MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitwize | 2025-04-23 17:16:04+00:00
When you're just starting out, especially if you're young, programming feels like it's about the journey more than the destination. You can feel yourself growing and learning, and it's incredibly addicting because you feel like nothing's out of reach.

But in the business world, what matters is that you ship something that works, and pleases the customer, on time and under budget. If you're selling software, time to market is a critical constraint. And after your umpteenth slog through some wretched legacy code base, the feeling of achieving wizardly power begins to fade. Programming becomes another clerical job, and really, you don't care much about producing a lovingly handcrafted solution, you just want to get it out there and collect your pay so you can pay your mortgage and keep supporting your wife and kids. At the end of the day, that's what it's all about. AI lets you get stuff out there faster. Therefore it makes sense from a business perspective.
by elefanten | 2025-04-23 17:16:14+00:00
Putting aside the nebulous notion "contribution to hard science"...

She became famous for adopting a strain of strident and problematic activism, using it to attack her colleagues and making claims just as wild as some of the ones she cherry picks to critique.

It's not at all surprising that she ended up an extremely divisive figure. And meanwhile, the state of the art sped far ahead of where she drew her line in the sand.

It's hard to find discussion of her that isn't strongly biased in one direction or another (surely, my own comment included). In my experience (sample size 1), when she gets brought up (or involved), the quality of the discussion usually plummets.
by carlosjobim | 2025-04-23 17:16:45+00:00
Nokia is a strange story. I remember when it happened, and absolutely everybody knew it would kill the company to sell it to Microsoft. So of course the leaders and owners of Nokia knew the same thing. My guess is that they decided that they couldn't compete with the iPhone and decided to cash out what they could. Maybe Microsoft could help them with shuttling money to offshore accounts or some other under the table services? Nokia was publicly traded, so it could have been a great robbing of small time investors. But did Microsoft really get anything out of the deal that was worth the price?

I had the Nokia N9 at the time, which was years ahead of its time and one of the most well designed smartphones so far, both in hardware and especially in software. Modern iOS and Android still look dated in comparison.
by zo1 | 2025-04-23 17:16:45+00:00
FastAPI and it's very opinionated "ecosystem" of "easy to use" and "hipster-esque documented" tools are fast-becoming a horrible one-man show version of Django, and we will all regret going so deep into it using it, one day. Until then, sure we can use it and it mostly makes sense and it mostly works really very well. Hopefully the community matures and moves away from opinionated tooling that forces you into the "one true way".
by nozzlegear | 2025-04-23 17:16:49+00:00
I'm trying to find more information about creating videos/courses with Scrimba, but most of the info on your website is geared toward consuming content. I see that it's possible to create a new course, but is it possible to create one that's private/limited access? My usecase is recording a course with a tool like this and selling it as the video part of premium course materials for my clients.
by jefftk | 2025-04-23 17:16:54+00:00
This isn't just pixels, it's the normal way we use rectangular units in common speech:

* A small city might be ten blocks by eight blocks, and we could also say the whole city is eighty blocks.

* A room might by 13 tiles by 15 tiles, or 295 tiles total.

* On graph paper you can draw a rectangle that's three squares by five squares, or 15 squares total.
by doubleorseven | 2025-04-23 17:17:13+00:00
I was programming 14 years without LLM so I'm not sure I can relate, but -

Agents got really good lately in explaining what they did, which makes it easier to skim over the "boilerplate" and focus on the main event it produced.

Also I got really good with agents since I spend half of my day talking in my head to an agent and focusing on how to build my prompt and what questions and areas I want it to ask me about before I set it free.

It's not really vibe coding but actuall vibe coding never worked for me, it usually get stuck in a loop of "let me fix a linter issue" and "i didn't implemented this interface correctly".
Ask HN: Is using GitHub for a closed-source product considered "not cool"?
by kenanbek | 2025-04-23 17:17:18+00:00
I use a GitHub repository for release distribution for a cross-platform desktop application. The source code itself is not open source. However, I keep testing scripts and binaries for all supported platforms. Additionally, the repo also serves as a GitHub page.

I explicitly have a [disclaimer][1] about it not being an open-source project.

Is this a bad appeal from a community perspective?

[1]: https://github.com/KenanBek/maxDEV/blob/main/README.md
by keyringlight | 2025-04-23 17:17:52+00:00
The trouble is that if some weirdness happens because of the edit, you've got to handle it even if you say it would be reasonable to assume that it's outside of being supported. Maybe you spend a bit more time defensive coding around what inputs it reads from the file, maybe a certain proportion of users doing the save edit see bugs in an apparently unrelated part of the game and seek support (and their bug report might not be complete with all the details), developers spend time to chase down what went wrong, maybe they bad-mouth it on forums which affects sales - there's going to be some cost to handling all of that.

