skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reading through their guidance they don't really mention anything about password strength indicators being a good or bad idea. Sure, they list out a set of rules to verify passwords by and state no OTHER arbitrary rules should be included. But that doesn't prevent you from calculating password strength based on the rules they specify ie. minimum length and complexity.

But I get that "strength" is a poor metric. It shouldn't allow "weak" passwords. It should be binary - pass or fail.

The nicest thing about strength indicators - and I reckon this is why they are copied a lot - is that they are usually real-time feedback to the user with a nice red/orange/green invalid/weak/strong indicator that updates as the user types. The best ones even go as far as show you the list of rules your password is failing to meet, again updating as you type. Much much nicer than the server-side validation form submission loop imo.

So, remove the middle concept of "weak but allowed" passwords from the strength indicator widget, I think then you get good UX that meets NIST recommendations..?
"He's expecting a locked-down tablet appliance to suit the same needs and use cases as a laptop running a general-purpose OS."

Which is a perfectly valid complaint since it doesn't need to be locked down. It's an entirely artificial limitation. An iPad pro is like selling a Ferrari that can only turn left at 30mph.

I don't understand the "buy something else" mentality. Freedom of computing on hardware you own used to be core to the tech community, but I guess it's now cooler to side with monopolists.
Dithering is so neat.
Well, more generally to HN readers.
> In fact, the closest parallel for #2 I can think of us plagiarism in an academic setting. You didn't do the work, which means you didn't actually learn the material, which means this isn't actually progress (assuming we continue to value #2 (...)

Plagiarism is a great analogy. It's great because what we call plagiarism in academic setting, in the real world work we call collaboration, cooperation, standing on the shoulders of giants, not reinventing the wheel, getting shit done, and such.

So the question really is how much we value #2? Or, which aspects of it we value, because I see at least two:

A) "I'm getting better as a programmer"

B) "I'm getting better as a someone who understands our system"

As much as I hate it, the brutal truth is, you and me are not being paid for A). The business doesn't care, and they only get so much value out of it anyway. As for B), it's tricky to say whether and when we should care - most software is throwaway, and the only thing that happens faster than that is programmers working on it changing jobs. Long-term, B) has very little value; short-term, it might benefit both business and the programmer (the latter by virtue of making the job more pleasant).

I think the jury is still out on how LLMs affect A). I feel that it's not making me dumber as a programmer, but I'm from the cohort of people with more than a decade of programming experience before even touching a language model, so I have a different style of working with LLMs than people who started using them with less experience, or people who never learned to code without them.
> The notion that consumers shouldn't be allowed to make decisions that are different than your own... THAT is user hostile.

Having the choice is fine, but if there's no way to opt-out then it's not a choice. While far from perfect the Xbox One is a good example of the video game platform that offers an opt-out. And it works, it is one of the most secure gaming consoles on the market and yet it still offers consumers the ability to create their own game software for it.
That doesn't need to be zero sum game.
Hyper-personalization: a practical UX guide
Is it being lazy though? Or is it accidentally parroting an actual good mentor?
But I'm sure there would be some people that given the following question would not be able to produce any code by themselves:

"Let's implement a function to return us the Nth fibonnaci number.To get a fib (fibonacci) number you add the two previous numbers, so fib(N)=fib(N-1)+fib(N+2). The starting points are fib(0)=1 and fib(1)=1. Let's assume the N is never too big (no bigger than 20)."

And that's a problem if they can't solve it.

OTOH about 15 years ago I heard from a friend that interviewed candidates that some people couldn't even count all the instances of 'a' in a string. So in fact not much has changed, except that it's harder to spot these kind of people.
It has ~3 results. 1 talks about making something immovable with your gaze with a spell in a fantasy setting. The other 2 are in blogspam articles of German companies, one of them is also available in several other languages, presumably machine translated.
What I also notice is that the very easily get stuck on a specific approach to solving a problem. One prompt that has been amazing for this is this:

> Act as if you're and outside observer to this chat so far.

This really helps in a lot of these cases.
Quantity has a quality all it’s own.

That is to say, as we strive for better and better tools along a single axis, at some point the social dynamics shift markedly, even though it’s just “more of the same”. Digital distribution was just better distribution, but it changed the very nature of journalism, music, and others. Writing on computers changed writing. And the list goes on.

“This is just the next thing in a long line of things” is how we technologists escape the disquieting notion that we are running more and more wild social experiments.
https://archive.md/jRglK
That's not true in general.
Prompt Kit – Core building blocks for AI apps
I agree completely with all you said however Claude solved a problem I had recently in a pretty surprising way.

So I’m not very experienced with Docker and can just about make a Docker Compose file.

I wanted to setup cron as a container in order to run something on a volume shared with another container.

