skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I always get the impression that people spend more time writing Forth interpreters, rather than writing Forth programs to solve actual problems.
One man's ongoing journey coaxing an LLM to write Common Lisp code. Bonus "AI generated" poem by Stanislaw Lem, and a five-paragraph story actually generated by LLM: "The Unspeakable Syntax: A Tale of Lispian Horror." [3] Suprisingly entertaining.

Posts so far:

[1] https://funcall.blogspot.com/2025/03/vibe-coding-in-common-l...

[2] https://funcall.blogspot.com/2025/03/vibe-coding-in-common-l...

[3] https://funcall.blogspot.com/2025/03/ai-silliness.html

[4] https://funcall.blogspot.com/2025/03/vibed-into-non-function...
Recession is coming before end of 2025, corporate CFOs say
My kid did the exact same thing with the phrase "be careful!" in the same intonation I used

Except in her case it meant "Witness me!!, as I do something exceedingly dangerous!", or alternatively "Look at the aftermath of this dangerous thing I just did, see the blood?"
The word "woke" was first used in the 1930s, and critical theory began its intellectual popularity in the late 1800s. Marx and Clausewitz were early adopters of critical theory, but Engels, Gramsci, Hegel, and many others who popularized the movement did their work in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In other words, critical theory predates "woke" by a century.

The word "woke" only attached to critical theory long after both had come about.
Isn't a big factor in US trade deficits the US being a richer country than most of its trade partners?
Yes. It is still locked in the vaults of the temple
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padmanabhaswamy_Temple
“Inverted pyramid …”

I developed a writing format that I call an “iceberg article”:

https://john.kozubik.com/pub/IcebergArticle/tip.html

… which qualifies as an inverted pyramid but with some additional attributes.
Not only that, after X months of not paying the landlord can request an eviction, and from the moment the eviction is requested to the moment its executed the government pays the rent to the landlord (I believe 3 is reasonable for X, but it can be higher or lower).

I'm a renter and always have been a renter, but it has always been crazy to me that the cost of people without a house is dumped on the unlucky landlord.
If the decision is that this cost must be put on society, at least it should be spread among all citizens/landlords (e.g. with a tax on rent).

Not having the government paying while waiting for the eviction is the same as now: the government can just take ages.

The risk to landlords when the renters doesn't uphold the contract needs to be limited. This is also the reason why an insurance would be an inferior solution: there is still no incentive for the government to intervene fast.

We might find out that it's preferable to build social housing rather than paying rent to landlords, and the government starts actually doing something about it
It is a tech-centric version of "I alone can fix it".
There's also a strategic imperative for chip production in the US that isn't cutting edge; lots of stuff depends on basic ICs that were in short supply during COVID and having more production of stuff that doesn't need to be 2nm is a good thing for the US.
>The next step is engineering a hydrophobic coating or other biodegradable packaging that offers an adequate level of resistance to accidental scratching for a particular application

then you're back to square one. you might as well just make the whole thing out of that material
How complex is the system? Can a local model or the agent itself be used instead?
I mean that seems like a methodology that would run a heavy risk of sampling bias. This is literally people who have chosen to switch to software engineering, and who are currently software engineers.
Interesting study, but I think this framing is a bit too pessimistic. AI isn’t replacing critical thinking, it's shifting where we need to apply it. We'll be spending less time on monotonous tasks and more time architecting projects, validating AI outputs, and creatively solving problems AI can't handle. The real skill will be knowing how to leverage AI effectively by planning, prompting, debugging, and critically evaluating its results. It’s a new kind of critical thinking, not a decline.

