MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GauntletWizard | 2025-05-24 17:42:23+00:00
I have never had a hot dog fall out of a side cut bun. Every time I've used a top cut bun I've felt like it was going to fall out, and it has on at least one occasion that I can remember - and it's not like I remember the details of eating foodstuffs.

The side cut gives you easy gripping surfaces. The undisturbed tops and bottoms of hot dog buns are easy to grip. The sides are inherently less structurally sound because they're "inside" portions and spongy, and when you grip them you're likely to grip the bun very well but apply pressure to the hot dog itself from direct points at your fingers rather than the bun distributing the pressure evenly through the structure.

Gripping a top-cut hot dog bun is like squeezing a baseball half in a mitt - The ball just pops right out the front, and so does the dog. It launches straight upwards and then falls where it may.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-24 17:42:28+00:00
The issue is people are assuming 100% automation and job replacement by AI/ML overnight - that is NOT happening in the near future.

Realistically, we are going to see 20-30% reductions in headcount in the near-to-medium term. THIS IS STILL CATASTROPHIC.

A number of earlier stage companies I've funded have already been heavily utilizing automation to simplify code generation or scaffolding/project ops work. They use the cost savings to hire experienced SWEs at high base salaries and are able to hit the same development metrics as they would have if they had a large team of average paid SWEs. On the BDR side, they are using a massive amount of video/audio automation to scale out cold calling or first impressions, so reducing the need to hire teams of BDRs hitting the phones all the time. And finally, they are automating tier 1/2 support ticket responses and communication so reducing the need for teams of support engineers spending time basically respondng to customers with the polite equivalnet of "read the docs".

Basically, a Series A startup that would have had a staff of 50 employees 10 years ago can essentially output the exact same as a Series A startup with a headcount of 20 employees today, and with a tangible path to FCF positivity.

This is a net reduction in jobs, and a significant one at that, because most people just cannot upskill - it's hard.
Feedback on my Snow Days Calculator project
by NepVibeCoder | 2025-05-24 17:43:40+00:00
I built a tool called Snow Day Calculator that predicts school closures based on weather data and historical trends.

It’s free, requires no sign-up, and works globally.

Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/snow-days-calculator/hgjbkeohcgkmimgcnmkecikbmdakpndo

Edge: https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/snow-days-calculator/lemdhaigpgajbfhljgjclkhiokakbpcl

Would love your feedback or feature ideas!
by actuallyalys | 2025-05-24 17:44:19+00:00
Personally, I wouldn’t normally think of a friendship as a “success accelerator” because that reduces a friendship to its material benefits. I think you can have strong and meaningful relationships without this aspect at all.

Still, I do want to acknowledge that if I’m in a position to help accelerate a friend’s success, I will. I don’t know whether I’d say I expect my friends to do the same for me since it’s so contextual. At the same time I would expect a certain level of reciprocity if they’re in the position to reciprocate, although I admit I’m struggling to articulate my expectations clearly, since they’re not simply one to one.
by dinfinity | 2025-05-24 17:44:30+00:00
> AI needs appropriate and sufficient guidance to be able to write code that does the job.

Note that the example (shitty Microsoft) implementation was not able to properly run tests during its work, not even tests it had written itself.

If you have an existing codebase that already has a plenty tests and you ask AI to refactor something whilst giving it the access it needs to run tests, it can already sometimes do a great job all by itself.

Good specification and documentation also do a lot, of course, but the iterative approach with feedback if things are actually working as intended is a game changer. Not unsurprisingly also a lot closer to how humans do things.
by NooneAtAll3 | 2025-05-24 17:44:44+00:00
that Orwell quote can be saved a lot by proper punctuation

I am not, indeed, sure*,* whether it is not true to say that the Milton *(*who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley*)* had not become *-* out of an experience *-* ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic) to the founder of that Jesuit sect*,* which nothing could induce him to tolerate.
by detaro | 2025-05-24 17:44:49+00:00
> you pay it to UPS upon receipt?

