skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Im not saying LLMs are not impressive or useful — Im pointing out that corporations behind commercial AI models are capitalising on our emotional response to natural language prediction. This phenomenon isnt new – Weizenbaum observed it 60 years ago, even with the simplest of algorithms like ELIZA.

Your example actually highlights this well. AI excels at language, so it’s naturally strong in teaching (especially for language learning ;)). But coding is different. It’s not just about syntax; it requires problem-solving, debugging, and system design — areas where AI struggles because it lacks true reasoning.

There’s no denying that when AI helps you achieve or learn something new, it’s a fascinating moment — proof that we’re living in 2025, not 1967. But the more commercialised it gets, the more mythical and misleading the narrative becomes
While I agree the leap to linking geopolitics to LibreOffice's success is a stretch you are misrepresenting the American position.

The President of the United states, its commander in chief, explicitly did not rule out military action when discussing his desire to bring Greenland and the Panama canal under direct American control. The rhetoric of making Canada the "51st state" while less explicit a threat is still one. Greenlanders, Panamanians and Canadians all clearly see these as threats.
It always shouts "curated inauthentic bookshelf" to me.

Every book and item has been carefully selected to produce a specific image about the person.

I just use a Severance themed overlay :)
This is absurd. You quite clearly don’t experience “blue bubble” envy yourself, because you’ve so obviously corrupted the sentiment, and argument.

Nobody is saying “gosh, macOS is so damned unstable, but I’ve gotta use it, because…blue bubbles on my iPhone?

You’ve just read some story about a company you already hate and are parroting it.
100% this. I think we should start producing independent evaluations of these tools for their usefulness, not for whatever made up or convoluted evaluation index the OpenAI, Google or Anthropic throw at us.
> It feels so ridiculous to me that a total stranger can send an iMessage message to me, including some attachment, and my phone will process that message in the kernel.

ridiculous ?

Some good years ago, maybe. Since then, it is business as usual.

As long as the majority believes that Apple is secure, nothing to see here. /s
Probably too slow, easy to detect and shoot down.
Indeed JavaFX is better than ever ;-)
See https://www.jfx-central.com/ for many example applications, libraries, tutorials, etc.
Where would you like it to be distributed for an old GameBoy game?
I was under the impression that you do "-" for hyphen, "--" for En dash, and "---" for Em dash. IIRC, LaTeX (or maybe the editor, it has been some time) even helpfully changes that for you to the correct dash.
Is it fair to say that both "Say 'an'" and "Say 'astronomer'" output features would be present in this case, but say "Say 'an'" gets more votes because it is start of the sentence, and once it is sampled "An" further votes for "Say 'astronomer'" feature
MS office has been removing features, ruining the UI and adding bloat. No wonder people are jumping ship.
I absolutely love Tailscale and can’t imagine living without it today, but that’s what scares me. If they get acquired or just reach enshitification velocity we really need someone else to step up. I know wireguard is OSS and we have headscale. We’re in a good position for that someone to take over.
It has two! — http.client and urllib.request — and they are really usable.

Lots of people just like requests though as an alternative, or for historical reasons, or because of some particular aspect of its ergonomics, or to have a feature they’d rather have implemented for them than have to write in their own calling code.

At this stage it’s like using jQuery just to find an element by css selector (instead of just using document.querySelector.)
There very well might be but authoritarianism has always hated individual freedom and tried to destroy it.
I have a theory that echoes the surprising premise of the well known HN-famous article "The optimum amount of fraud is not zero" that states "The optimum amount of poverty, to governments, is not zero."

It seems to me that if governments deliver too well for their citizens, if the citizens because too wealthy, if they are too well off, then they will begin to demand even more. This would cause problems for governments, problems that also include the citizens having power and sight to realize the abundant shortcomings of their governments, and the means to do away with them for something that works "better".

So my theory is that the stable system of "liberal democracies" seeks an equilibrium position of "not too much abundance" in order to preserve itself.

Just a theory, I'm not a historian and don't know any historical smoking-guns for this - besides the experience that governments seem to not deliver excellence, even when they could, and instead focus on policies that are often surprisingly ineffective.

I don't discount incompetence, but I like to have at least one alternate theory. Moreover, incompetence is not "constructive" in that it doesn't let you actually design a solution or understand the problem. It provides no real insight. It is, therefore, the kind of explanation that governments intent of continuing to deliver under-adundance would probably want you to believe in place of what my theory proposes is the truth.

I'm sure some political-economists could comment on this - as long as they are sufficiently lacking in woke to retain their critical skills.
When digital cameras first appeared, their initial generations produced low-resolution, poor-quality images, leading many to dismiss them as passing gimmicks. This skepticism caused prominent companies, notably Kodak, to overlook the significance of digital photography entirely. Today, however, film photography is largely reserved for niche professionals and specialized use-cases.

