MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MostlyStable | 2025-04-20 15:31:38+00:00
Ok, I'm going to make a slightly controversial statement: Vibe coding is both A)potentially hugely important and transofrmative and B)massively good.

Most of the criticisms of vibe coding are coming from SWEs who work on large, complicated codebases whose products are used by lots of people and for whom security, edge cases, maintainability, etc. are extremely important considerations. In this context, vibe coding is obviously a horrible idea, and we are pretty far away from AI being able to do more than slightly assist around the edges.

But small, bespoke scripts that will be used by exactly 1 person and are whose outputs are easily verified are actually _hugely_ important. Millions of things are probably done every single day where, if the person doing it had the skill to write up a small script, it would be massively sped up. But most people don't have that skill, and it's too expensive/there is too much friction to hire an actual programmer to solve it. AI can do these things.

Each specific instance isn't a big deal, and won't make much productivity difference, but in aggregate, the potential gains are massive, and AI is already far more than good enough to be completely creating these kinds of scripts. It is just going to take people a while to shift their perspective and start asking about what small tasks they do every day that could be scripted.

This is the true potential of "vibe coding". Someone who can't program, but knows what they need (and how to verify that it works), making something for their personal use.
by westurner | 2025-04-20 15:31:41+00:00
Plants absorb nitrogen and CO2 from the air and store it in their roots; plants fertilize soil.

If you only grow plants with externally-sourced nutrients, that is neither sustainable nor permaculture.

Though it may be more efficient to grow without soil; soil depletion isn't prevented by production processes that do not generate topsoil.

JADAM is a system developed by a chemicals engineer given what is observed to work in JNF/KNF. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38527264

Where do soil amendments come from, and what would deplete those stocks (with consideration for soil depletion)?

(Also, there are extremely efficient ammonia/nitrogen fertilizer generators, but still then the algae due to runoff problem. FWIU we should we asks ng farmers to Please produce granulated fertilizer instead of liquid.)

The new biofuel subsidies require no-till farming practices; which other countries are further along at implementing (in or to prevent or reverse soil depletion).

Tilling turns topsoil to dirt due to loss of moisture, oxidation, and solar radiation.
by firesteelrain | 2025-04-20 15:32:39+00:00
It’s a Copilot competitor and it’s used by Zillow, Dell, and Anduril (newish Defense company). Cursor can’t work in airgapped environments right now. I don’t know what Codeium charges to run an on prem licensed version but they boast over 1000 enterprise customers. Codeium is on a rapid growth trajectory from $1.25b to $2.85b in such a short period.

Codeium can be fine tuned. Though it’s trained on similar open source it does provide assurances that they do not inadvertently train on wrongly licensed software code.

https://windsurf.com/blog/copilot-trains-on-gpl-codeium-does...
by WindowsDev | 2025-04-20 15:32:44+00:00
>The file size doesn't need to be small for Github, they don't care. Likewise it doesn't need to be small for the extension since the extension is stored locally, not loaded over the network. Take your malware elsewhere.

It’s minified like this because it was being distributed to 100,000’s of users in the crx state it came from, as a courtesy to not waste their data / HDD space. Google was fine with it in this state for 5 years. Take your slander elsewhere.
by jerf | 2025-04-20 15:33:22+00:00
Nobody has accused my code bases of being "too enterprise" yet.

Edit: I should probably elaborate on that before my edit window closes. Other than pervasive use of dependency injection, done directly with no framework simply by passing values around, there are effectively no "Enterprise" structures in sight in my code base. That's what I mean by "this design is sufficient for me". The only thing that resembles a "factory" is in the precise place I need to construct values from a type specified by an input string. No patterns put in place "just in case". No top-level frameworks used for 3% of their functionality. I use a process monitor but the interface that requires is "Serve(context.Context)", which is just the minimum you need to be able to monitor a service.

There are what I'd call "patterns", but they're there to do their job to the full, not guesses about what maybe I'll need later.

I've actually got a half-written pattern book for Go I've been trying to figure out what to do with, but the introduction is basically "why pattern books shouldn't just be a recitation of the original GoF patterns", because that is, well, stupid. Even the original book bit off too much trying to straddle Smalltalk and C++ in one shot. They require different patterns. My pattern book is how to solve Go problems in Go, not to give people words to slap in their code in case someday their code might grow enough to need it.
by csense | 2025-04-20 15:33:48+00:00
Internet Historian made an amazing documentary on how the game's changed over the years [1]. They're still making massive changes to the game!

