MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by selridge | 2026-02-22 15:15:52+00:00
the central argument to the piece is still fundamentally silly. What truly do we know about the organization that produced the Claude desktop app, by virtue of the fact that they built it in electron?

Really truly what do we know about them based on that decision? I submit the answer is basically nothing.

Instead, we’re sort of coasting on priors and vibes about “native” tool kits being better. And that’s just catnip for people on the Internet who want to talk shit about code and don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.

If native is a stand in for better in your mind and you conclude that they made a choice that was worse because it’s not native then therefore you can conclude that they are bad somehow. But the connective tissue there is not whatever they’re designing choice is (and of course we have no vision into the actual choices). It’s the un-investigated prior. That native is good and cross platform is bad. That’s really what people are arguing in this thread.

And the only reason we don’t see that is completely fucking ridiculous is because we are also interested in talking about how AI is bad.

So everyone gets to have two bites of the cookie and nobody gets to defend an actual argument. It’s so silly that I don’t think that we can claim that the piece is actually much more moderate and subtle than everyone is reading it to be. Because that’s kind of a dastardly position too. It allows the main argument to be advanced, and whenever it is questioned, one can retreat to claims of nuance.

Instead, let’s just say that it’s silly.
by gingerBill | 2026-02-22 15:16:05+00:00
The article does no such thing and just focused on declaration syntaxes and semicolons. I can class literally any language into the three categories for declaring variables.

* Haskells are name-focused languages.
* Smalltalk is a name-focused language.
* LISPs are qualifier-focused languages.

I think you might have a blinkered viewpoint in how you have interpreted the article.
by chuckadams | 2026-02-22 15:16:53+00:00
There's also a lot of historical writing out there that's more or less the shorthand scribblings of shopkeepers, foremen, and low-level clerks, so it's not all flowery prose. There's even surviving Egyptian hieroglyphics that are more or less just work logs, and they're quite different than the painted ones in the tombs. Then there's the graffiti that's all over Pompeii.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-22 15:17:37+00:00
“To simplify greatly, the strategy of non-violence aims first to cause disruption (non-violently) in order both to draw attention but also in order to bait state overreaction. The state’s overreaction then becomes the ‘spectacular attack’ which broadcasts the movement’s message, while the group’s willingness to endure that overreaction without violence not only avoids alienating supporters, it heightens the contrast between the unjust state and the just movement.

That reaction maintains support for the movement, but at the same time disruption does not stop: the movements growing popularity enable new recruits to replace those arrested (just as with insurgent recruitment) rendering the state incapable of restoring order. The state’s supporters may grow to sympathize with the movement, but at the very least they grow impatient with the disruption, which as you will recall refuses to stop.

As support for state repression of the movement declines (because repression is not stopping the disruption) and the movement itself proves impossible to extinguish (because repression is recruiting for it), the only viable solution becomes giving the movement its demands.”

https://acoup.blog/2026/02/13/collections-against-the-state-...
by magicmicah85 | 2026-02-22 15:18:30+00:00
I think your experiment was valid, even if anecdotal. This article from January 2009 was talking about the phenomena of what it actually meant to have friends on facebook. Are you a "loser" or a "social slut"? This was at least a few years before most of the algorithms that we perceive as dangerous and enshittifying became core to the platform. The specific study they referenced (new link below) argued that there is genetic components in how we perceive our social networks.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psyched/200901/faceb...
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0806746106

Where FB and Instagram are to blame is not just being aware of the psychological impact but amplifying it make it worse, especially onto a teen audience that has no capability of distinguishing the real world from social media. To them, it's the exact same. Your online social circle may be all you have in real life, not to mention the cyber bullying, unrealistic body standards and all the other awful parts that come when you gamify and reward capturing people's attention.

I won't deny that individuals are also responsible to guard themselves and especially parents, but these platforms have been accused (and are currently in US court) over the fact that they knew about the addictive potential of their platforms and made no safeguards over improving that. As a platform owner, you are responsible for all aspects of its success and failures, its highs and lows.
by bluGill | 2026-02-22 15:19:36+00:00
That is about right for me. I scoll a little longer but as soon as it changes from people I care to follow to slop I'm gone for a couple more months. there is value in following distant friends but it isn't worth hours per day of sorting through slop to find it. When it is only every month or two the non-slop still seems to rise to the top. (But God only knows what non slop they choose not to show me) I wish there was a way to block all 'so-and-so shared' as that is where most of the slop comes from. (Ads at least I can say is how they pay the bills and so I accept a few as non-slop)
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-02-22 15:19:36+00:00
> It's also a huge problem if the maintainer leaves because typically those small systems are owned by an individual dev who set it up in the first place.

