skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
debugging is hard man, especially when the codebase is getting bigger

I try to create and manage a well-structured documentation so it's easier both for me and AI (i use cursor) to understand the codebase even if I look back at something after a few days

I know that I created this tool to help for debugging only, but i think it's about time i extend its capabilities to debug itself. would be fun lol
I agree, I oppose social media as a whole. What's your point?
Because the amoral drive for extreme wealth doesn't stop at a certain level of wealth
Didn't a lot of economies slow down in the later 1960s, after the economic damage of WW II was repaired?
trace is great for shimming in your own code to an existing function, but it’s not an interactive debugging tool.
Future of Building Starship
How many other companies need to fund rebuilding of entire countries? (granted: usually the DoD's fault in the first place...)
https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc

https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/space-explor...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/e... | https://archive.is/2025.04.06-135244/https://www.washingtonp...

https://freebeacon.com/issues/emails-epa-rushed-to-resolve-t...

“Who is John Galt?” /s He is Schrödinger's Entrepreneur: a self made man when the ego and cult calls for it, but a scrappy startup founder just trying to save the world and get to Mars when desperate for government or Capital market support and intervention.
Or you are like me and you love having ideas, you love solving business and technical problems but you don't like the "execution" part.

Because from my experiment at "vibe coding", LLMs for code are good at following the rules, not at being intelligent. They are especially bad at keeping the "big picture" in their context.

In fact you can talk to your IA at the level of abstraction you want :

1 - You can ask it to create an entire app and, for sure, that'll be a black box full of unknown bugs.

2 - Or you can just give it precise instructions : "create the model for x entity with exactly those characteristics". "Now let's create the controller for the API but pay attention to this or that".

If you are good at describing things, LLMs are excellent at doing what you are already good at. They'll write exactly the code you would have wrote, they'll take care of the boilerplate, they'll self correct if needed except they'll do it in seconds while it would have took you hours between just typing the whole thing, debugging your own mistakes, going back and forth files, refactoring your implementation ...

Sure it takes more time than just asking "make me a snake game in pygame" but it also takes so much less time than writing it yourself.

Also, but that's only my personal experience, working with LLMs, even with a lot of iterations helps me a lot with staying in flow.
Go lobby for car makers to replace car chargers with usb ports because car chargers can be used as cigarette lighters so no one bothers you to light their ciggie.
Action Figure Generator
That's irelevant. The sample size of the population who voted is large enough to extrapolate and represent the opinion of the entire voting population.

When you don't vote you ceded your vote to the majority who did go to vote. That's how democracy works. You can't cop out because you don't like the end result.
Which is a real problem for the rare person (ie me) who doesn't like McDonalds. Go to a new city and I get recommendations of McDonalds, and the dozen "you won't believe we are not McDonalds" - never mind that I don't like burgers, that is about all I can find when looking for a meal.
I'm using Mastodon with DMs completely disabled and it's better than OK. Its only use on Twitter was to receive spam anyway.
On the flip side, the only reason I don't finish a movie or TV show is because I run out of time. Either it's time for bed, time to go, or I fell asleep. In all 3 cases I'm still interested in the movie; it's why I put it on in the first place!
They are crowing about increasing the Pentagon’s budget.
Usually, they recruit government office workers into this? They acquire domain knowledge in endless drudgery, then get a pay upgrade and get rehired as consultant? The whole machinery becomes a whole level more inefficient.

Van der Leyen was famous for squandering german defense budget to mc kinsey and co - who poached heads from the german rearmament office.
National Defense related industries should be in general forbidden to hire consultants.
"Qu'ils mangent de la brioche"* vibes.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake
>The idea is to think outside the box and create entirely new markets instead of just new products in existing ones

It's interesting that SV outwardly says it "wants to create entirely new markets instead of products in existing ones", meanwhile the actual experienced outcome for users is the same experience across multiple markets.

SV is somehow failing on both of its metrics here. It's creating entirely homogeneous products across all existing markets.
Hey! I started doing the same w.r.t bookmarking this a couple of years back. All new bookmarks now go into a note specific to the topic in the personal KB instead of into the browser bookmarks. Most notes have a '## bookmarks' section at the end where these go.
That is exactly what is happening to Reddit. Made famous by its submitters and moderators. Business decision driven by metrics based on view counts because that sells ads. Let this be a lesson: metrics are not the only way to measure success. I worked at a company where metrics were viewed as a way to cut through dissonance and bias. Newflash: leaders should be opinionated and have visions that do not yet exist. They should be investors in their product and its culture. Metrics should play a role in that decision, but perhaps a tiny one. Because what metrics you choose, how you measure it, and most importantly, what is even measurable, have a tremendous impact on the effect of those metrics.