New technologies typically require multiple generations of refinement—iterations that optimize hardware, software, cost-efficiency, and performance—to reach mainstream adoption. Similarly, AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), and Machine Learning (ML) technologies are poised to become permanent fixtures across industries, influencing everything from automotive systems and robotics to software automation, content creation, document review, and broader business operations.

Considering the immense volume of new information generated and delivered to us constantly, it becomes evident that we will increasingly depend on automated systems to effectively process and analyze this data. Current challenges—such as inaccuracies and fabrications in AI-generated content—parallel the early imperfections of digital photography. These issues, while significant today, represent evolutionary hurdles rather than permanent limitations, suggesting that patience and continuous improvement will ultimately transform these AI systems into indispensable tools.
I made it in v0
But what about afterwards? You move to a more performant language or just accept that you're now invested in JS?
I visited the hardest math class
A photo album of space age consumer electronics
Who are security teams? At which size company hires those? Is having a security team driven by copmliance to get certaion certificates that required by vendoes? Did the product you built addressed the observability need, if so, why it wasn't used much?
Thinkpad line from Lenovo. Amazing build quality, and you can order them with Linux.

I have a P1 Gen 7 and it’s fantastic. It feels premium, and it’s thin, light, powerful, has good connectivity and 4K OLED touch screen. I’d take it over Mac hardware any day.
LLMs are not a miracle, they are a type of tool. The hype I am angry about is the “black magic? Well, clearly that can solve every problem” mode of thought.
For me it’s been the same since 2017: TypeScript and Node. I occasionally need extra libraries for something highly specific like XTerm.js. I have so many personal libraries that cover so many common and edge cases that I can generally just reach into my personal library for 95% of what comes up and be running within 3 hours with a solution that scales well and achieves higher performance than the big frameworks.
I think it depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Are you trying to fit in or stand out?
Are you a doctor?

I am today
I anonymized the code:

def start_new(name, config) do
# Logging set up
Supervisor.start_child(
name,
{ HandlerModule, config }
)
end

def replace_supervisor(name, config) do
Supervisor.terminate_child(name, HandlerModule) # Success
Supervisor.delete_child(name, HandlerModule) # Failure
start_new(name, config)
end

That is exact code. Success and failure were logged. Also (from Erlang's documentation)

> one_for_one - If one child process terminates and is to be restarted, only that child process is affected. This is the default restart strategy.

In terminate child you can read that (once again Erlang).

> If the supervisor is not simple_one_for_one, Id must be the child specification identifier. The process, if any, is terminated and, [[unless it is a temporary child, the child specification is kept by the supervisor]]. The child process can later be restarted by the supervisor.

https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/stdlib/supervisor.html#termi...

So yeah, Elixir documentation is wrong.
> but there’s no reason why a thoughtfully engineered Win7 clone DE on a lightweight Linux

Why not a "thoughtfully engineered Win7 clone Desktop Environment" (without Linux :-) ). By the way: people are working on ReactOS:

> https://reactos.org/
About section:

> Formerly, I was a pickup artist (as featured in the book The Game) and professional gambler.

(probably soon to be purged from the site)
-, --, --- is, IIRC, how it is done in LaTex and would be exceedingly simple to do on a typewriter. That being said, to break up sentences I use " -- " because I think it looks nicer than "---". I'll go now ;)
I guess some may view it that way, but like you say narcissistic.

To me it's a mutually beneficial arrangement, de-risks the continent.

For the US ensures long term alignment and influence avoiding someone else filling the vacuum (EU militaries were weak and fragmented). For Europe common alignment and influence ensures some unity. Remember the continent was consistently fragmented and at war before this, it's hard to imagine in current times with the EU.
https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?currentFeatureI...

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?currentFeatureI...
Sigh. I don't get the sentiment and the whole debate here. The author is clearly nitpicking (he is the first person who uses messages after all). But honestly, complaints about "arrange" screens button?

Nevertheless, he is probably right. Only the people who went through working on Windows, Linux both on cheap and expensive machines while dealing with all the "baggage" these environments bring can tolerate MacOS with leniency. I will never come back to anything else until I see a competitive offer from just anyone because what Apple offers is:

* Fast, silent, extremely energy efficient devices with excellent screens and audio.

* The font rendering. I honestly can't believe people who professionally work with text all their lives never mention it here. MacOS had and continues to have the best fonts and font rendering that is.

* Solid build that lasts (I own MacBook Pro and MS Surface Book 2 both from 2019 so I see how they age).

* A device that is ready to work when you open a lid or touch a keyboard button without any "waking up from sleep/hibernation" or freezing due to buggy video drivers and inability to work with GPU in hybrid mode OUT-OF-THE-BOX in 2025.