I googled “docker compose cron” and must have found a dozen cron images. I set one up and it worked great on X86 and then failed on ARM because the image didn’t have an ARM build. This is a recurring theme with Docker and ARM but not relevant here I guess.

Anyway, after going through those dozen or so images all of which don’t work on ARM I gave up and sent the Compose file to Claude and asked it to suggest something.

It suggested simply use the alpine base image and add an entry to its crontab, and it works perfectly fine.

This may well be a skill issue but it had never occurred to me to me that cron is still available like that.

Three pages of Google results and not a single result anywhere suggesting I should just do it that way.

Of course this is also partly because Google search is mostly shit these days.
Absolutely agree the feeling of this is that the source code is alive. It's like riding a bike, you cannot explain it in words what it is.

I tried to convey the idea in a video here: https://youtu.be/3AqEDzAT4n8?si=aI0ZjWqXVnNDdJ4J
Already knowing the Fibonacci sequence isn't relevant:

> He was unable to explain to me how he would have implemented the Fibonacci sequence without chatGPT.

An appropriate answer could have been "First, I look up what the Fibonacci sequence is on Wikipedia..." The interviewee failed to come up with anything other than the chatbot, e.g. failed to even ask the interviewer for the definition of the sequence, or come up with an explaination for how they could look it up themselves.
Did you try any of the OKlab color space implementations for calculating? https://bottosson.github.io/posts/oklab/
Reminds me of a Django project rewrite I got to work on very early in my career. I was able to convince the lead to stave off JavaScript because I could barely read Python at the time. I did however fail to convince my colleagues to write unit tests.
That’s a cool tip; I usually just give up and start a new chat.
I do indeed continue to disagree with you. Do you normally find that just repeating your stupid opinions convinces people? If so, you should know that it is just because they get tired of you.

BTW, swearing and insulting people doesn't give you a moral high ground.
I agree with Cursor
Like, dropping this in the middle of the conversation to force the model out of a "local minimum"? Or restarting the chat with that prompt? I'm curious how you use it to make it more effective.
Capitalists in a capitalist country controlling the country? Color me shocked
Exactly. If there is a tool that can do a lot of the low level work for us, we are free to do more of the higher level tasks and have higher output overall. Programming should be just a means to an end, not the end itself.
Remember Jobs coining the phrase "Post PC era". Good times.

There was a period of about two, maybe three years where you saw nothing but tablets outdoors.

Now it's very rare for me to see someone tapping away at an iPad out in the wild, all I see are laptops.
But I’d argue they aren’t corner cases.

Most people I know with bad credit aren’t desperate for money. At least not educated, highly paid ones like nurses.

Most just ignore their financial problems in the hope they go away.

Not to mention nurse demand outstrips supply, so they have options and can certainly turn down bad offers.
Bureaucracies are about processes.

I do not live in the US, and I don't follow all that's happening too closely, but from what I hear it seems that most of DOGE actions are about eliminating people and cutting budgets, which may be a valid way to save money. This has nothing to do with bureaucracy.

If, to complete a process, you needed approval by three people and you still need the same approvals, the bureaucracy is untouched -- it will just take longer without people and money.
> started the whole movement or whatever you'd call it for this push towards privacy

I don't really like this framing because it makes it sound like if you care for privacy you are some form of fringe advocate.

We should always try to reframe:

Would you be ok with government employees or law enforcement indiscriminately opening your letters? Ask any senior and the answer is a clear no.

So why are we discussing this as if privacy is entirely optional as soon as you change medium from written letters to emails, sms, instant message?
Why does it even need to be that type of robot, a conveyor that has items on it, but its a mesh, a camera looks, and if something can be sorted just use compressed air to move it to a collection area/bin. Put an electromagnet at the start of the conveyor that can move on a gantry to another bin.

Why's everything gotta have arms and graspers it's so inefficient.

Robots aren't climbing trees or chasing food. They don't need tails, either.
Progress is more than just simplistic effort reduction. The attitude of more efficient technology = always good is why society is quickly descending into a high-tech dystopia.
I haven't seen it mentioned here, but one other classic trick for hamburger menu is to use a checkbox, and let CSS handle the rest.

Something like:

<header class="main-header">
<input class="hamburger" id="hamburger-action" type="checkbox" />
<label for="hamburger-action">Some icon here</label>
<nav class="main-navigation">My menu here</nav>
</header>

and then use the `:checked` CSS selector to display or not the hamburger menu, you can see it working in my (very barebone :D) website [1]. Note that this implementation is not keyboard-navigable because the input is not visible, I should fix it someday.