You cannot paint by numbers.
the first example video tells you how to improve your home decor by saying that you could add a side table and blanket to your chair. Thank you Gemini for telling me that tables can go next to chairs.

There's really no use for AI outside of making studio ghibli drawings and giving me a bunch of broken code quickly.
> no obvious solution: network effects => monopoly => "optimising" for typical user.

ahem. We have a solution for the monopoly part.
We've had it since the 19th century.
We just stopped enforcing it in the 70s and 80s when the Chicago School convinced everyone that as long as judge Robert Bork's "consumer welfare" can be trotted out to prove that the "free market" is working and prices are low.
>this is manufactured outrage.

Yeah, seems like Electrek.co has an article hating on Musk 1-2 times a day.
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Sure, spotify has maintained a near-complete catalogue where Netflix hasnt.

But I no longer find Spotify any good at finding new music, beyond manually looking through artist catalogues.

For context, try out Pandora's recommendations. They haven't improved, yet they're orders of magnitude better than Spotify. The songs are hand annotated for style, content, etc. As a result, they recommend truly new songs with regularity that truly match the vibe.

Compare with Spotify, where everything is based on statistical "people also listened to X". Everything converges on some pop form of whatever genre and songs you've listened to a lot. It'll play odd, out-of context songs from the same artist before it'll find you new artists. Sure they have a few manicured playlists, but its nothing compared to the value Pandora has provided for years.
If an interest free loan at a time when Tesla couldn’t get a bank to loan them breakfast is not a subsidy then you also agree that none of the banks received any sort of government support either right?

Because even despite many of the companies failing, the govt made a profit on TARP.
Yes, you hit the nail on the head. This kind of behavior is bad because of the way it shifts accountability. Previously, a human could ultimately be held responsible. Now, neither machine nor human can be held responsible for abhorrent behavior
I expect the next administration will switch SpaceX to cost-plus. Musk may be banking on reaping huge profit margins on those fixed price deals. Well that ain't gonna happen. Elections have consequences.
If you want something similar to Ruby but more functional, try Elixir. The similarities are superficial but might be enough to ease you in.

Haskell is weird. You can express well defined problems with relative ease and clarity, but performance can be kind of wonky and there's a lot more ceremony than your typical Lisp or Scheme or close relative of those. F# can give you a more lispish experience with a threshold about as low as Haskell, but comes with the close ties to an atrocious corporation and similar to Clojure it's not exactly a first class citizen in the environment.

Building stuff in Lisp-likes typically don't entail the double programming languages of the primary one and a second one to program the type system, in that way they're convenient in a way similar to Ruby. I like the parens and how they explicitly delimit portions that quite closely relate to the AST-step in compilation or whatever the interpreter sees, it helps with moving things around and molding the code quickly.
Perhaps, but the profit motivation is completely different. One's there to serve and the other to bill hours.
implemented the second part and its is now much cooler / smooth, thx a lot
Auditors don't get access to whatever the modern equivalent of this is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bank_%26_Trust_(Baham...
Honestly, I think it’s just simple imitation.

Something is popular, folks are envious of it, they end up building something much like it. Doesn’t matter if it’s houses, logos, or user experiences – seems to be how things work.
You don't need*
I'm sure that contributed to some of the insanity, but they also cooked down wine in lead pots (sapa or defrutum) which caused lead to leach and act as a sweetener. I think they also used this in cooking but this is all from memory so trust but verify!
We Built the RunReveal MCP Server
Writing a simple operating system – from scratch [pdf]
> There's no million dollar Japanese supercars competing against Lamborghinis and McLarens

Well there was the NSX
See, this is the thing that I, as a non-founder, have trouble understanding. Presumably the product is started by an enthusiast, an enthusiast _for the product_. Is it just hard to maintain that level of enthusiasm over time? Is the sum of possible money just too desirable? If feels like we're on this unending treadmill towards constant enshittification of literally every single thing that I interact with on a daily basis. All of the apps on my phone eventually turn into shit piles, all of the business/work software I use is constantly moving towards bullshit, even the houses that I rent, the newer construction is noticeably shittier than the old houses. Wifi got better for a while but now appears to be backsliding to the point of maximum frustration that the user will take (while given no viable second choice).