However, the study highlights a potential trap: passively offloading critical thinking tasks to AI could hinder development. For younger generations especially, proactively cultivating strong critical thinking skills is essential to truly harness AI's power. It's about augmenting their abilities, not outsourcing them.
If that becomes reality, what would you expect the US companies to do?
One time I had a Pyrex casserole dish in the oven under a pie to catch any overflow. When the pie was done, I was in the middle of washing dishes, so I pulled the casserole dish out of the oven and dropped it straight in the dish water. Boom.
There are the same number of COBOL devs and embedded driver devs. Guess we better switch hardware away from using embedded drivers.
Posts like this are why I wish there was a way to downvote stories. It doesn’t deserve to be flagged — it’s not spam or malicious or even misleading. It’s merely intellectually titillating garbage.
You can set the temperature to zero in most APIs, which gives deterministic output. The only problem with that is some models produce inferior results with zero temperature, including lots of slop and AI-isms.
Never knew, this temple also has so much gold. Thanks for sharing
And you don't have anything to hide because the government is not authoritarian, the argument continues, in theory if not in practice. Our governments are good and righteous and will not misuse the surveillance data in any way.
IIRC there was a significant decrease in late 2024.

The biggest gas distributor in Austra had a contract that basically couldn't be cancelled. However, the contract specified that the Russians deliver the gas, and the Russians did that through Uraine, on a contract that expired late in 2024. At that point the Russian exports to Austra dropped to approximately zero, and I haven't heard any complaints from Austria.

There are some other customers (more willing than the Austrians) who also got transit through Ukraine, their purchases also decreased drastically at the same time.
I'm not sure about any of these questions, I am just pointing out how wrong it is to suggest that a -60% economic setback is historically fatal. The economy of Myanmar increased 8-fold in the last 30 years.
It's worth noting that the scale of the graph above it has a _logrithmic_ scale so I do think it is actually 6% to 70%.

That page is estimating fatalities of 10k to 100k people and economic losses of 10B to 100B USD.

(For context: Myanmar GDP is about 67B USD, according to Wolfram Alpha.)
Crime statistics are because Kerala Police isn’t as corrupt and registers more crimes compared to rest of India. It’s a good thing as most crimes goes unreported in India as police are corrupted in rest of India.
It's short.

From dictatorship to democracy : a conceptual framework for liberation

by Gene Sharp is the "tell me more" version, 138 pages. Includes non-violent ways to gum up the progress of tyranny.
I wonder what it could have been like if we got the 1990s vision of the future where one could have ClarisWorks 5 anywhere they want as an OpenDoc Part: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/clarisworks-5-opendoc
He's doing it wrong, the obvious approach being to extract sunbeams from cucumbers!

:-)
"The E-Myth Revisited" calls this working on your business as opposed to working in your business. Otherwise you don't own a business, you own a job.
A React Framework for building internal tools
amaze. but sad that there is no Hong Kong
> They don't spend their full NATO commitments.

Some do and some don’t. EU is not one country. But in general it’s a bit strange that we didn’t start increase spending already around 2014.
SignalBotOne – Notification Webhooks for Signal
Tynan here. I've bought small apartments with groups of friends in Hilo, Budapest, Tokyo, and bought a small island in Canada. My share of all four of those cost under $50k. So most of the time when I travel I go to places I have my own place. I don't do a ton of touristy stuff, because I've been to all these places dozens of times, but instead more or less live a life like a local there, which doesn't cost more than my life in Vegas.

I still have to buy flights, but there are a lot of well known methods (points, etc) to get really cheap flights.

Even back when I really had no money, a buddy and I just rented cheap apartments around the world for a year and gave up our places at home. It cost very little.
> Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead.

Sounds like it flat out breaks the rules.
Nice. I recently have been doing a bash deep dive and realizing that treating it like repl driven development is very useful. Been wondering if this is worth writing about for others.

You can also just execute another ‘bash’ process, of course the environment is a bit different
I chuckled at "Litearcy Rate" written on one of the graphs...
You’re reading the youth unemployment rate. Overall is only 9% (still not great, but much better).
Shakedown at the Snack Counter: The Case for Street Pricing
You're part of the problem and know nothing of the shift that these teachers have seen over the last 30 years.
Happy to hear it! --Tynan
"Tesla Takedown" movement plans mass protests amid U.S. crackdown
The Horrible Truth About One-Way Video Interviews (2018)
> So we're talking about tracking plate numbers, in public. No expectations of privacy.