One of the anecdotes from Titan Quest developed by Iron Lore is that their copy protection had multiple checks, crackers removed the early checks to get the game running but later 'tripwires' as you progress through the game remained and the game appeared to crash. So the game earned a reputation for being buggy for something no normal user would hit running the game as intended.
by oceanplexian | 2025-04-23 17:18:02+00:00
A lot of people assume that AI naturally produces this predictable style writing but as someone who has dabbled in training a number of fine tunes that's absolutely not the case.

You can improve things with prompting but can also fine tune them to be completely human. The fun part is it doesn't just apply to text, you can also do it with Image Gen like Boring Reality (https://civitai.com/models/310571/boring-reality) (Warning: there is a lot of NSFW content on Civit if you click around).

My pet theory is the BigCo's are walking a tightrope of model safety and are intentionally incorporating some uncanny valley into their products, since if people really knew that AI could "talk like Pete" they would get uneasy. The cognitive dissonance doesn't kick in when a bot talks like a drone from HR instead of a real person.
by xp84 | 2025-04-23 17:18:40+00:00
> solution looking for a problem

I think it's not actually that bad a situation, to me I think we're just at matters of degree. To explain:

It's not that people can't see that it might be super nice to have an experience kind of like the AVP for a few already-known problems:

1. As an alternative to a big, heavy, non-portable display(s) or a bulky laptop for people who can't always just work at a desk.

2. As an alternative to a TV

3. Fun gaming applications. For instance, MarioKart Home Circuit is a neat game that uses physical karts with cameras, which you play on the TV, but imagine how cool it would be if kids could run around the house and the neighborhood with friends in AR racing karts that only you can see.

1 and 2 are already perfectly there, and obviously a very small number of games that take advantage of VR exist, but they're not that ambitious.

The issue though is that nobody wants those 'problems' solved badly enough to (A) pay $3500+ plus tax for it, nor (B) wants to wear a very heavy and awkward-looking helmet with poor battery life.

The promise is there. If a device can be made that is far lighter, can fold to fit in a coat pocket, with better battery life, and costing $1000, that could go a long way to being something people would find well worth the effort of carrying around and worth the cost. If everybody has one and it's comfortable and light, watching movies on it together, either on an awesome AR screen with atmospheric effects, or in a VR movie theater could be a fun experience rather than look like an absurd antisocial nerd thing.

All this will require investment and improvement of the tech, and will require a healthy developer ecosystem, but with those pieces I'd give the idea itself a good shot. We'll see if Apple is willing or able to do either one. If not them, someone else might.
by uludag | 2025-04-23 17:18:40+00:00
> Vibe coding is here to stay.

I would say this is true in the same way that copy-paste coding functioned and that vibe coding isn't fundamentally different. It can be a useful approach to a variety of problems.

Having capable, knowledgable, and skilled employees is important to businesses though. If your business is something easily approachable then you are at risk of being outcompeted from companies with more skilled employees. There are truly hellscapes of codebases out there without the glimmer of hope of being worked on with vibe coding alone. On top of that, I'm getting the feeling that vibe coding is a sure way to hellscape your own codebase. Nothing can take the place of critical thinking.
by foo_barrio | 2025-04-23 17:19:04+00:00
This has been the majority of my professional coding experience since the 90's ::shrug::. Having to take ownership of some Java Spring application felt a lot like stepping through an assembly program or some random ROM. Each line of code just returns values and modifies a bunch of other stuff at the same time and you slowly build up a mental model of what it's doing and what it's trying to do!
by ethbr1 | 2025-04-23 17:19:15+00:00
Windows: I can pay a low skilled admin who knows how to run prebuilt tools

Linux: I require a higher skilled admin who knows how to architect and build things

Because Linux has been built by developers for developers, it eschews braindead administration as a feature, because that's not something its dev community ever required.

That's changed somewhat in the past 15 years, but still lags Windows substantially.
by snozolli | 2025-04-23 17:19:40+00:00
What's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%?

IMO, the harm is that the weirdo billionaire who wants to do this has said that he needs a trillion dollars to accomplish it and subsequently embedded himself within an incompetent, would-be-authoritarian regime.

I want humanity to colonize Mars and space. I don't want it happening at the whim of a madman whose only concern is going down in history as the man who made it possible at any cost to society.
by cgriswald | 2025-04-23 17:20:39+00:00
You don't need AI to scan social media posts for wrongthink. AI may let you go deeper, detecting thoughtcrime based on certain patterns of otherwise acceptable speech. However, AI is already good enough for that and the sort of people who want this don't care about false positives (or really truth at all) and are probably already compiling lists. Historically these sorts of folks just make stuff up against their enemies if there is no real evidence, so I'm not sure AI does much at all here, except possibly adding some credibility for the less skeptical.