Obviously not all of these are founder centric things but they're all profit driven enterprises. Is it actually just not possible for a typical human to turn down excess profits and take pride in a project rather than a money machine? People seem to think these things used to be better, "no one takes pride in their work anymore", "everything is made to break", etc. What changed?
There is something that comes before democracy, that is the ability to make good (for some definition of good) decisions. In theory all the affected by a decision should have its voice or vote on it, but not all have independent, faithful and complete information on it, really critical thinking, and try to have an unbiased view on the topic. More than age, sex, skin colour, economic status and social, place of living or family, those are more useful criteria.

In the age of AI and worldwide information networks, some of this could be provided, but still it won't be enough. Is still easy to put a bias on source information, and in practice that won't be so different from manipulation of social sectors.
The issue I think you're outlining is whether someone builds because they believe in their product and its value or if they are profiteers charading as believers.

I'm not saying profit isn't a factor, but a lot of these founders are five year founders, they are using the company as a means to their end. Basically I'm criticizing short sightedness and what it does to our economy. That's why I've turned against the stock market. The high liquidity means you are beholden to thousands of people who view your company as a roulette wheel amongst thousands, who want immediate gains and have no stomach for any losses. And many of the founders are the same people wearing a different hat.
> it's about something mentioned earlier in the article: "make as much money as I can".

I think it's a little deeper than that. It's the democratization of capability.

If few people have the tools, the craftsman is extremely valuable. He can make a lot of money without a glut of knowledge or real skill. In general the people don't have the tools and skills to catch up to where he is. He is wealthy with only frontloaded effort.

If everyone has the same tools, the craftsman still has value, because of the knowledge and skillset developed over time. He makes more money because his skills are valuable and remain scarce; he's incentivized to further this skillset to stay above the pack, continue to be in demand, and make more money.

If the tools do the job for you, the craftsman has limited value. He's an artifact. No matter how much he furthers his expertise, most people will just turn the tool on and get good enough product.

We're in between phase 2 and 3 at the moment. We still test for things like algorithm design and ask questions in interviews about the complexity of approaches. A lot of us still haven't moved on to the "ok but now what?" part of the transition.

The value now is less knowing how the automation works and improving our knowledge of the underlying design, but how to use the tools in ways that produce more value than the average Joe. It's a hard transition for people who grew up thinking this was all you needed to get a comfortable or even lucrative life.

I'm past my SDE interview phase of life now and in seeking engineers I'm looking less for people who know how to build a version of the tool and more people who operate in the present, have accepted the change, and want to use what they have access to and add human utility to make the sum of the whole greater than the parts.

To me the best part of building software was the creativity. That part hasn't changed. If anything it's more important than ever.

Ultimately we're building things to be consumed by consumers. That hasn't changed. The creek started flowing in a different direction and your job in this space is not to keep putting rocks where the water used to go, and more accepting that things are different and you have to adapt.
> Does the world-class acoustics lab earn so much money, it can upkeep the industrial facility its housed in?

Obviously not, but there isn't much else the space can be used for. Power plants are extremely polluted because the PCBs from the turbines and transformers drip into the concrete floors and stay there forever, so these spaces generally can't be repurposed in any meaningful way.
I stopped making my smartphone the hub for the rest of my life. Now it's only used for instant messaging, keeping my calendar, an alarm clock, my password manager, a music player, and (very rarely) doing a quick web search for something when out and about. I use it for nothing else.

Doing that has significantly improved my life.
To be fair even with modern software bloat the overall experience is a lot better now than it was in the XP days. I think it's mainly due to SSDs. They were a huge step change in performance and we fortunately haven't regressed back to the slowness of the HDD era.

At least on most hardware. I have a shitty Dell laptop for work that's basically permanently thermally throttled... :(
My read on this that they don't mean EEs as in IEEE, but "engineer" as in "sanitation engineer", i.e. people who assemble electronic devices in factories.
Python removed cgi-bin calling it a dead battery module.

> cgi — Common Gateway Interface support
Deprecated since version 3.11, removed in version 3.13.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/cgi.html
In those early days the Spotify user experience needed to try and differentiate and put up barriers to being copied. Later it suffered from being purely metric driven and tracking things like user-engagement thinking it's a proxy for happiness with the platform. And then later still they start to mostly care about the cost of delivery.
Wrong, only once have I seen a useful ad in my entire life, and decided against buying it because I don't need it. I can reveal the ad if you ask, just don't want to be seen as a, dare I say, a tiser'.
AI Lacks Values
The short term data driven optimizations somehow erode the original product architecture and some of its value. I also think treating the consumer as static. Trick me one shame on you, trick me twice (admittedly I get tricked even more often to click on stuff) shame on me but eventually I learn and what worked turn into a constant irritating torn-off. These irritations accumulate. Good product management should strive to minimize such irritations but I guess we lost that with Jobs.
Elections have consequences. Although it's decidedly unfair, it would seem, when some of those consequences fall on those who don't even get a vote.
> Whenever I hear someone talking about purely functional programming, no side effects, I wonder what kind of programs they are writing

Where have you ever heard anyone talk about side-effect free programs, outside of academic exercises? The linked post certainly isn't about 100% side-effect/state free code.