So now I gotta be home 100% to receive the package, instead of it getting it dropped off at a neighbors if I happen to be out/at work/...? And I hope they picked a shipping company that takes card/allows online payments and not someone who expects me to pay in exact cash.

And that's the happy path where everything worked correctly, and not one where something in the paperwork is wrong or got messed up and now you get to try figure out what exact proof the shipping company wants to release your package/believe that they got the amount wrong/... Or it gets shipped in a way where it ends up stuck with actual customs and you get to deal with them. If a seller has their shit in order it's relatively unlikely to happen, but well, random small-ish companies not necessarily do, and if it goes wrong its really annoying.

+ of course if the seller has an actual legal presence here it makes it clear consumer rights as I expect them apply.

I'm not someone who absolutely won't order from abroad if I want something, but a local source or a known distributor just avoids a whole category of potential issues. And computers are the kind of high-value item where people really want to avoid them (and some of the simplifications aren't available, e.g. I think the most straight-forward pre-payment mechanism for sellers is restricted to low-value parcels).
by quantadev | 2025-05-24 17:44:54+00:00
Stack Overflow never fixed any bugs either, but a developer with access to S.O. always had a huge productivity boost from using it. So with even a 1% productivity boost that means a big company can fire 1% of developers, and we're seeing that happen already, although for largely political and reputation reasons company management is currently denying that AI is a direct cause of the layoffs.

Only an AGI will ever "replace" developers. Current AI merely boosts us.
by mnahkies | 2025-05-24 17:45:12+00:00
Phone call was available, but I choose chat in this instance. It wasn't a particularly complex conversation - I outlined my experience, and my doubts from my research and he came back with availability and some direction. I was on holiday with family in a different part of the country whilst arranging it, a few weeks out so there was no real time pressure. Tbh I'm also somewhat adverse to phone calls for no good reason.

At a higher level, this small business offered multiple channels and was able to meet me where I wanted to communicate. This is an advantage small business have because the volume is manageable. At larger scale it becomes more tricky to do economically and so you need to focus on self serve journeys (which may include chat bots, etc)
by cjbgkagh | 2025-05-24 17:46:59+00:00
Perception precedes reality, being a dev was already a low status job. Consider a top tier FAANG vs white shoe lawyer. With AI that has dropped further. Even if AI only takes the very junior roles there will be increased competition at the more senior roles which will again drive down prestige and salary.

Additionally, I’m not hiring anymore which is kind of the same thing as firing. I did have a few roles open for junior assistant types but those are now filled by using AI. AI helps improve my productivity without the added overhead of dealing with staff / contractors. I even hired junior devs and put them on full time study mode to try to skill them up to be useful, one guy was in that mode for 6 months before I had to fire him for learning too slowly. Technically LLMs did learn faster than he did and it was his full time job. It’s easier for me to communicate with the AI, especially with the quick responses and being always available.

I figure the AI will eventually get to my level and eat my lunch but hopefully there are a few years before that happens.

And designers, OMG AI is far easier to deal with and produces far better results.
by josephcsible | 2025-05-24 17:47:18+00:00
> Unfortunately in the real world, that's not how it works. In the real world businesses fo not operate with a "innocent until proven guilty" attitude. Quite the reverse.

> Pretty much any security starts with "guilty" and moves up from there. For example my building has a buzzer, not an open door. I assume all visitors are nefarious unless someone in the building vouches for them by buzzing them in.

What you're describing is the exception. Consider that most merchandise in most stores is unlocked, and that most sit-down restaurants let you eat before paying for your food. And doors generally only work the way you do when they're mainly employee doors. Most places that customers come in all the time are just always unlocked.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-24 17:47:30+00:00
The line:

> Become the AI expert on your team. Don't fight the tools, master them. Be the person who knows when AI helps and when it hurts.

