MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by benwills | 2025-04-23 17:57:20+00:00
I haven't used Claude Code, but I have used Windsurf, Cursor, and Continue. They all do well with their own "rules" files. I essentially understand that as something similar to a System prompt sent before a chat session. I even have pretty specific rules on styling that are unique to me, and it generally follows those.

It's also worth asking what rule it would need in order to follow the rule. On occasion, a rule I've added isn't quite followed. So I'll respond immediately pointing out what it did, that the rule is in the file, and then will ask it to tell me how I should modify, or add to, the rule in order for it to be easier to follow.

I'd imagine Claude Code has something similar that might be worth looking into.
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-23 17:57:33+00:00
> but the thing I'm confused about is why there doesn't seem to be a serious competitor

Why does this confuse you? It's the same in every single industry in the US right now.

Go ahead, try and start up a competitor to Amazon. Most likely you will just fail for normal business reasons, but if you ever even come close to being a threat, Amazon will just immense weight to steal your market out from under you. They can subsidize anything they want with AWS profits and can outspend you in any direction.

Meanwhile the DOJ will look away from obvious anti-competitive behavior because Reagan was a moron who thought regulating markets was magically bad.

Even Google ran into this with Fiber. Everywhere they went, Spectrum and Comcast just dropped prices to make Google's offer not very impressive, which is easy for them to do since they've spent decades extracting unbounded profits and paying off infrastructure investments, so their costs will be lower than any market entrant. Demonstrating like this that you COULD have significantly lowered prices but just chose not to SHOULD make people angry at you, but Americans are allergic to requiring companies actually be good for consumers.

This is the clear, obvious, trivial direction that any market operating in a capitalistic system is attempting to become. People need to stop being surprised.

If you want a competitive market, that doesn't happen naturally. You must force it.
by financetechbro | 2025-04-23 17:57:34+00:00
Considering a library is just a component of the application and not the whole application itself. And one can typically understand the inputs and outputs of a library without having to know the detailed functionally of the code behind the library. I would say yes, it is different.

But this of course can still open up potential vulnerabilities or unexpected behavior. The way I see it, there is some level of trust behind the library that it was built competently
by freedomben | 2025-04-23 17:58:01+00:00
Interesting thoughts regarding MCPs being the future App Store/Platform. I don't know that I agree but I don't necessarily disagree either. Time will certainly tell.

To me, MCP feels more like an implementation detail, not something that most people would ever use directly. I would expect that the future would be some app distributed through existing channels, which bundles the MCP client into it, then uses a server-side component (run by the vendor of course) to get the real work done. As much as I like the idea of people installing the servers locally, that future seems like a Linux nerd/self hosted type of activity. I just can't imagine a typical mac or windows non-power-user installing one directly. Just the idea that they would need to install "two apps" is enough to confuse them immensely. It's possible some might bundle the server too and run it locally as needed, but even in that case I think MCP is completely invisible to the user.
by Andugal | 2025-04-23 17:58:03+00:00
> I’m actually having a really hard time thinking of an AI feature other than coding AI feature that I actually enjoy.

If you attend a lot of meetings, having an AI note-taker take notes for you and generate a structured summary, follow-up email, to-do list, and more will be an absolute game changer.

(Disclaimer, I'm the CTO of Leexi, an AI note-taker)
by rkagerer | 2025-04-23 17:58:05+00:00
They also built a flying saucer:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar

I recall hearing how the US Air Force was investigating reports of UFO's, and was surprised to find a 'real' one closer to home.

Highly unstable more than a few feet off the ground, it never proved viable. Unfortunately nobody at the time realized they might have been onto something if they'd pivoted to inventing the hovercraft.
by 3np | 2025-04-23 17:58:16+00:00
"Vibe coding" is a very certain way to use LLMs (one where you treat code the same way a junior Java SWE reads generated JVM bytecode), which is what the OP is about. They agree with your point.

There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. ... I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it.
by kyle-rb | 2025-04-23 17:59:12+00:00
Cool game!

Ran into a weird bug on puzzle 2 where adding a `flex-flow` property and then deleting it also seems to unset the `flex-direction` property on the underlying element. Probably should be disallowed under the no-mixing-shorthand rule I guess.

Also could you make it so that clicking inside a text box doesn't trigger the drag effect? It would be nice to be able to highlight/double-click text to delete/replace it.
by pmarreck | 2025-04-23 17:59:29+00:00
Loved the fact that the interactive demos were live.

You could even skip the custom system prompt entirely and just have it analyze a randomized but statistically-significant portion of the corpus of your outgoing emails and their style, and have it replicate that in drafts.

You wouldn't even need a UI for this! You could sell a service that you simply authenticated to your inbox and it could do all this from the backend.