If it's been years since you played it, you should give it a try. There have been a lot of bug/crash fixes, new mechanics, even redoing some core game systems (I think they recently made some big changes to planet generation).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ
by pbiggar | 2025-04-20 15:33:57+00:00
Really, anyone working at any of the companies that are enabling or supporting ISrael's war on the people of Gaza are going to face this sooner or later. We remember the role of IBM and Hugo Boss and Volkswagon in the holocaust - we are certainly going to remember that Microsoft employees worked in the same room as the Israeli army to build some of the tools that ran the genocide. And we also know about the role of Google, Amazon, Palentir, Meta, LinkedIn, etc.
by vajrabum | 2025-04-20 15:34:41+00:00
The feds don’t generally indict unless it’s a slam dunk. That means two things. Lots of people walk and they will go after someone if they have the evidence. As a small investor I’m glad they get at least a few. Insider trading is a kind of stealing where the victims don’t generally even know they’ve been robbed and at the high end the amounts are large.
by rfoo | 2025-04-20 15:35:17+00:00
> Cursor isn't providing their own models

For use cases demanding the most intelligent model, yes they aren't.

However, there are cases that you just can't use best models due to latency. For example next edit prediction, and applying diffs [0] generated by the super intelligent model you decided to use. AFAIK, Cursor does use their own model for these, which is why you can't use Cursor without paying them $20/mo even if you bring your own Anthropic API key. Applying what Claude generated in Copilot is just so painfully slow to the point that I just don't want to use it.

If you tried Cursor early on, I recommend you update your prior now. Cursor had been redesigned about a year ago, and it is a completely different product compared to what they first released 2 years ago.

[0] We may not need a model to apply diff soon, as Aider leaderboard shows, recent models started to be able to generate perfect diff that actually applies.
by KaiserPro | 2025-04-20 15:35:32+00:00
> it has been successfully replicated by almost every organisation without mainframes

yeah but how much did it cost?

At a large financial news company I worked for, the AWS opex was £4m, All to put text on a page. You know, a solved problem. We spent years fucking about with fleet to make something "resilient". (then early, shitty k8s)

The opex for FAANG is astronomical. facebook spends something like 40 billion a year on infra. Thats without staffing costs. (manifold, the S3 clone, is a bastard to use.)

My point is, which I should make more obvious: if you buy the right mainframe, you can literally blow one of them up, and not loose any uptime. Yes, its expensive.

But, hiring a team to fuck about with k8s on AWS is going to cost more, and never be finished, because true redundant systems are hard to design and build, even by distributed systems experts.
by yubblegum | 2025-04-20 15:35:38+00:00
That age discrimination post VC infection is real. Back when I started in 90 we had senior engineers with white hair. I distinctly remember brushing aside my father's advice when he cautioned me about such things. "No, not in software. It is a pure meritocracy". Hah. (Implicit lesson: listen to your elders /g)

Second lesson then was that engineering as a career is for chumps; young ones: start your own business.
by orbital-decay | 2025-04-20 15:37:42+00:00
Valid question, and yes I don't think there's any difference in performance.

However I'm not talking about technical tasks with objectively measurable criteria of success (which is a super narrow subset, not even coding is entirely like this). I'm saying that you have to transfer some kind of human preference to the model, as unsupervised learning will never be able to infer an accurate reference point for what you subjectively want from the pretraining data on its own, no matter the scale. Even if I'm wrong on that somehow, we're currently at 1x scale, and model finetuning right now is a pretty hands-on process. It's clear that ML people that usually curate this process have a really vague idea of what looks/reads/feels good. Which is why they produce slop.

TFA is talking about that:

>AI doesn’t understand why something matters, can’t independently prioritize what’s most important, and doesn’t bring the accountability or personal investment that gives work its depth and resonance.

Of course it doesn't, because it's not trained to understand it. Claude was finetuned for "human likeness" up to the version 3, and Opus had really deep understanding of why something matters, it had better agency than any current model, and a great reference point for your priorities. That's what happens when you give the curation to a non-ML adjacent person who knows what she's doing (AFAIK she left Anthropic since then and Anthropic seemingly dropped that "character training" policy).

Check 4o's image generation as well - it has terrible yellow tint by default, thick constant-width linework in "hand-drawn" pictures etc. You can somewhat steer it with a prompt and references, but it's pretty clear that the people that have been finetuning it didn't have a good idea whether their result is any good, so they made something instantly recognizable as slop. This is not just a botched training run or a dataset preparation bug, it's a recurring pattern for OpenAI, they simply do not care about this. The recurring pattern for Midjorney, for example, is to finetune their models on kitsch.

This all could be fixed in no time, making these models way more usable as products, right now, not someday when they maybe reach the 100x scale (which is neither likely to happen nor likely to change anything).
by MostlyStable | 2025-04-20 15:37:46+00:00
I actually literally think that these small scripts, if widely applied, are far, far more bigger than that. Even solely in the US, let alone globally. I'm also relatively certain that, if they weren't sinking money into research etc, subscriptions on inference are probably already profitable. These companies are burning money because they are investing in research, not because $10/month doesn't cover the average inference costs. Although I'd love to find a better source than the speculative ones I've seen about it.
by 1dom | 2025-04-20 15:38:38+00:00
Again, you're still missing the point by trying to focus on specific examples that perpetuate the idea that everything must have a deadline and a deadline must be fixed and heavily consequential.