Is something I’ve been wondering about. I haven’t played with this AI stuff much at all, despite thinking it is probably going to be a basically interesting tool at some point. It just seems like it is currently a bit bad, and multiple companies have bet millions of dollars on the idea that it will eventually be quite good. I think that’s a self fulfilling prophecy, they’ll probably get around to making it useful. But, I wonder if it is really worthwhile to learn how to work around the limitations of the currently bad version?

Like, I get that we don’t want to become buggywhip manufacturers. But I also don’t want to specialize in hand-cranking cars and making sure the oil is topped off in my headlights…
by rudedogg | 2025-05-24 17:47:42+00:00
The narrative and hype is out of control. After seeing all the praise on Twitter for the latest frontier models, I figured I'd' try to generate a semi-simple View for SwiftUI. All the features I'm asking for have been covered in a 2023 or 2024 WWDC session, and are in the sample code, as well as public repos.

The prompt was "Please create a basic NSTextView wrapper in SwiftUI, that uses TextKit2 and SwiftUI best practices."

Claude 4 Sonnet produces something I can't type in and the font is invisible, Gemini 2.5 Pro produces a bunch of compiler errors.

I use this stuff for React at work, and while it's slightly better in that context, it still makes completely idiotic mistakes and it really is a toss up on whether I save any time at all IMO.

I think the positive experiences are some mix of people who:

- Lack the skill/experience to recognize bad code or issues

- Don't care about the quality at all (future upgrades or maintainability)

- Only care about the visual output

--------------------

The more I use these tools the more I think the raw generation aspect is a complete crapshoot. The only thing I've had success with is data marshaling or boilerplate code where I provide examples - and even then they'll do random things I specifically instruct them not to in the prompt. Even for small context windows. And to do anything useful I have to be a fucking surgeon with the context and spend a lot of time crafting a really good prompt, and they still mess it up frequently.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667... was posted in a comment here a few days ago, and I think it explains a lot of the issues. Programming works because it's a rigid language to communicate precise instructions to the machine. We're trying to circumvent that by using natural language, but natural language isn't precise. So the LLM has all this ambiguity to deal with, and output isn't what we want.

To counteract this the new idea is to provide tools to the LLM so it can check that its output is rigid/valid to at least fix some of the issues, but it's never going to be 100% due to the fundamental way this all works (LLMs using probabilities/randomness and us instructing them with natural language).

--------------------

Not to be completely negative, I think there are really exciting use cases that we can leverage well today:

- Embeddings for semantic/similarity search is amazing and will have all kinds of applications

- Processing error messages/logs with LLMs is awesome. They can parse out the actual issues much faster than I can
by eddieroger | 2025-05-24 17:47:56+00:00
What prerequisites are you thinking of? Nowadays, all you need is a Mac, download Xcode, and go. You can't do /everything/ if that's as far as you go, but if all you wanted to do was flesh out an idea, that would get you started. And how's that's any different than getting a computer, installing Android Simulator, and starting a new project?
by wat10000 | 2025-05-24 17:48:04+00:00
We already see that a little bit. JSON in theory allows arbitrary decimal numbers, but in practice it’s almost always limited to numbers that are representable as an IEEE-754 double. It used to allow UTF-16 and UTF-32, but in practice only UTF-8 was widely accepted, and that eventually got reflected in the spec.

I’m sure you’re right. If even this simple spec exceeded what people would actually use as a real standard, surely anything beyond that would also be left by the wayside.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-24 17:48:30+00:00
I worked at a medium sized company attacking a market dominated by one or two gigantic FAANGs and it was really sad how focused our leadership was on copying them feature-for-feature and watching them closely to do whatever they were doing. Surprisingly, they also had far more process and red tape in place slowing down routine things than I encountered in BigTech. They were always agonizing over easy product decisions, and second guessing themselves and waiting to see what FAANG does when they should have been taking risks and differentiating themselves. Like, come on, guys, use our few advantages over them and do something great and unexpected!