It would likely end up being close enough to the mark that the uncanny valley might get skipped and you would mostly just be approving emails after reviewing them.

Similar to reviewing AI-generated code.

The question is, is this what we want? I've already caught myself asking ChatGPT to counterargue as me (but with less inflammatory wording) and it's done an excellent job which I've then (more or less) copy-pasted into social-media responses. That's just one step away from having them automatically appear, just waiting for my approval to post.

Is AI just turning everyone into a "work reviewer" instead of a "work doer"?
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-23 17:59:49+00:00
> Presumably the big differences are incentives and scale. Scale wise, more building occupants justifies more regulation.

This is the ex post facto rationalization of the rules, not the actual reason. The actual reason is that businesses are more likely to have contracted it out regardless so are less likely to oppose, and are the more lucrative customers for the license holders lobbying for the rules, whereas homeowners object more and have a larger voting block.

Notice that the rules are based on use and not occupancy. A residential multi-unit condo will have more occupants than a small business that only serves five customers at once.

Meanwhile nobody actually wants an electrical fire. The primary thing leading to shoddy workmanship is artificial supply constraints on professional work, which creates financial pressure for amateurs to covertly perform work they're not qualified to do because there aren't enough professionals and puts the professionals under time pressure because there is too much work for them to complete with that number of workers.
by sedatk | 2025-04-23 17:59:53+00:00
Oh I missed that you used this to write code *on* that platform, not *for* it. Okay now it makes sense.

About columns, I pretty much meant expressions 1-5. They are arbitrary, unlike sound channels, there is no special meaning to, say, expression 2.

But since you use this to code ON the device, your tradeoffs are sensible.
by skrebbel | 2025-04-23 18:00:16+00:00
Appreciate the context! Thanks for the detailed writeup, bonus points for the conspiracy hat.

> If your school imported books in English without performing due diligence to compare the philosophy of both books (Dutch vs English)

I'm pretty sure they did some due diligence - most books were great. Also they were without exception British schoolbooks, not American. I know little about the UK school system but I doubt it's as college preppy as what you describe.

> What was your experience with textbooks growing up? Did you read all of them cover to cover as a part of the curriculum?

Yes. Well, read.. We like did one chapter per week or something like that, with explanation and exercises etc. All the school books were designed in a format intended to be worked through, cover to cover, over the given period (usually 1-3 books in a series per year depending on the subject). I can't recall skipping anything ever. Fwiw this held for the English books too.

There was also often a separate textbook and "workbook" from the same series that tied in together. I believe these workbooks primarily exist to make schools re-buy them every year (kids write in them), super wasteful & scammy. But still, no skipping (except maybe little bits here and there that the teacher thought was silly).
Vibe Coding: The Infrastructure Problem
by nomadrian | 2025-04-23 18:00:26+00:00
The vibe coding trend has gained significant attention lately, but I believe we need a reality check on what it can actually deliver for production applications.

My brief explorations of tools like Lovable.dev and Bolt.new revealed that they rely on traditionally-coded infrastructure like Supabase to function effectively. This suggests vibe coding's ultimate success depends on the quality and breadth of what lies beneath it.

For prototyping and simple applications, vibe coding shows promise. But for complex production systems? I remain skeptical. I'm curious about others' experiences using these tools for anything beyond basic implementations.

The path forward, as I see it, requires specialized infrastructure tools designed for specific domains. In my own work, I've developed the ChainReact.NET library with high-level abstractions that span the entire application stack (frontend, backend, business logic, etc.) for line-of-business applications. This approach could provide the foundation that vibe coding needs to become truly effective in that domain. One-size-fits-all solutions likely won't succeed. Instead, purpose-built infrastructure for different application categories offers more promise.

What do you think? How might we bridge the gap between vibe coding's lofty ambitions and production reality? Which infrastructure areas most urgently need development to make vibe coding viable?
by crote | 2025-04-23 18:00:44+00:00
I think a big problem is that the most useful AI agents essentially go unnoticed.

The email labeling assistant is a great example of this. Most mail services can already do most of this, so the best-case scenario is using AI to translate your human speech into a suggestion for whatever format the service's rules engine uses. Very helpful, not flashy: you set it up once and forget about it.

Being able to automatically interpret the "Reschedule" email and suggest a diff for an event in your calendar is extremely useful, as it'd reduce it to a single click - but it won't be flashy. Ideally you wouldn't even notice there's a LLM behind it, there's just a "confirm reschedule button" which magically appears next to the email when appropriate.

Automatically archiving sales offers? That's a spam filter. A really good one, mind you, but hardly something to put on the frontpage of today's newsletters.