The above-mentioned is more than enough for me to tolerate any MacOS issues and the ones mentioned in the article are just laughable.

Apple offers you the full package that allows cross-device integration while Win/Linux users still rely on the Google stack or other third party "workarounds". Yes, no surprises here -- owning the hardware and software stack is a massive advantage.
My take is that if you expect current LLMs to be some near perfect, near-AGI models, then you're going to be sorely disappointed.

If that disappoints you to such a degree that you simply won't use them, you might find yourself in a position some years ahead - could be 1...could be 2...could be 5...could be 10 - who knows, but when the time comes, you might just be outdated and replaced yourself.

When you closely follow the incremental improvements of tech, you don't really fall for the same hype hysteria. If you on the other hand only look into it when big breakthroughs are made, you'll get caught in the hype and FOMO.

And even if you don't want to explicitly use the tools, at least try to keep some surface-level attention to the progress and improvements.

I honestly believe that there are many, many senior engineers / scientists out there that currently just scoff at these models, and view them as some sort of toy tech that is completely overblown and overhyped. They simply refuse to use the tools. They'll point to some specific time a LLM didn't deliver, roll their eyes, and call it useless.

Then when these tools progress, and finally meet their standards, they will panic and scramble to get into the loop. Meanwhile their non-tech bosses and executives will see the tech as some magic that can be used to reduce headcount.
I remember when Google results called out the ads as distinct from the search results.

That was necessary to build trust until they had enough power to convert that trust into money and power.
You are absolutely right. But why would anyone do that? That doesn't make sense and it is bizarre that you would even put in the time to post this.

What you do need to do is document how the function is intended to behave. If, for example, your function opens a file, you need to describe to other developers what is expected to happen when the file cannot be open.

"The compiler won't let me forget to handle the error" is not sufficient to answer that. That you need to handle the error is a reasonable assumption, but upon error... Should it return a subsequent error? Should it try to open a file on another device? Should it fall back to using a network resource? That is what you need to answer.

And tests are the way to answer it. It is quite straightforward to do so: You write a test that sees the file open failure occur and check that the expected result happened (it returned the right error, it returned the right result from the network resource, etc.). Other programmers can then read your example to understand what is expected of the function. This is as necessary in Rust as it is in Go as it is in any other language you are conceivably going to be using. Otherwise, once you are gone, how will anyone ever know what it is supposed to do? As changes occur through the ongoing development cycle, how will they ever ensure that they haven't broken away from your original intent?

So, once you've written the necessary tests – those that are equally necessary in Rust as in any other language – how, exactly, are you going to forget to handle the error? You can't! It's impossible.

I don't know why this silly thought persists. It is so painfully contrived. If one is a complete dummy who doesn't understand the software development process perhaps they can go out of their way to make it a problem, but if one is that much of dummy they won't be able to grasp the complexities of Rust anyway, so...
Well, that's the problem - too many people motivated only by the paycheck/career. It used to be different, people without deep technical background were largely doing things they are more competent in, and the software, for all it's troubles, without idealising the past, was a few notches higher quality than today. Myself and a lot of people I know, became engineers because we liked working with the machines. Not because someone offered us a lot of money, that came as a consequence. I couldn't imagine for example retraining myself e.g. to become a lawyer if I had a guaranteed 2x the income I have now. It must be horrible for people who force themselves like that. More than once I've heard frontend "engineers" complaining bitterly about supposed 'unpredictability' of computers, whenever they accidentally switched off some environment variable or something to that order. Just do what you enjoy, money will follow.
It's that we open Hacker News right after we wake up and post comments before our brains are in full power, hence the mistakes. Coffee is not a necessity, but most people drink it. I believe it's not exactly about caffeine but letting the brain 30 minutes or so to "wake up" to stop making mistakes. At least, that's how it works in my case.
It's curious how the author mentions iMessage. No Apple user among my friends in Europe uses that. Zero. I guess in the US this is very much not so.

It's all WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal here, nowadays. I.e. they wouldn't know about bugs in iMessage as they never open it.

I'd be curious to hear about other regions of the world. Do people there use iMessage?
I think prokaryotic bacteria can form biofilms which seems like one step on the road to multicellularity, but that's more like a community, and iiuc most biofilms these days at least contain eukaryotic yeasts. I don't know of any actually-properly-multicellular prokaryotes, but maybe I need to read up?
It's crazy that marketing hasn't worked out that quality and reliability can be spun as a feature. In fact, I remember with OS X, that was the baseline word-of-mouth feature when the comparison was made with Windows at the time.

"It just works"
I really wish everyone would stop entertaining these borderline crackpot hypotheticals that all rely on the notion of “those damn Apple dummies not getting it!”