If you keep on creating examples where x number of people face consequences for being late, then yes, there will always be stressful consequences for being late.

Yes, there will always be situations like this, actual life or death situations. Don't release this update to address a newly spotted bug, pacemakers are all going to switch off at midnight and people die - worth the stress from the engineer and everyone else involved to keep people alive.

Is a tax return one of those things? It doesn't have to be. Unless you want to insist it has to be. That is my point.

> There's no way for deadlines to not be moderately stressful. You can't decide to avoid urgency and stress.

Owners of deadlines can decide to avoid urgency and stress if they have the resources to be flexible with submissions. Most deadlines are not life, death, urgency and stress, unless people make them to be.
by notarobot123 | 2025-04-20 15:38:40+00:00
I agree, let's be open to new ideas and to revising our perspective. Humility is necessary if we know that our own knowledge is only based on the best information available.

That said, we shouldn't then count all our present knowledge as worthless and any and all kinds of information as equally valid and worthy of dissemination.

I do get your fear - censorship is a dangerous tool that is not always used responsibly. Yet abandoning any kind of social self-regulation in what information circulates publicly sounds a lot more dangerous.
Show HN: Qduck – DuckDB client API for KDB/Q
by gohwell | 2025-04-20 15:38:44+00:00
Open source library for allowing KDB users to interact with DuckDB. The main motivation was to be able to query open data formats on s3 buckets without having to rely on python/pykx. Great for adhoc research when you want to join new data with existing data stored in KDB.
by hosh | 2025-04-20 15:39:04+00:00
Working at the scale of product design and user experience, it is easy to see what a user is doing as against their own personal interest. What I've found is that there is usually some kind of motivation for some things to be done. It might not be strictly rational, but more often than not, there is some kind of narrative or view from which that particular action, belief, or rational makes sense. They are often unexamined.

So I probably shouldn't have said "aligned to human interest", because the scope of that interest is different among individuals (for different aspect of their life). That scope is dynamic. It could be self-interested, or interest of the immediate family or community they belong to. Thank you for bringing that up.

As far as the rigidity -- I appreciate your view and comment on this. I admit too. It may be obvious to you that the post-conquest syncretic culture is different, but it was a blind spot for me. I didn't even think about that. I say all of this to say that the lens (view) in which we see all of this isn't itself always seen by the person looking through it. In my case, I know about the idea and I can still miss it.

However, I have learned tbat many arguments that talk past each other happen because the view from which people argue from are not always called out or clearly defined. There are things that can be dismissed simply because it doesn't fit the view.

Re-reading your original comment -- perhaps it's better stated that, while you don't have to couple the original culture and technology, for something to be practiced now, those technologies need to be coupled with the current-day culture.
by dingaling | 2025-04-20 15:39:28+00:00
> Fools was not only popular, it was > well-liked. And I mean really well-liked.

Maybe outside London, but it wasn't well-liked in much of the capital. OF&H was seen as mocking and stereotyping the Cockney trader, whereas Minder ( which inspired it ) paid much more respect.

The difference between laughing at and laughing with.
by luckylion | 2025-04-20 15:41:42+00:00
> But small, bespoke scripts that will be used by exactly 1 person and are whose outputs are easily verified are actually _hugely_ important.

Are they easily verified though?

I have a bunch of people who are "vibe coding" in non-dev departments. It's amazing that it allows them to do things they otherwise couldn't, but I don't think it's accurate to say it's easily verified, unless we're talking about the most trivial tasks ("count the words in this text").

As soon as it gets a bit more complex (but far from "complex"), it's no longer verifiable for them except "the output looks kinda like what I expected". Might still be useful for things, but how much weight do you want to put on your sales-analysis if you've verified its accuracy by "looks intuitively correct"?
by ForOldHack | 2025-04-20 15:42:02+00:00
At first I am reluctant to agree. But I decided to take math and English every year. I sucked at math, and had to figure out how to get good on my own. Now I have a degree. Math and music go hand in hand. I hated the music I was learning, so I quit lessons, and got the music I wanted to learn and struggled to learn it and I got muh better. I am an avid reader.

I reluctantly admit that you are right, and I am the better for it because I overcame my lazyness and found joy, in math, English, reading, and music. I sing, play piano, guitar, and listen with appreciation.
by consumer451 | 2025-04-20 15:42:02+00:00
I dislike the term, but eventually "vibe coding" should replace many existing no-code/low-code platforms, right? I see that as nearly guaranteed, for many use cases.