It can all provide quite a bit of value, but it's simply not sexy enough! You can't add a flashy wizard staff & sparkles icon to it and charge $20 / month for that. In practice you might be getting a car, but it's going to look like a horseless carriage to the average user. They want Magic Wizard Stuff, not invest hours into learning prompt programming.
by aylmao | 2025-04-23 18:00:49+00:00
"that’s when it struck me. coding isn’t about the finished product. its a lot like writing. its about the process. its about how you approach a problem. its critical thinking."

I like this analogy, because anyone who has written and/or has a habit of writing would attest this is not (only) some ideological claim about developing skills by doing the hard work yourself.

Writing clears up the brain, a lot. It structures ideas, both on the paper and in your brain, in a way you can't structure them any other way. It leads to new ideas, makes you realize mistakes or fallacies, and somehow can make you feel less worried when writing about things that stress you out. The way you write matters too— handwriting not only _feels_ different from typing, in spite of being slower it's sometimes the better tool to write certain things. Part of writing effectively is knowing when the slowness of handwriting is actually what you need— speed isn't always better.

It's often useful and productive to write things, even if no one will ever read them again.

I think it's similar with coding, and in a way I think it's related to something that happens all too often with engineers too. There's a lot of talk about developers having side-projects that are never done, and many see this as negative thing, but I've long held on the contrary, that it is in fact a very healthy thing. Sometimes you just need to code for the sake of organizing your ideas and laying them on the screen, not because you'll sell what you write, or someone else will use it or read it. Heck, often you won't even yourself. But that's fine, often the concretizing on "paper" ideas floating in your head is itself is what you actually need.
by gymbeaux | 2025-04-23 18:00:52+00:00
It sounds like you're saying people like me just need to "wait out" the "mediocre" SWEs... that they, already with one foot out of the industry anyway (having never been particularly passionate), are more-likely to switch careers entirely in order to make ends meet.

If so, I would be playing right into that (to my detriment) by pivoting to another career myself. Therefore, I should stay put and trust that things will get better and eventually return to normal.
by grahac | 2025-04-23 18:01:51+00:00
Agree that for mainstream use it needs to be and will be hidden from the user entirely.

Will be much more like an app store where you can see a catalog of the "LLM Apps" and click to enable the "Gmail" plugin or "Shopping.com" plugin. The MCP protocol makes this easier and lets the servers write it once to appear in multiple clients (with some caveats I'm sure).
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-04-23 18:02:27+00:00
Live development is still so under-explored, and is just so exciting to work with.

One of my favorite talks is "Stop Writing Dead Programs" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ab3ArE8W3s) and touches on a lot of what could be in terms of live development.

Lisp is very well-suited to live development due to code being data, but live development doesn't need to be lispy.

I built a live development extension for Love2D which lets you do graphics livecoding (both lua and glsl) in real-time - every keystroke updating the output, (if a valid program).

https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/livelove

Here are some (early) demos of things you can do with it:

https://gist.github.com/jasonjmcghee/9701aacce85799e0f1c7304...

So many cool things once you break down the barrier between editor and running program.

I've also asked myself the question of, what would a language look like that was natively built for live development, and built out a prototype - though it's definitely a sandbox so haven't posted it anywhere yet, other than demos on mastadon.
by antasvara | 2025-04-23 18:03:05+00:00
>In this case the PE firm would have been better off not getting a loan to begin with - it would have kept the interest payments to itself.

That assumes the PE company can predict exactly how long the expect the business to survive after takeover. They can't.

Both sides (the lender and the PE firm) are evaluating the company being purchased and the plan set out by the PE firm. The loan terms are set such that both sides feel they can make money on the deal.

The fact that PE doesn't make money on every deal indicates that they can be wrong.
by dagmx | 2025-04-23 18:03:10+00:00
Your comment is highly incorrect

You can render traditionally all you want with metal. You just don’t get some of the features like camera access, or gaze. Which does have its downsides, but is a long way from what you’re describing. I’ve ported a metal based renderer to visionOS for companies already, and you already have engines like Unreal supporting it too.

I’m not even sure what DOM you’re talking about. SwiftUI? RealityKit? The former is for Ui. The latter is an ECS like rendering engine. But neither fit what you describe.

Perhaps before being outraged by things you should be familiar with development on them first.
by pizzathyme | 2025-04-23 18:03:30+00:00
If that's the case, you can easily only write messages to your wife yourself.

But for the 99 other messages, especially things that mundanely convey information like "My daughter has the flu and I won't be in today", "Yes 2pm at Shake Shack sounds good", it will be much faster to read over drafts that are correct and then click send.

The only reason this wouldn't be faster is if the drafts are bad. And that is the point of the article: the models are good enough now that AI drafts don't need to be bad. We are just used to AI drafts being bad due to poor design.
AI-Curated Daily Newspaper
by izaguirrejoe | 2025-04-23 18:04:08+00:00
I'm Joe, one of the co-founders of Los Angeles AI Apps. We've created The Digital Press, a daily newspaper tailored to our interests. We've input the Sections that we want to see (Ruby, Artificial Intelligence, etc) and let our AI-powered Reporters, Section Editors and Editor-in-Chief do the rest. The Reporters are currently pulling from Hacker News and Arxiv.