Usually, people talk about minimizing side-effects as much as possible, but since we build programs to do something, sometimes connected to the real world, it's basically impossible to build a program that is both useful and 100% side-effect free, as you wouldn't be able to print anything to the screen, or communicate with other programs.

And minimizing side-effects (and minimizing state overall) have a real impact on how easy it is to reason about the program. Being really carefully about where you mutate things, leads to most of the code being very explicit about what it's doing, and code only affects data that is close to where the code itself is, compared to intertwined state mutation, where things everywhere in the codebase can affect state anywhere.
This is fantastic! I've used Lit and we components every day since they were invented and I learned things, too.

This tech, being almost "bare metal" and built into the browser, improves and subsumes today's proprietary frameworks.

There is also an ECMA proposal to build Lit into JS itself, closing the gap alltogether.
This ^ and uncertainty

If I had to break down how consulting contracts are actually priced, it'd be:

- 50% work
- 35% requirement ambiguity
- 15% customer management overhead
Yes but do you really believe Deloitte isn’t showering them with bribes and bending the knee to keep these contracts?

It’s not about who bends and who doesn’t. They all will. Even Tim Cook who famously wears his politics on his sleeve has completely bent the knee to Trump.

Money talks.
> Who is "we", what was the price, and what was the imagined reward?

Slow down and re-read.

>> You get: the knowledge that your function's output will only depend on its input.

>> You pay: you gotta stop using those for-loops and [i]ndexes, and start using maps, folds, filters etc.
I don't buy that [3] is bad and [4] is good examples. That Samsung plant reel doesn't show the same parts of assembly as the first one - I bet those videos are just focusing on different parts of fundamentally identical factories.
This is conflating slightly different things, though? One is that you can build a program that does the same thing. The other is that you can do the same things with the language.

There are special forms in LISP, but that is a far cry from the amount of magic that can only be done in the compiler or at runtime for many languages out there.
Henry Ford's point wasn't that people didn't want faster horses but that they'd buy the car they never knew they needed - instead of a horse.

With Spotify, the point is that lots of people pay for it and it's popular. So good for them. Individuals wanting something else does not mean that it's worth for Spotify to build that. It might be worth for someone else to invest in such a thing. But judging from the lack of successful things in this space, probably not.
Gemini works with large files surprisingly well, but from my limited experience, the token usage (and cost) explodes and I'm not not sure it's worth it. I try to keep my file lengths fairly small because of it, so I have more control over what is pulled into the chat context.
Incidental to this, I'm now convinced that the tube map is overrated and a quasi-geographical map would suit London better. And by "quasi" I mean slightly expanded or contracted in certain spots for clarity but basically correct.

But the district labels are a bit too in the way right now, and in any case it would be nice to see the stations.
It's not a next, but more a previously :) Localized development tooling is an old timer thing.
Almost as if the more of a deadbeat someone is, the higher they rise to the top.
> The hard part is managing effects

You can say that again!

Right now I'm working in C#, so I wished my C# managed effects, but it doesn't. It's all left to the programmer.
I used to live in Cambrige, several friends had PhDs. None went to the US when they got their PhDs, and some even resigned from UK jobs when their multinational employers tried to relocate them to the US.

One's in Sheffield, another went to ITER.
I get where you're coming from, but describing the fastest production FWD car as the "closest thing" is really funny
The problem is with the definition of “sustainable business model.”

Could you maintain a profitable business and continue steady growth? Sure. Could you become a unicorn and IPO within the next 5 years? Unlikely.
There have been multiple errors posted in this thread, and I don't know where those numbers are coming from since the budget is public record.

The '25 budget has not yet been approved, but the request is $8 billion more last year, not $100 billion.
Had a PalmPilot taped to a modem that did our auth. Lisp made the glue code feel like play. No types barking, no ceremony—just `(lambda (x) (tinker x))`. We didn’t debug, we conversed. Swapped thoughts with the REPL like it was an old friend.
Sure looks like it! Identical HTML as far as I can tell
No; If you're forced to go to the US, take a burner phone.
time to slim down nasa and do more with less
I was under the impression the US was in the drivers seat rather than reacting, Bretton Woods being in New Hampshire and all..