Correct.

> So we're talking about monitoring prisoners, in prison cells. No expectations of privacy.

Correct.

> > I was suggesting that panopticon is an inappropriate term for surveillance that happens only in public spaces.

> OK... Why?

Because prisons have no real equivalents for the private and public spaces we experience as free citizens. Drawing an equality between people who are voluntarily in a public space and people who are incarcerated is wrong, because the people in public can choose to withdraw somewhere private. The prisoner (in the panopticon model at least) has no such option.

If the state had an interconnected surveillance system which saw both into our public and private spaces, the analogy might make more sense -- and usually when "panopticon" is used, it is used in that sense. But it's the wrong term to use for surveillance which occurs only in public.

I'm not trying to be an overly pedantic dick here, but words do need to have clear meanings. There are other terms we could use for ubiquitous surveillance that occurs in public, and perhaps we should standardise on one.
Haha I doubt it too.
Yes but did the subject matter experts have the kind of trust/working relationship those at the SSA have with DOGE? That should smooth out this project.
This isn't a "Don't buy from Amazon" article and the conclusion of the article is that while there's a difference it's quite plausible that they aren't fake.
Making public institutions compete with each other for funding seems like a rather inefficient use of public resources.

Why not just remove the middle man and eliminate public education then?
It is possible to talk to young children in a grown up way faster than people think, at least for those that do not have recent experience with toddlers.

My son is 2 1/2 and making sure we know he wants to do things his own way.

But if you take time to explain a situation like an adult he backs down eventually. Or, it could be I am just boring him to death and he gives in to shut me up.
Tech News Digest – March 28, 2025
Zig-PyPI: The Zig programming language, packaged for PyPI
AFAIK for items shipped by Amazon the only way to rule out commingling is after delivery: If the barcode starts with an X that's an FNSKU (specific to a seller), meaning the item did not come from commingled stock. Items sold by Amazon itself never start with an X, so...
Nah, we should remove all Automated License Plate Readers.
atime is so exotic you shouldn't need to consider disabling it experimental. I consider it legacy at this point.
I'm still confused as to how to compute t(N). Maybe it's buried in the legalese of this text and I'm just dumb, but I can't find a clue.
Of course it has other benefits. The context of the conversation was in terms of advancement in society,
The only way to make the sample better would be to also sample people who moved the other direction, but there haven't been nearly as many of those because software engineering jobs have been in much higher demand than other engineering positions.

What you certainly cannot do is sample people who have only experienced one field.

But yes, it's not meant to be a quantitative study, but there are a lot of very valuable insights in the blog posts.
You know in a parallel world this headline is just "EU mandates Apple-designed P2P Wi-Fi standard". They did submit it for standardization after all, keeping to their proprietary one was just a transparent segmentation play.
> But when you are thrown into a new project, with new tools, new code, maybe a new language, new libraries, etc., then having an LLM is a huge benefit. In this situation, there is no way that you are going to be faster than an LLM.

In the middle of this thought, you changed the context from "learning new things" to "not being faster than an LLM"

It's easy to guess why. When you use the LLM you may be productive quicker, but I don't think you can argue that you are really learning anything

But yes, you're right. I don't learn new things from scratch very often, because I'm not changing contexts that frequently.

I want to be someone who had 10 years of experience in my domain, not 1 year of experience repeated 10 times, which means I cannot be starting over with new frameworks, new languages and such over and over
Developer ergonomics is drastically underappreciated, even in modern times. Since we're talking about textual data formats, I'll go out on a limb here and say that I hate YAML. Double checking exactly how many spaces are present on each line is tedious. It manages to make a simple task like copy-pasting something from a different file (at a different indentation level) into an error-prone process. I'll take angle brackets any day.
> It needs to be screened by someone

The people using this stuff want plausible deniability. If there's a problem with the slop, the computer did it, not me.