> Low-code and no-code development platforms allow professional as well as citizen developers to quickly and efficiently create applications in a visual software development environment. The fact that little to no coding experience is required to build applications that may be used to resolve business issues underlines the value of the technology for organizations worldwide. Unsurprisingly, the global low-code platform market is forecast to amount to approximately 65 billion U.S. dollars by 2027. [0]

We could argue about the exact no-code TAM, but if you have a decent chance to create the market leader for the no-code replacement, $3B seems fair, doesn't it?

[0] https://www.statista.com/topics/8461/low-code-and-no-code-pl...
by 9rx | 2025-04-20 15:43:23+00:00
> Human brains aren’t limited to the standard human body plan.

But as the body starts to lose function (i.e. disability), we start to consider those humans special intelligences instead of general intelligences. The body and mind are intrinsically linked.

Best we can tell the human brain is bootstrapped to work with the human body with specialized functions, notably functions to keep it alive. It can go beyond those predefined behaviours, but not beyond its own self. If you placed the brain in an entirely different body, that which it doesn't recognize, it would quickly die.

As that pertains to artificial analogs, that means you can't just throw AGI at your hardware and see it function. You still need to manually prepare the bulk of the foundational software, contrary to the promise you envision. The generality of AGI is limited to how general its hardware is. If the hardware is specialized, the intelligence will be beholden to being specialized as well.

There is a hypothetical world where you can throw intelligence at any random hardware and watch it go, realizing the promise, but we call that ASI.
by csense | 2025-04-20 15:43:28+00:00
I made the switch from Windows to Linux around 2008. But I've always kept around a dual-boot partition (or more recently, a dedicated Windows PC) for gaming.

With all the weird stuff around Windows 11 I'm thinking I may just switch to Linux for gaming too. I've had good experiences with Wine in the past. And I've heard the Steam Deck has "encouraged" game devs to have better Linux support.

Windows XP was by far the best Windows version. In 2025 I would gladly pay money for Windows XP with modern 3D graphics support and up-to-date security patches.
by prmph | 2025-04-20 15:44:20+00:00
1. Speeding over the speed limit can be a crime. I haven't ever driven in the US and not noticed that pretty much everyone around me is over-speeding

2. Failing to pay tax on certain gifts can be a crime

> You make a gift if you give property (including money), or the use of or income from property, without expecting to receive something of at least equal value in return. If you sell something at less than its full value or if you make an interest-free or reduced-interest loan, you may be making a gift. [1]

3. If you are reading Hacker News on end instead of working for your employers who pays you, you could be stealing from them, a felony.

4. Jay-walking can a misdemeanor, and open to interpretation. Commit 3 misdemeanors and you could have committed a felony.

5. More examples come to mind

[1] https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
by wishfish | 2025-04-20 15:45:10+00:00
One possible option would be to install Netguard (open source Android firewall that doesn't require root) and block Play Services.

I have that on a spare unrooted Android phone. Seems to be working so far. But I'm sure Google could bypass it if they really wanted to. I don't know if they've ever made an effort to bypass Netguard (or similar) in the past.
Loops in AI Coding Agents
by finally4444 | 2025-04-20 15:45:26+00:00
AI coding agents are powerful but shallow. They work great when the problem is linear, scoped, and easy to describe. But debugging is none of those things. The moment something subtle breaks, you fall into a loop. Prompt, response. Prompt, response. The agent forgets what it tried. It repeats itself. You start feeding it context just to keep it grounded. Eventually, you give up and fix the bug yourself.

It feels like watching GEB unfold in real time. The agent tries to reason about its own reasoning but gets lost inside its own frame. It has syntax, not semantics. The result is recursion without insight. A strange loop that cannot close.

I built Deebo to break that pattern. It is a separate agent that runs debugging sessions in parallel. It forks the codebase, creates branches, and tests different fixes at once. Every hypothesis is isolated. Every result is logged. You can plug it into Claude, Cline, or anything that supports the Model Context Protocol. It installs in one line. It does not hallucinate. It explores. And when it is wrong, you still learn something.

https://github.com/snagasuri/deebo-prototype
by SeanLuke | 2025-04-20 15:45:45+00:00
No, it is not. When they say "capeesh" in the movie, they're trying to say "do you understand?" (second person singular). In Italian, that would be "capisci" (pronounced "ca-pee-shee").

Additionally, capisce ("does he understand?") in Italian, is pronounced "ca-pee-sheh".

The "capeesh" is derived from Sicilian.
by mekpro | 2025-04-20 15:45:59+00:00
Gemma 3 is way way better than Llama 4. I think Meta will start to lose its position in LLM mindshare. Another weakness of Llama 4 is its model size that is too large (even though it can run fast with MoE), which greatly limits the applicable users to a small percentage of enthusiasts who have enough GPU VRAM. Meanwhile, Gemma 3 is widely usable across all hardware sizes.