[1] https://www.marc-monchablon.fr/
Python Developer Learns C++
A billionaire's "onerous regulations" are out consumer protections
Indeed, taking the work of others, stripping the license and putting it on a photocopier is the most efficient way of "work". This is progress, not a problem.
Moralist bias:

Then compilers are a clutch and we all should be programming in assembly, no matter the project size.
> In modern times I do not think there's any real comparable examples

There are real comparable examples, from South America and Africa, and America herself. You won't hear about them much, partly because they break important narratives and partly because often the US went to extraordinary lengths to smear, coup and/or murder those people.

Examples:

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton
FWIW The Critic is associated with the British conservative movement so there is definitely a leaning to the political right

(This is a comment on the magazine that published TFA, not TFA itself)
While I haven't been there, I know of it from Alan Furst's novels (which I recommend) -- he writes novels set before and during WWII and likes to often set them in places like Thessaloniki/Salonika in Greece and Trieste in Italy -- places which were on the border between two (or more) cultures and which lost a lot of their multicultural status due to the war.
Sheesh, I didn't expect my post to go viral. Little explanation:

I downloaded and run Cursor for the first time when this "error" happened. Turned out I was supposed to use agent instead of inline Cmd+K command because inline has some limitations while agent not so much.

Nevertheless, I was surprised that AI could actually say something like that so just in case I screenshotted it - some might think it's fake, but it's actually real and makes me think if in future AI will start giving attitudes to their users. Oh, welp. For sure I didn't expect it to blow up like this since it was all new to me so I thought it maybe was an easter egg or just a silly error. Turned out it wasn't seen before so there we are!

Cheers
You say that as if it’s a bad thing.

Not all writing needs to be as dry as a technical bulletin.
No, what you say is just what you want to be true. A comforting lie that is being repeated in various forms.

Listen to what those people say, watch what they do. They literally say they want to cause harm. When their politicians gets insulting or cause harm, they get more votes instead of less. Instead of listening and watching, you knee jerk sanitize it, use euphemisms and basically gaslight everyone else. I do actually read and listen to what conservatives actually say and write.

It is in project 2025. It is online. It is in conservative journals and articles. Talk to them in person long enough personally and they will tell you. It is the same thing with trade war. It is in Trumps rhetoric. And it was the same thing with abortions - it was totally paranoid to say they plan to remove protection for women ... until they actually did it. Again and again, their opinions and plans are sanitized and euphemized away. And then they get benefit of doubt no democrat or leftist is ever getting.

There were enough low tax republican politicians who lost against Trump. When centrist democrats adopt republican plans, the previously cheered on plans are suddenly bad and republicans who keep supporting them are suddenly ennemies too. And the reason is that it is not the economics or taxes.

---------------------------------------------

Also, speaking about empathy, why is there consistent expectation that empathy flows exactly one way? You are demanding that I am emphatetic to people who see empathy as weakness on an ideological level. And who are never ever asked to return the favor.
> whole reason for the "AI epidemic" is that people are avoiding effort like the plague

sounds like you're against corporate hierarchy too? or would you agree that having underlings do stuff for you at a reasonable price helps you achieve more?
Perhaps Cursor has learned the concept of shakedowns. It will display stolen code only if you upgrade the subscription or sign a minerals deal.
Tesla every time. Who would want a crappy Ford?
> effectiveness is a function of effort

In other words, the Industrial Revolution was a mistake?
Haha I just came up with that off the hip (never heard of, seen, or even contemplated sorting garbage before) because the idea that this needs articulation and graspers is the height of "we're VC funded and don't care about anything except runway". Laughable.
I'm curious, do you maybe have an example for each of the "legal services work processing" and "accounting workflows" that LibreOffice can't handle?
I worked early in my career with a developer who printed out every part of the codebase to review and learn it. He viewed text search tools, file delineations, and folder structures as crutches best avoided.
Catching Grace
Pangolin: Tunneled Mesh Reverse Proxy Server with Identity and Access Control
comments look like a call for a hit
Insecurity is not just a part of growing up, it's a part of growing old as well, a feeling that our skills and knowledge will become increasingly useless as our technologies advance.

Humans are tool users. It is very difficult to pick a point in time and say, "it was here that we crossed the Rubicon". Was it the advent of spoken word? Written word? Fire? The wheel? The horse? The axe? Or in more modern times, the automobile, calculator, or dare I say the computer and the internet?

"With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism."

― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Are we at battle with LLMs or with humanity itself?
There's nothing wrong with that. But once the interviewer tells you that the next number is the sum of the previous two, starting with 0 and 1, any programmer with a pulse should be good to go.
Yep, I still can not understand how programmers unable to do fizzbuzz still have a sw engineer career. I have never worked with one like that, but I have seen so many of them on interviews.
My god you are thick.

The point was that risks can be managed.
bring back the 2.2.3 theme, in the distribution, officially, and stop the flatness disease.
Ask HN: Anyone building open source OpenSearch serverless?
Apple is taking it from all sides
For Claude, set up a custom prompt which should have whatever you want + this:

"IMPORTANT: Do not overkill. Do not get distracted. Stay focused on the objective."
The Edgee Component Registry for WebAssembly at the Edge
The issue is, glib understanding replaces actual application.