Screening it is contrary to that, so they won't do it.
Depends on how wide your definition on "domain" is. Most of the dinosaur lineages have gone extinct, it's not too wild an assumption to assume the same is true for entire lineages of other species. So the safe answer to your question is "probably, yes".
It's what makes sense. I don't think it's that hard given materials available, I think companies just forego putting thought into it because customers don't care and will claim their products are weak and not long lasting, while having to spend more money for the problem.

Things like sandwich containers/wrappers shouldn't even be plastic to begin with. A salad container should probably not have a lifespan of much more than a week or so. A disposable cup should probably be designed to hold liquid for a period of something like 12-24h then rapidly degrade under liquid.

I'd love to see more alternatives pop up in the short term, whether it's natural wax paper, banana leaves, hollowed out shells or gourds, some type of thin wood, etc. But plastic is just so cheap and ubiquitous it's a hard thing to convince a company to do.
I've experienced terrible teachers (especially math teachers) and had to teach myself.

I've seen good schools crumble due to terrible policies and teachers.

You're enabling the problem by apologizing for these poor performing teachers.

Literally all of 8th grade was learning how to count to 10 in other languages and some stupid cross-stitching art. In Math!!!

Luckily I learned through programming on my own time, but once you're behind from one shitty math teacher, it's hard to catch up.
This is not true. You can even see in tons of product listings where you can buy from "Amazon Resale". The prices are cheaper because they were returned from customers and are missing packaging, tags, etc.

Amazon absolutely resells returned items when possible. And if it's not through Amazon Resale, it's by reselling them in bulk lots to people who then make money listing the items on eBay.

Yes some of the absolute cheapest stuff gets tossed because it's not profitable to resell. But in many cases you're not even asked to return -- just keep it and get refunded. (As long as you don't have a history of abusing that.)

Levi's are absolutely going to be resold. Amazon is a business. They're not going to eat a loss when they don't have to.
No coins or weapons, but this has something at least: https://youtu.be/F6wJcwQmz4Y
Fuck 'em — pirate that shit with a clean conscience https://massgrave.dev/office_for_mac#office-activation
What's "thinking"?
""We're going after them": Musk promises Trump admin will target Tesla critics" - https://www.salon.com/2025/03/27/were-going-after-them-musk-...
You'll get at least one up-vote from me. Meanwhile, "time is a flat circle" and "all of this has happened before."

"Overly restrictive rules (zoning) and elaborate process (permitting and planning) create chronic shortages driving prices higher and creating an angry populace. That’s the TLDR thesis of a lot of the abundance books.

This is just the same concern-trolling anti-government neoliberalism that's been "eating state capacity" since at least the 1970s.
This coincides with Microsoft's presence[0] at Distributech 2025[1] earlier this week - an expo attended by ~20,000 people from electric utilities and vendors who do business with them. Microsoft was there in addition to Amazon AWS, Oracle, and NVIDIA[2], all of whom are likely trying to strike deals to power their datacenters.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/industry/blog/energy-and-res...

[1] https://www.distributech.com

[2] https://www.instagram.com/distribugram/p/DHqwGt1JGJ4/?img_in...
Contributed what? Their nuclear exit caused two nuclear power plants to shut down, which were the oldest and smallest in Germany. They had a combined capacity of a just 1 GW - utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

Even when the conservatives pulled the plug on nuclear power plants in 2011, Germany just stopped decreasing emissions of its electricity production for a year or two. And this was at a time of higher gas prices, so it's even up for debate how much the nuclear exit contributed to that short stagnation.
Yep. I lived there for the first two decades, and outside Kerala for the next two and a bit. The only thing Kerala exports is the workforce, since it's impossible to start anything in Kerala thanks to politics and high costs. I know because I've tried. Kerala had historical ties with the Middle East thanks in part to a substantial Muslim population, and the migrant labour force was able to funnel some of Middle Eastern prosperity during the oil boom years back into the state. That is in a nutshell, Kerala's economic story.