If there's enough interest from the community, we'd love to open this up for anyone to create their own daily newspaper. Give us some feedback below!
by freedomben | 2025-04-23 18:04:10+00:00
I don't disagree with you, but I do think it's important to distinguish between a censored swear word or nipple, and taking down an entire video because it mentions the Lab Leak Theory at a time when that was politically unacceptable. The former may be suppressing a small element of the "speech" but it's not (for the most part) restricting the expression/transmission of ideas. It's also a very firm and defined standard that is unambiguous (i.e. here is a list of words you can't say, use substitutes to convey meaning v. here is a list of opinions you aren't allowed to express). The latter on the other hand is absolutely the suppression of ideas, which IMHO is what "free speech" is really about and why it's so important.
by frabonacci | 2025-04-23 18:04:25+00:00
If you're running Cua from VS Code or Cursor, have you checked out this issue? https://github.com/trycua/cua/issues/61

Feel free to ping me on Discord (I'm francesco there) - happy to hop on a quick call to help debug: https://discord.com/invite/mVnXXpdE85
by leptons | 2025-04-23 18:05:17+00:00
If I had a kid (I'm too old for that now), I would absolutely buy a working Commodore 64 for the kid as their first computer, complete with the fantastic manual that came with it. When they understand how it works, then they can have a tablet and a modern computer. The C64 manual has instructions for BASIC programming, as well as how to program the peripheral chips to make sounds and graphics. And then in the back it goes into assembly language including documentation for all the opcodes, and then in the very back of the manual were the full schematics for the computer.

I think it's still an amazing resource for anyone wanting to learn how computers work. It literally changed my life. Before I got the C64 when I was 15 years old, I had an Atari 400 and then Atari 600. There was very little available to me in the way of documentation for the Atari for anything beyond BASIC programming, and I found that very limiting. The C64 and its manual opened up a whole other world to me. I taught myself assembly programming in about a week. I got into BBSs, and eventually into the "demoscene" where I got to use all the assembly programming I learned. This built the foundation for the rest of my computing life and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
by sanderjd | 2025-04-23 18:05:44+00:00
On the tool-invocation point: Something that seems true to me is that LLMs are actually too smart to be good tool-invokers. It may be possible to convince them to invoke a purpose-specific tool rather than trying to do it themselves, but it feels harder than it should be, and weird to be limiting capability.

My thought is: Could the tool-routing layer be a much simpler "old school" NLP model? Then it would never try to do math and end up doing it poorly, because it just doesn't know how to do that. But you could give it a calculator tool and teach it how to pass queries along to that tool. And you could also give it a "send this to a people LLM tool" for anything that doesn't have another more targeted tool registered.

Is anyone doing it this way?
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-23 18:06:19+00:00
I already posted this in this thread but unironically this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWF74KMRq04

Tech leaned so heavy into enshitification it has become it, to the point an entire word was coined to explain what tech was turning the world around us into. Tech still thinks 'but I'm a good person/we're doing good so.... XYZ is OK' and isn't willing to even see how they actually chose to present themselves.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-04-23 18:06:57+00:00
The problem with that is that this is often not a real choice. You don't get to pick individual properties, you get to pick from a (usually pretty small) selection of products which bundle a lot of properties together, and these annoyances are usually not deal-breaking enough to cancel the other reasons why you are using that product.

Often, there simply is no respectful alternative because everyone is doing it, or the respectful alternative is utterly useless due to other issues, or the disrespectful platform is the exclusive distributor for some content that you really want to access.

The platforms/apps know this and generally get more abusive the less alternatives you have.
by johnmaguire | 2025-04-23 18:07:26+00:00
The problem with Chrome and the DMA has to do with the fact that Alphabet does these "don'ts":

- treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform

- prevent users from un-installing any pre-installed software or app if they wish so (Chrome on Android can be disabled but not uninstalled)

- track end users outside of the gatekeepers' core platform service for the purpose of targeted advertising, without effective consent having been granted.

https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/about-dma_en#what-d...
by hinkley | 2025-04-23 18:08:13+00:00
React is, I am convinced, the new Struts only client side.

Struts was SSR before we needed a term for SSR. It had low productivity so it looked like it was doing well in the industry because there were so goddamned many jobs. But if you asked people you really couldn’t find many that loved it, and if they did it was a sign that maybe their judgment wasn’t that great, and you were going to be disappointed if you asked follow-up questions about what else they thought was a good idea.

It was killed by JSTL, which was one of the first templating systems to get away from <% > syntax.