Its one thing to have the AI work through the materials and explain it.

Its another thing to have lost a lot of the background information required to sustain that explanation.

Greater productivity, is of course, a subjective measure. If that's all that matters, then being glib is perfectly acceptable. But, the value of that productivity may change in a different context - for example, I find it very difficult to go back to AI-generated code some months later, and understand it - unless I already took the time earlier to discern the details.
Hmm this gave me an interesting project idea: a coding assitant that talks shit about your lack of skills and low code quality.
It has nothing to do with capitalism. You can have capitalism and society that is aware that having good public services pays-off, as overall spending on schools, security, etc. will be smaller if done at the whole country level.

In the USA it is not that easy to achieve, as, historically, it is not a single country but a union of "states" that is countries, so the main boss should not interfere too much with local bosses and force on them particular "federal" laws.
I switched to hatch last year for many projects, its been quite pleasant.

Has anyone used both hatch and uv, and could comment on that comparison?

EDIT: quick google gives me these opinions[1]

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/1gaz3tm/hatch_or_uv...
I'm still cycling through wayland and x11, and I also do get 1.5 hours more runtime on average on my old 2nd gen t14s with x11+xmonad+no compositor. It's one of the main reasons I'm struggling to move permanently, as I really don't see any advantage from my perspective as I don't use any desktop environment or feature that would make a compositor actually useful. The only thing I do notice occasionally are black borders due to shadow dropdowns in gtk4 programs that don't respect the system theme I've set.
Nobody is telling JS developers that Rust will save them, chill.
Yeah I'm not sure what they meant by 2008... After 9/11, things werent optimistic.

Coming up to YEAR 2000, the future felt here. I remember watching the TV shows in preparation for YEAR 2000. Then the future never really happened like predicted. We didn't wear silver suits in 2001.
Thankfully it is becoming more popular to call out racism and sexism like "DEI".
> These predators aren't scared of name and shame.

There are exceptions. See the ongoing kerfuffle over "DOGE" employee lists.
Yes indeed, that is a perfectly reasonable approach to take, especially in the world of computing where rigorous attention to detail is often rewarded with extraordinary results.

I have very early (and somewhat fond) memories of reviewing every single index card, every single hole in the punch-tape, every single mnemonic, to ensure there were no undiscovered side-effects.

However, there is a point where the directory structure is your friend, you have to trust your colleagues ability to understand the intent behind the structure, and you can leverage the structure to gain great results.

Always remember: software is a social construct, and is of no value until it is in the hands of someone else - who may, or may not, respect the value of understanding it...
JPMorgan's prediction: Tesla will report worst quarterly deliveries in 3 years
Soda bottles can be washed and nearly directly used by 3d printers. Spiral cut the bottle, Thermoform it into a continuous cylinder (it folds it in and heats it to make it solid, then immediately fed to the printer or spooled.

If plastic recycling was actually being done and was profitable I don't think there'd be a Pacific garbage patch and pfas in my heart right now.
ZFS in the Real World: Mistakes Made, Lessons Learned and Future Plans [video]
The Linux Foundation is neither a project nor open source. It's an industry trade group. I don't think there is any feasible comparison.
Please not. Python core is suffering from corporate capture and ruins everything it touches.

The PSF would probably dig up some old posts from the uv authors, defame them, take the code and make it worse.
Emergent Features Using Prompts and Context in UIs with LLMs [video]
Mozilla's greatest contribution to the web could well end up being a fork of Firefox with an accompanying standard for html and CSS which halts the march of SPAs and curtails interactivity, cookies, etc. Call it HTML4+.

It wouldn't need hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve, and if it took off it'd hurt Google and their ilk massively.

At the moment the Faustian pact is that they act as a competition fig leaf in the browser space: Google can point to a nearly-as-good browser and say "look, we don't control everything" while they steam ahead setting standards that largely benefit themselves. The reason they can do this is the sheer capital intensity of the exercise: nobody can keep up or catch up. So a captive competitor makes perfect sense.

Shedding that capital intensity - by means of devising a simpler to implement, slower moving standard - is the only real escape hatch. Mozilla won't get anywhere by begging forever, and it'll lose its character if it doesn't keep it's nonprofit status.
Get yourself a retro computer and you can appreciate all that joy with renewed vigour! :)

I regularly return to my old 80's 8-bit machine (Oric Atmos, FOREVER!) just so that I can remind myself how great we've got it in this day and age of near-infinite memory, the network-is-the-computer, and endless pixels for days. Nothing sharpens the mind stronger than a misplaced RTS or a failure to budget for room on the stack ..