Speaking of the left, I remember being next to a protest circa 1990 against ... computers!
Could you argue why they don't? And could you also argue why we do?
There was always corruption like Clinton pardoning Marc Rich or Biden pardoning his son (after claiming he wouldn't) but Trump is bringing it to a new level. First Blagojevich and now this guy. Really hard to justify these pardons.
> P2P proximal wireless transfer, sure, but there's half a dozen apps on your phone that'll let you punt a document, a photo, an invite to someone on the other phone OS platform.

Yeah, via their server, which means it's slow even if you have wifi, requires valuable data credit if not, or it requires the installation of a companion app on the other device and putting the other device in the same network.
Remittanced only contribute to 15% of GDSP. 65% is from tertiary sectors of IT, Healthcare and Tourism. Kerala gets substantial investments from private companies instead as opposed to large corporations in Gujarat for example. Investments in Kerala rarely grab news headlines as it’s mostly private investments.
I started experimenting with a some form of LLM detox in order to get my brain more active again.
Vasco da Gama, is credited with discovering a sea route to India by sailing around Africa in 1497-1498, though India was not new to the world, and the people of India were not "discovered" by Europeans. He entered India through Kerala (Calicut).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasco_da_Gama
I'm in my early 40s; we very occasionally have to still write checks. Most recently, it's how we've paid for house repairs that were too expensive to feel comfortable paying in cash for.
Same experience ordering Lucky brand jeans… from Lucky themselves! Same exact model would result in different material composition / origin country. It could be 0-2% spandex/100-98% cotton or something. I wound up making a little spreadsheet to try to figure out which ones I liked the best (origin country, materials)

It’s crazy.
I understand, but my point is that it took a lot of time for Snow Leopard to reach a level where it lived up to that.
Fraud pays.
I use Docusign cause it looks official and grown up. With this product I worry about the name and domain name looking like phishing or a typo.

I am a fan of replacing docusign as a principle though.
The stupidity argument [1] is a possible trap. The technofascists are making the same argument: The masses are morons. But they extrapolate to claiming the masses therefore cannot self-govern, as evidenced by what has happened and is now happening. Democracy must be swept aside for the superior people, the oligarchy, to run the show.

I don't even know what the question is. Is there a threshold function? Is there a critical mass of stupidity beyond which all hope is lost and we just have to go through the ugly process of tyranny and its eventual collapse? But what if technology can provide a superior tyranny, in effect flawless totalitarianism? The hope part of the puzzle seems unpredictable.

[1] Bonhöffer seems apt here, a Lutheran pastor killed by the Nazis, who consider stupidity a greater threat to good than evil.
I wonder if there should be a two-tiered structure to replace the traditional drivers license. In flying, you can get a Private Pilot License, or you can get a Sport Pilot Certificate, which is easier to get but has fewer privileges. It would be interesting to see a state replace a drivers license with the Sport level license, which would only let you drive a vehicle up to 6,000 pounds (Cadillac Escalade), have other restrictions, and have a higher insurance rate. Then the higher level license would require additional training (somewhere between current DL requirements and the monthlong requirement for a CDL) and let you drive the full limit of 26,000 pounds and you'd get discounted insurance.
It takes a pretty specific type of property to accommodate an ADU and it has to be in a specific location to make the ADU worthwhile. If you're in the suburbs you also have HOA rules to contend with. The only place we could put an ADU in our suburban house is to build out our 4-car garage -- it's large enough (and we onyl need 1 car), but we'd have to build a bathroom and a kitchenette. But even if we could afford the initial substantial outlay, I don't think we'd have a lot of takers as people who are likely to rent an ADU typically need to live closer to the city.