It's not uncommon that this maintainer actually wants to get away from maintaining this code, and would actually be quite willing to teach some successor how everything works.

The problem is that it is often hard to find someone who is similarly passionate about this system (often the system only keeps working because the original maintainer invests a lot of energy into keeping it alive), and is thus brutally willing to learn this system inside out. You can't force this mentality from above: either a suitable programmer has this mentality or he is typically not suitable.
by counters | 2026-02-22 15:19:48+00:00
> It's "extremely exact" but our models are not good enough. So... inexact?

That's not the common way that the phrase "inexact science" is used. All modeling involves approximations at some levels, but you wouldn't turn around and call it "inexact science."

> ... but there are still a lot of variables unaccounted for.

Such as... ?

This is the problem with throwing away colloquialisms like "inexact science." What, specifically, is a "variable" that is unaccounted for that would unlock improved forecast accuracy or to push thresholds closer to the predictability limits?

> This is why I think that ~90% accuracy for a few days in advance[1] is good enough for most people. A smartphone app won't miraculously make this better, no matter how pretty or "fun" it is.

I agree, which is why the other portions of your comment come off poorly.
by ars-machina | 2026-02-22 15:19:52+00:00
Using non-deterministic LLMs to vibe code applications is a “workshop” activity - meaning it is iterative and the greater the complexity, the more complex it is to workshop the fixes. At some stage you realize that while you’re blown away by how sophisticated the LLM is, playing go-fish with it is a larger time suck than you expected. It’s like being asked to read a friend’s term paper only to find it’s beyond saving and you just say “good job”. Now scale this up to ever evolving, highly complex systems that have to work with five-nines regularity. When we don’t need the humans to workshop the fixes, things will be different.
by selridge | 2026-02-22 15:20:22+00:00
I’m just saying that the consensus seems to be that they should’ve rebuilt what was inside electron so why not just insist that AI doesn’t work until they’ve recreated chrome?

What really is the argument and the threshold we’re proposing here?

I just think the idea that we have some sort of vision into their design process because we can look at some externally visible feature of the design is silly. Am I supposed to presume the same thing about capabilities for every shop that creates an electron app? Am I supposed to take anyone’s native app and see that as a claim that they’ve cracked coding?

These things are just orthogonal to the questions at hand. They’re just simply not related and everyone here seems to pretend like they are.
by rednafi | 2026-02-22 15:20:30+00:00
I work at one of those large companies where migration work never stops. We recently acquired a few other companies. To coalesce the platforms of multiple companies, we're rewriting a big chunk of our codebase in Go. The new platform itself is also being built from scratch in Go.

But the catch is we haven't historically been a Go shop. A lot of folks are coming from Python and Kotlin backends. So in our knowledge-sharing channel, we constantly see feature comparisons across these languages.

One thing that came up recently is how hard structured concurrency feels in Go. go func() is unstructured by default unless you wire it up with sync primitives like WaitGroup. A bunch of people also pointed out how Python’s TaskGroup or Kotlin’s coroutineScope make cancellation feel trivial. In Go, cancellation semantics require explicit context checking and manual bailouts.

We had some interesting internal discussions around this that I think would be valuable for others going through similar journey.

So I summarized some of the key points that came up and added a few examples. I’m curious how others approach structured concurrency in Go. How do you avoid the usual leaks that happen with manual plumbing?
by nchmy | 2026-02-22 15:20:45+00:00
His successor is https://languagetransfer.org, which is just a labour of love by a genius polyglot and language teacher.

So much so, in fact, that the owners of the Michel Thomas IP tried to sue him for stealing the methodology. The EFF, back when they actually did anything, shredded them.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/07/no-you-cant-pate...

Please check Language Transfer out and support him how you can.
by brabel | 2026-02-22 15:21:52+00:00
Wait, were things different as recently as 2018? I just remember when I was into concerts, circa 1998, most people just stood there unless it was a big hit playing, but a significant amount of people would always dance or just jump like crazy near the middle of the pitch. I did recently went to a punk concert from a band from the late 80s , so most people there were my age. It was just like the old times. A lot of people went crazy as this was a band that had only good songs to play! But some around me thought that they could just stand there and film with their phone. They quickly realized that they would had to move away as nearly everyone around just started jumping like maniacs, just like in the 90s . I can’t comment on the new generation though as like I said, I don’t frequent the scene much anymore and when I do the younger people only go to accompany their parents, I guess.
by Atlas667 | 2026-02-22 15:23:09+00:00
Many are protesting because of the sanctions, considered war crimes, imposed by the west onto them.

The US and its allies have attacked the currency and the availability of goods for the common Iranian. This is how regime change works. This is what is happening in Cuba as well. You starve and disenfranchise the average person to make regime change by internal bad-actors more successful.

