your reputation score, while typical closures (not duplicates and not questions flagged and then seen by someone on the very small moderation team) require three high-rep users (and it used to be five) to agree.

However, the question was not "nuked": the OP gets at least 9 days to fix it and submit for reconsideration before the system deletes it automatically (unless it's so bad that multiple even higher rep users take even further consensus action, on the belief that it fundamentally can't be fixed: see https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426214/when-is-it-a...).

And this overwhelmingly was not done "by mods". It's done by people who acquired significant reputation (of course, this also generally describes the mods), typically by answering many questions.
by bitwize | 2026-01-07 18:52:25+00:00
Indeed. I remember the times I needed to interact with the Massachusetts state government. State House notwithstanding, many of the Boston government district's buildings are brutalist in style, and when you go there in January or February, the winter wind really whips through the courtyard, making you legitimately feel like you're on Vogsphere instead of in Boston. Seeing some of these maps gave me flashbacks to that time.

A lone coffeeshop, barely more than a kiosk, called Cuppacoffee, is in the area. It's run by an affable fellow from Australia, a country with an excellent coffee culture, and also sells Australian style meat pies. An oasis of warmth.