I see Mars as an inevitability. We need Mars. Our eggs are all in one basket and the only way to guarantee our future is to be a multi-planet species or to learn how to live in self-sustaining tin cans. Colonizing Mars would help us develop the tools for either one of these necessities. Colonizing Mars right now I'm a bit more skeptical about.
by ericmcer | 2025-04-23 17:20:53+00:00
It depends on how you answer the question "why are we here?"

Is the goal is to create an earthly utopia with minimum suffering and maximum happiness? Is it aggressive progress so that we can't be wiped out by a random cosmic event? Or should we be eschewing all of that and living harmoniously with nature and dying spiritually content when our time is up?

There is also the argument that if we had focused on solving poverty 150 years ago instead of prioritizing rapid industrialization and economic growth more people would be in poverty today. A 50 year period of scarcity would completely erase all progress we have made towards lifting people out of poverty, regardless of how equitably we distributed the scarce goods.
by jayd16 | 2025-04-23 17:20:57+00:00
I think you're looking at the command line and saying a mouse is a solution looking for a problem.

Its not just about manipulating objects spatially. You could do that on a desktop screen with a wii-mote. The other aspect of the form factor is that its an always on, omni-present display, with awareness of the user's surroundings.

This unlocks the ability for apps to be locked to specific locations and contexts, to overlay information on the world, and to, as you stated, manipulate them in a spatial way.

Once the UX itself isn't an uncomfortable hassle, the use cases are really very easy to imagine.
by LAsteNERD | 2025-04-23 17:21:21+00:00
Any thoughts on the ethics of cloning and/or genetically engineering endangered species to survive in a changing world?

What would you want to read about in a deeply reported story on the role of cloning and AI in shaping the future of wildlife management and conservation?

Any under-reported technologies or case studies you're aware of? Any thoughts on the promise or (probably underconsidered peril) of this technology?

Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
by gymbeaux | 2025-04-23 17:21:33+00:00
Yeah fair enough. I do write my own tickets. I don't think that resolves the "can't be bothered" attitude- that they're very busy and value their time very highly.

I will add another interesting quirk- he will never admit fault and in written communication tends to "make assertions" and I feel like I have to defend them or the lack of defense means his assertions are correct "in a court of law" - I don't know if I'm describing that well. Basically he has it so ingrained in him never to say anything that may be used against him later, even though obviously I have no intention of suing him now or in the future.

It amounts to a sense of under-appreciation and that I am not respected.

We have a patent together through this project. It's very interesting work that I wouldn't be doing anywhere else. It definitely could be worse.
by fuzztester | 2025-04-23 17:21:52+00:00
IIRC, expect (Unix automation tool) was developed at NIST by Don Libes, who also wrote the book about it.

I would call that punching about your own weight, if you consider the use and impact of expect:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expect

https://core.tcl-lang.org/expect/home
by thmsths | 2025-04-23 17:21:54+00:00
Sounds good to me. I am not too dogmatic about the exact implementation of who does the work and your system seems to align incentives properly while also avoiding the too many cooks in the pot/too much dilution of the money into small projects to have an impact issues.

From past failures the 2 things I want to be addressed are: 1) Have a proper procurement agency with actual experts at the helm, they are the "customer", they hand over the bids, they measure success, they should of course listen to end users. 2) Shield the project from petty internal politics. While I understand that political interference is inevitable, especially if you get public funding. The top priority is to have a good alternative to existing software in these 3 categories I defined. Not yet another job program/kickback to politically well connected entities.
by duxup | 2025-04-23 17:22:04+00:00
I was wondering what was going to happen after the legal situation with the founder.

In the past I've found scotusblog to be very handy in focusing on the technical details of the case rather than the typical "so and so won", especially when they were cases with a lot more nuanced questions than someone win someone lose.

Although at the same time I feel like scotusblog recently has had less of that depth than in the past...
by colechristensen | 2025-04-23 17:22:40+00:00
Every time I've tried to get LLMs to create something they quickly get to the point where they fail miserably. It can do boilerplate, it can do straightforward things which have been done a billion times, it can come up with 50 ideas 10 of which are decent and not obvious... but it can't go beyond a certain complexity, it can't use mildly obscure libraries, it can't get major versions of libraries straight, it invents API calls that don't exist.