Therefore many citizens protest against their conditions, not against their government. The misconstruing of this reality is intentional and an essential part of war mongering.

We understand this and we are smarter than the BBC thinks we are. Now ask yourself why must young Americans in the armed forces put their lives on the line for this?
by 3du4rd0v3g4 | 2026-02-22 15:23:20+00:00
I'm Eduardo Vega, the author. I'm a senior engineer specializing in identity, trust, and distributed systems, CISSP certified. I intentionally kept my name off the site and paper — the framework is public domain and I wanted the ideas to stand alone. Happy to own it publicly: this is my work, and I'm here to discuss the architecture, the gaps, and what I got wrong.
by gingerBill | 2026-02-22 15:23:30+00:00
> I never got why compilers don't have pluggable syntaxes.

Because then you've created dialects and produced the Curse of Common Lisp all over again.

Syntax matters a heck of a lot, and you want consistency and coherency across codebases of the same language, otherwise you don't have a language at all. So wanting it "pluggable" is in fact the worse possible choice you want.

It's also a naïve view to think that concrete syntax can be trivially swapped out with the abstract syntax remaining. For certain things it can usually work (like declaration syntax in the article) but for most things it cannot.
by hectormalot | 2026-02-22 15:24:05+00:00
SQLC for me has been able to replace most cases of use an ORM for. It made most of the boilerplate of using plain SQL go away, I get type safe responses, and it forces me to be more mindful of the queries I write.

In an app where we do use an ORM (Prisma), we sometimes have weird database spikes and it’s almost always an unintended heavy ORM query.

The only two things I miss in solutions like sqlc are dynamic queries (filters, partial inserts) and the lack of a way to add something to every query by default (e.g., always filtering by tenant_id.)
by microtonal | 2026-02-22 15:24:38+00:00
I'm so happy that my prime concert-going days were 1998 to 2013. People just came for the concert and were fully immersed in the music and the vibe. Though admittedly, concerts of groups that were not too well-known, but also not unknown, were the best. At more mainstream bands people would come for the hits. But as something like a Nomeansno concert everyone was locked in.

I also don't really understand what the point of constantly filming is. Some groups regularly put high-quality concerts on Youtube [1], so if you want to re-experience a similar concert afterwards you can.

I guess it's more about documenting your life's story on socials. But what's the point of documenting the life that you don't really live?

Some artists (e.g. John Zorn) forbid filming, which is IMO the best way to go. It's all about experiencing it in the moment.

[1] Bands like King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard even put pretty much every concert online now in full 4K, professionally filmed glory.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-02-22 15:24:51+00:00
"Spatial frequency spectrum" typically refers to visual elements of an object, and has nothing particularly to do with its structure. Entirely smooth surfaces banded in different colors have a "spatial frequency". Extremely irregularly surfaces have no effective spatial frequency. Objects on the same scale as, say, a human head, would have to be "rubbed" at ridiculous high rates (and repeatedly) to even get into a "frequency" range that might include pressure variations that would be considered as a "wave".

I think you're imagining an entirely too limited set of objects.
by Razengan | 2026-02-22 15:24:59+00:00
Sorry about the whataboutery but it's "funny" how chaos in non Western-allied countries gets so much coverage, even when it doesn't affect us, but shit like the people of France's New Caledonia trying to get independence doesn't:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6S1AFh88PE

I didn't even know about that, just that it was a beautiful place and looked it up one day to fantasize about a potential future vacation, and saw that news.

So Iran may have nukes and is beating up its own people.. If the coverage keeps ramping up, the news cycle echoes of Iraq and Libya all over again. Maybe Trump's planning to make it a trilogy
by snisarenko | 2026-02-22 15:25:01+00:00
Hey, this is great. And looks similiar to WaveTerm
https://www.waveterm.dev/

I currently use WaveTerm and it's pretty good. (But a bit laggy sometimes, i think it's electron based)

But both your terminal and waveterm are missing an important UX feature.

When you keep appending vertical terminals to the right (in the same view). They all get squished, to fit in the current window width.

Instead, I would love a horizontal scroll at the bottom, so I can have infinite termnial appending without having them squeezed to be smaller and smaller.
by DaedalusII | 2026-02-22 15:25:24+00:00
they have to start pivoting as their core business model of charging a human being ~$30k USD to access a data terminal is dead with AI.

now instead of having 10 human agents using 10 human terminals that costs $300k you can have 100 AI agents orchestrated into a single terminal that costs $30k

its especially dead because people can begin to develop macros and tools to create alternatives to their system using raw data models, and filters, as well as machine-tools rather than just using transformer models to process reports
by gingerBill | 2026-02-22 15:25:50+00:00
Hello again. That's not my position in the slightest. The point of the article is to express how people will shallowly and naïvely judge something. It might be naïve conception of "aesthetics" but it's not even a good one.