Nope, it was always stuff like: we need to do another grand redesign because we want to change our brand look and feel again.
by ack_complete | 2025-05-24 17:49:18+00:00
Direct3D doesn't, but the kernel can eat exceptions if 32-bit code triggers an exception from a user mode callback on a 64-bit system. Rendering code is vulnerable to this when triggered from a WM_PAINT message. The call SetProcessUserModeExceptionPolicy() is needed to override the default behavior:

https://code.google.com/archive/p/crashrpt/issues/104

It was introduced in a Windows 7 update and documented in a knowledge base article that has since been removed instead of the regular Win32 docs, so information on it is harder to find these days.
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-05-24 17:50:57+00:00
> He spends months chiseling each essay

I like Graham's writing, and defend it elsewhere in this thread, but that has such an obsequious and somehow macho smack to it, wow. One imagines Hercules chiseling his abs. If that's what his writing does for you, fair enough, but it sure is intense.
by speedylight | 2025-05-24 17:51:25+00:00
I’d suggest looking at other popular repos for inspiration. But at the very least you README should have information on how to run the program as an end user as well as a guide for developers on how to set up the dev environment such that they’re ready to go by following it.

Also a basic description of what your app is/does and what’s it’s trying to solve, a video demonstration also goes a long way. Make sure you use tags on the repo, it’s help with search discovery.
by Teever | 2025-05-24 17:51:28+00:00
This is unavoidable and the only way to mitigate the negatives is sousveillance.[0]

I reject claims by law enforcement that this will lead to making their lives less safe and that they will need to take steps to mitigate it including wearing masks and not giving out their names.[1]

In small towns of old every knew the police and judge, where they lived and which schools their children attended because their kids may have even sat next to them in class. This was fine and served as a moderating force for the worst impulses of law enforcement.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance [1] https://calgaryherald.com/news/calgary-police-service-doxing...
by geraneum | 2025-05-24 17:51:39+00:00
> from frontier labs

The target market of these companies are software shops. You don’t see them advertising the model capabilities in i.e. Civil Engineering much. They are trying specifically to sell a cheaper replacement of software engineers to those CEOs. You have to read the news and announcements with this lens:

A vacuum cleaner manufacturer claims that dirty dusty house is a thing of the past. Of course they say that.
by prmoustache | 2025-05-24 17:52:05+00:00
My experience when I was commuting by bicycle all year in Switzerland, is that drivers had a more complicated time than I had when it was snowing and roads were icy. I had a dedicated bicycle for these kind of situation with studded tires.

More often than not people are put off cycling by weather conditions not because it is that hard, but because they haven't put enough thoughts and preparation. Most people ride bicycle with subpar or no lightning, fenders, and more often than not have the wrong tires and protective gears for the job. This require a wee bit of investment but totally negligible compared to the money that is usually spent on a car.
by adamgordonbell | 2025-05-24 17:52:15+00:00
Perhaps ironically, I'm not communicating my point well.

There's a book called 80/20 running and the concept is you should do 80% of your running running slow. To me, that's a very legible concept. It's very clear and small and easy to explain.

I think his book is well packaged by having a title that condenses all of his thoughts into one little sound bite concept.

But actually you know his advice about training for running is much more complex. And you know he puts together running plans and they have a thousand types of running and it's not always 80% slow running. Sometimes it's this, sometimes it's that. It's rarely exactly 80% slow running. There's a million pieces of nuance to how he would train people to run faster but to get the concept across to write it down, he makes it more legible. He simplifies it to 80% of your running should be slow.

To me, and perhaps I'm learning only to me, that concept is very related to the concept of legibility in seeing like a state. You're taking the complicated forest with many different types of trees and you're simplifying it down to one uniform thing. That's much easier to understand and easy to track and communicate. 97 trees in this area.

The same thing can happen to concepts. They have a lot of nuance and complexity but to write them it down so that they can best be communicated, you often need to remove a lot of that.
by lm28469 | 2025-05-24 17:52:55+00:00
This is both overly optimistic and overly simplistic.