One of the biggest wastes of human talent is corporations hiring people to solve the same problems over and over and over. Every company has to reinvent so many wheels for themselves because sharing code between for profit companies just isn't done outside of the occasional breaking a whole project off into an open source project. This is what LLMs are good at, the very repetitive boilerplate connecting the dots and doing obvious things. Companies are going to have to retool themselves to only really be doing "the hard part", and the rest left to LLMs. In the same way languages will have to change to accommodate the hard part and the easy part.
by 13years | 2025-04-23 17:23:12+00:00
> where we will have personal agents that are AGI for a huge range of use cases

We are already there for internet social media bots. I think the issue here is being able to discern the correct use cases. What is your error tolerance? For social media bots, it really doesn't matter so much.

However, mission critical business automation is another story. We need to better understand the nature of these tools. The most difficult problem is that there is no clear line for the point of failure. You don't know when you have drifted outside of the training set competency. The tool can't tell you what it is not good at. It can't tell you what it does not know.

This limits its applicability for hands-off automation tasks. If you have a task that must always succeed, there must be human review for whatever is assigned to the LLM.
by taylodl | 2025-04-23 17:23:56+00:00
Musk has to leave for Tesla to have a shot at a future. There's an ever-shrinking cadre of "investors" willing to buy Musk's "promises" in lieu of delivered results. That's unsustainable. Get rid of Musk and absolutely their stock price is going to "tank", or I should say re-adjust to what it should have been all along.

Part of sending Musk on his way would involve Tesla owning up to what they are: an EV auto company with massive vertical integration on the charging side that allows their customers to charge at home, off-grid, and during their travels.

Robotaxis and robots are a distraction from their core competency, and in my mind, makes their stock less valuable.
by sumtechguy | 2025-04-23 17:24:01+00:00
You both are correct.

But also keep in mind in 2004 the legality of many open source projects was not really tested very well in court. Pretty sure that was right around the time one of the bigger linux distros was throwing its weight around and suing people. So you want to ship on PS2 and XBOX and PC and GameCube. Can you use that lib from inside windows? Not really. Can you build/vs buy? Buy means you need the code and probably will have to port it to PS2/GameCube yourself. Can you use that opensource lib? Probably, but legal is still dragging its feet, and you get to port it to PS2. Meanwhile your devs need a library 3 weeks ago and have hacked something together from an older codebase that your company owns and it works and means you can hit your gold master date.

Would you do that now? No. You would grab one of the multitudes of decent libs out there and make sure you are following the terms correctly. Back then? Yeah I can totally see it happening. Open source was semi legally grey/opaque to many corporations. They were scared to death of losing control of their secret sauce code and getting sued.
by joshstrange | 2025-04-23 17:24:03+00:00
I could not agree more with this. 90% of AI features feel tacked on and useless and that’s before you get to the price. Some of the services out here are wanting to charge 50% to 100% more for their sass just to enable “AI features”.

I’m actually having a really hard time thinking of an AI feature other than coding AI feature that I actually enjoy. Copilot/Aider/Claude Code are awesome but I’m struggling to think of another tool I use where LLMs have improved it. Auto completing a sentence for the next word in Gmail/iMessage is one example, but that existed before LLMs.

I have not once used the features in Gmail to rewrite my email to sound more professional or anything like that. If I need help writing an email, I’m going to do that using Claude or ChatGPT directly before I even open Gmail.
by leguminous | 2025-04-23 17:24:11+00:00
The half pixel offset makes sense, though. If you have two textures, you want the edges to align, not the centers of the pixels.

See, for example: https://bartwronski.com/2021/02/15/bilinear-down-upsampling-...

Implementations of resizing based on aligning pixel centers resulted in slight shifts, which caused a lot of trouble.
by cgannett | 2025-04-23 17:24:27+00:00
I had a weird old "laptop" that I was given as a kid, didnt know jack about computers back then so I couldnt tell you what it was. It was one of those that came with a big heavy docking station and it couldnt run without it anymore so I assume the battery was dead. Had Windows 2000 and I used to play AoE 2 on it all day and it was smooth and the interface was snappy. Fond memories. I remember being really confused when people told me that Windows 2000 was bad.
by kristopolous | 2025-04-23 17:24:28+00:00
When context changes, so do the prospects of these ideas.

Youtube wasn't the first video streaming service but it was one of the first for the DSL era when people could watch video without lengthy waits.

AI companies repeatedly failed until enough things, specifically data and compute were at enough scale to deliver.

Advancements in battery technology made electric cars practical bucking the trend of decades of failed EV car companies.

So many things - contactless payment, touchscreens, even LCD panels, these were lousy and impractical for decades.

Attempts at mass adoption of handheld computers, now called smartphones, started in the 1980s. Without high speed mobile networks, high density color LCD screens, reliable geolocation, these things were necessary to make the handheld pocket computer something that everybody has.

Even online grocery delivery services, now common place, had its start in the catastrophic collapse of WebVan in the 1990s. Cell phones, the gig economy, mature e-payments, these were all needed.

You always need to look for the context change and how that can untar some tarpits.