It has nothing to do with people disagreeing with me, I have seen people dismiss numerous languages (not just my own) based on that declaration syntax. Things like "why does Rust not use `type name = value`? why did they have to change things so much from C++?".

Do you think these people are actually serious programmers or just having shallow and dumb opinions on things they know little to nothing about?
by juliangmp | 2026-02-22 15:26:12+00:00
> The Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers, criticised the approach as “automated suspicion”. It said: “Officers must not be subjected to opaque or untested tools that risk misinterpreting unsustainable workload pressures, sickness or overtime as indicators of wrongdoing.”

Oh so when they target police officers these measures are questioned, but when police departments deploy them to spy on the general populace I guess its fine...
by nchmy | 2026-02-22 15:27:51+00:00
I learned Spanish just by being immersed and not really worrying about anything.

I mostly just focused on real, practical vocab. And the verb conjugation came with time.

I ignored verb conjugations at first - eg "He eat food."

Then learned present tense and used tricks to speak past and future tense "Tomorrow he eats food" (but you don't even need present tense for that!)

Then learned the simpler of the two ways to speak in the future - it's equivalent to "I am going to __" rather than "I will __" (in Spanish each verb needs conjugation when saying I will, but you use infinitive when saying going to.

Likewise I picked one of the past tenses (one refers to specific point in time, other is just "in the past"). Doesn't matter, in practical usage.

The rest - progressive, imperative, etc all comes with time. You don't really "need" them though. I still don't know the subjunctive tenses (which are sort of hypothetical, feeling etc) and effectively communicate with people about literally anything.

Most important of all, you just have to be humble, get rid of your pride/shame, and be willing and eager to make mistakes. I've spoken with thousands of native speakers and never had a bad experience due to lack of proficiency, even when I knew nothing. This is what most learners of language (or anything) lack, and they therefore are too afraid to ever actually practice. They need a psychologist more than a language teacher.
by 3du4rd0v3g4 | 2026-02-22 15:27:54+00:00
The moment this crystallized for me was reading about OpenClaw - runs locally, acts autonomously, and use third-party skills. Powerful concept. But as I went through the architecture I kept asking the same question: if this agent acts on my behalf, books something, sends something, deletes something — and something goes wrong — how does anyone trace that back to me? The audit trail wasn't there. Not because the builders didn't care, but because nobody has solved the underlying problem yet. That's when I stopped thinking about this as a product gap and started thinking about it as a missing layer in the infrastructure of the internet itself. That's when it became a manifesto.
by Rover222 | 2026-02-22 15:28:05+00:00
May Iranian Islamic regime fall one way or another, and let the true Persian culture flourish again.

Not that I'm a political activist, but I'm constantly disturbed that all my friends who posted non-stop about supporting Palestine have NEVER made one mention of supporting the Iranians protesting that regime.

I get that they were in theory protesting the US support of Israel, and the Iran situation is different, but... it seems like western liberals refuse to speak up against any Islamic regime. Or something like that.

Why are they always taking the side of the most oppressive, conservative cultures? I say this as a disaffected democrat, not a MAGA person.
by jaybrendansmith | 2026-02-22 15:28:17+00:00
Ironic that this post is flagged. But honestly, I probably sound like an extreme leftist in my comments. I can assure you that I am a political moderate, and would be considered a conservative in Europe because I am very pro-capitalist and pro-entrepreneur. But the political situation in the USA has swung so far to the right as to make it seem like I am a social democrat. And yes, those of us who are utterly horrified by what we are seeing and reading about are making some completely understandable noise on HN. I'm kinda horrified that more people are not, to be honest. The American experiment is a fragile thing, and as we teeter on the brink of losing it, I would hope most of us hackers would look at the world we've been able to build and understand better the foundations of freedom and democracy that keep it healthy.
by nobody9999 | 2026-02-22 15:29:04+00:00
>I can't use archive.today. I tried but gave up. Too many hassles.

What hassles have you experienced?

I use the Archive Page[0] extension which is really easy to use.

The only thing that annoys me about it is the repeated requests (starting about eight or nine months ago) to complete CAPTCHAs.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/archive-page/
by bediger4000 | 2026-02-22 15:29:37+00:00
Won't things fall apart at a lower unemployment rate? The Great Depression of he 1930s caused lower rates, and revolts almost occurred, we are told, only The New Deal saved things.

It'll probably be like other revolutions: the torch and pitchfork vendors will make a lot of money, one or two peasants strike it rich, the rest go home empty handed.