It doesn't matter how many products and services your society shits out, what matters is how you organize it. And clearly we're already way past the point where the amount of products and services is a bottleneck to quality of life. Access to healthcare, job security, home ownership, the ability to afford kids, good food, all of these things are going down, not up, despite the fact that as a whole we're much better off than in the last century.

Virtually no one can sustain a family on a single salary, it was the norm not so long ago

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Haruki-Seitani/publicat...

Housing is more and more out of reach

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335721006/figure/fi...

Most of the productivity gain doesn't translate into income:

https://files.epi.org/charts/img/235212-28502-body.png

Sure enough we now have access to instant brain rot doomscrolling services, infinite low quality entertainment, vast amount of ultra processed food, &c. but if anythings these things are distractions.
by quantadev | 2025-05-24 17:53:13+00:00
Thought Experiment: Imagine if we had a true "Perma-Web" where something like IPFS was keeping a permanent record of every web page. Then we could have a "Semantic Web" where each webpage maps to a single point (it's Vector Embedding) in higher dimensional space.

This would mean you could do things like:

1) Write a blog post, and then find all other blog posts that were the 'closest to yours' that was ever written.

2) Do basic "Search" in a way that's probably more powerful than even the Google Page-Rank Algo, by being able to look up every web page that exists based on a Cosine Similarity.

It's a shame Web3 didn't really ever "go viral" in a big way, or else we'd be able to do this stuff right now.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-05-24 17:53:15+00:00
While I perhaps wouldn't have put it the same way, I agree.

This may go against "SV standards", but I've found that the execs that I most admire at any particular company put in at minimum 4 years - that's the time it takes not just to get a project or two off the ground, but to really instill structural and cultural objectives at any company, and as you put it , to really deal with the consequences of their decisions and refine as necessary. While everyone have some "misfires" in their career, I'm extremely wary of advice from someone that has literally never hit the 4 year mark despite nearly 2 decades of experience.
by abletonlive | 2025-05-24 17:53:16+00:00
It is worth it and anybody that hasn’t spent the past month using it has nothing useful to say or contribute, their knowledge about what these tools are capable of is already outdated.

I would bet about 90% of the people commenting how useless llms are for their job are people that installed copilot and tried it out for a few days at some point not in the last month. They haven’t even come close to exploring the ecosystem that’s being built up right now by the community.
by DamonHD | 2025-05-24 17:53:22+00:00
Maybe I'm just oversenitised by "Just 3 special weird tricks to ..." rubbish. To me when the very first word is specious and there is no other 'joke incoming' clue/sidechannel/foreshadowing, my toes curl.

Jeff: I may have misjudged your intent, but know that that style may not work on British technical pendants, obviously a valuable segment of your audience... %-P

In penance I offer: every person who confuses correlation and causation dies...
by orwin | 2025-05-24 17:53:24+00:00
No, they don't. You have at least two VAT rates, and my country has four:

- Staple food (rice, basically? Probably flour too) as well as healthcare: 0%.

Food and common, staple products (soap, condoms, probably other), some cultural products (books, theater tickets, probably other), electricity, water: reduced rate (5.5%)

'vacation' rate: camping bookings, alternative healthcare, zoo, movies, restaurants (10%).

Everything else is 20%, whatever the brand or the producer. I know because I actually checked my transaction tickets for a long time (and my first journey b was writing an OCR to automatically analyze those tickets to ask for VAT reimbursement)
by bombela | 2025-05-24 17:53:38+00:00
In 3D printing, I often catch people talking acceleration in kilo-milli-meter/second². Written and pronounced "16k accel". Instead of writing "16m/s²" and pronouncing "16 accel".

I have nightmares of 150km meaning kilo-miles instead of kilo-metre. And when I say that my car has 260 mega-meter on the odometer, even people born metric look at me funny.

And don't get me started on MB vs MiB. I have seen so many stupid production outages because of people miss-allocating resources by confusing SI and IEC bytes.

/rant