It’s absurd.
Sure, more and better of everything, with engineering, including QA, calling the shots on what's sufficient to ensure great quality.
Oh hey, I have seen your post.
Making a script download the dependencies on its own is an interesting challenge.
I am a big fan of inline script metadata in Python, and I was an early adopter when pipx implemented PEP 722 (the precursor to PEP 723), but I made my version for fun.

https://pip.wtf/ was on HN not that long ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38383635).
I had my own take on it that used virtual environments, supported Windows, and was d a free license: https://github.com/dbohdan/pip-wtenv.
Brilliant Swarms – The future of America's missile defense
Saying you're planning to take over (part of) another state's territory, and that we'll "go as far as we have to" to do it, doesn't sound all that peaceful to me.

And people seem to be learning to take Trump's insane talk seriously. So no, I don't think the connection with LibreOffice downloads is a "load of tosh", but just one example of a larger shift.
En dashes, I'll grant you, are pointless. Those can go away.

However, em dashes are a different case. The main reason why it's desirable to use em dashes (beside convention) is for clarity of purpose. The hyphen is already a very overloaded character; they're extensively used to denote ranges and link compound words. Importantly, both of those usages do not correspond to pauses in spoken language. If you're voicing a hyphen you're supposed to barrel on through it. An em dash is much closer to a parenthesis, comma, or semicolon. It's a meaningful break in the sentence, in the way that a hyphen isn't.

Now, if it were up to me I'd choose a different character to replace em dashes (maybe underscores), but that's a separate argument.
Generally I find that most uses of x macros are obviated by an increasingly powerful constexpr.
to downvoters: you can think its not fair that apple effectively holds control of your device, true, but the only way you can change things is to not buy the products. If you buy it, you accept how it is. vote with your wallets, not in some internet forum
uv add --script wordlookup.py httpx

# /// script
# requires-python = ">=3.13"
# dependencies = [
# "httpx",
# ]
# ///

import httpx

That seems pretty redundant. Why can't UV just infer the dependencies from the import statements?
Sure, as long as it keep selling $130B worth of GPUs each year. Which is entirely predicated on the capital investment in Machine Learning attracting revenue streams that are still imaginary at this point.
> If that's the latter then...

It's a good thing I asked specifically about built-in types in a particular system, and didn't ask about comparisons between operators in different languages.

> For former - yes they do change, not often, but they do. Even Elixir is right now raising warnings that `-0.0` and `+0.0` will not be equal...

Sure, that's a change to optional behavior to comparison of floating-point zeros. That doesn't change how equality testing, addition, subtraction, or -if available- modular arithmetic works.

As I said:

> It's always well worth your time to learn the rules for commonly-used, bedrock parts of a language, major libraries, and runtime systems that you intend to use. Bedrock parts don't substantially change, because if they did, they would invalidate every program ever written against those parts.
In general LLMs have made many areas worse. Now you see people writing content using LLMs without understanding the content itself, it becomes really annoying especially if you don't know this and ask the question "did you perhaps write this using LLM" and get the "yes" answer.

In programming circles it's also annoying when you try to help and you get fed garbage outputted by LLMs.

I belive models for generating visuals (image, video sound generation) is much more interesting as it's area where errors do not matter as much. Though the ethicality of how these models have been trained is another matter.
Well, you can only win playing the stock market (Wall St. is Cook's only real customer) for so long while your products deteriorate. Financializing Apple and eliminating its technical prowess opens the door for the someone else with contemporary technical strength to take Apple's users.
I certainly wouldn't, the ribbon has much better discoverability than tiny toolbars. And Office 2003 performed reasonably well with HDDs anyway.
Trump pushes for near-total control of Ukraine's minerals and energy
This is the exact reason why Putin invaded Ukraine.

Ukraine started to get closer to European Union: more transparent, more democratic, less corrupt and richer.

When Russians saw that it was possible in Ukraine, they would get rid of Putin. So he invaded.
I strongly suspect that you've never been a landlord. Nor a particularly perceptive tenant in rental housing. Nor seen any police/tenant/landlord cases.

Plus, the policy goal of allowing small-scale stuff like ADU's is to encourage people to become landlords. "Your tenant has total right" rules have the opposite effect.
I see it as just the builder pattern that's pretty common in languages like Java. `container` is constructing the builder itself and eventually `terminal` (or other commands) use the state that has been incrementally built up in the builder to actually do something with the container.
People taking with their mouths full in movies really annoys me. Firstly it's disgusting, and secondly the sound mixing is usually terrible anyway, so I can't hear a word they're saying either. I can see the scene is set at dinner from the food on the table. I don't need to see and hear the dinner as it sloshes about in the protagonist's mouth.
Evolving Our Approach to DEI