MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-26 09:55:31+00:00
I'm sorry too, I realize I didn't make my point clear. Yes, frameworks are stupid. Their designs are likely suboptimal from the start, and only get worse over time, accumulating hacks to address biggest issue while they double down on going the wrong direction. A competent engineer will easily come up with better ways of doing any individual thing a framework offers, and they have a good shot at designing a framework much better for the needs of their team and their business.

Which is why I brought up SAP. It's well-known that adopting SAP usually ends up burning untold millions of dollars on getting expensive consultants to customize it for specific needs of the company, until it either gets written off and abandoned, or results in a "successful" adoption that everyone hates.

It's less well-known that the key to adopting SAP effectively and getting the promised value out of it is to change your business process to fit SAP. Yes, whatever processes a business had originally were likely much smarter and better for their specific situation and domain, but if they really want the benefits that come with SAP, abandoning wisdom of your old ways is the price of admission.

I say the same is true of software frameworks. Most businesses don't do anything interesting or deep either; you don't integrate with SAP to handle novel challenges, you do it to scale and streamline your business, which actually involves making most work more mindless and boring, so it can be reliably and consistently done by average employees. Software frameworks, too, aren't there to help you with novel technical challenges; they're there to allow businesses to be more efficient at doing the same boring shit every other business is doing.

I personally hate those frameworks, but that's because they're not meant for people like me; it doesn't mean they don't work. They're just another form of bureaucracy - they suck all life and fun and individuality from work, but by doing that, they enable it to scale.
by CapricornNoble | 2025-05-26 09:55:41+00:00
>> The eternal hope is that someday, somehow, we will be able to invent a natural language way of communicating something precise like a program, and it's just not going to happen.

I think the closest might be the constructed language "Ithkuil". Learning it is....difficult, to put it mildly.

https://ithkuil.net/
by account42 | 2025-05-26 09:55:42+00:00
> E.g. `en-US,en;q=0.9,zh-CN;q=0.8,zh;q=0.7` is read as "we should serve the Chinese version".

This can be a correct interpretation if Chinese is indeed the original language of that resource and the English translation has a lower quality - priorities exist on the server side as well, not just on the client setting. In that case you should qive zh-* a much lower q value if you want to see the English version anyway - or just remove them because pretty much everything that has more than one language available has an English version.
by crote | 2025-05-26 09:55:59+00:00
In practice it often looks more like the case of the Ford Pinto: the company knew that the design was flawed and could result in the fuel tank exploding in a fireball during a rear-end collision, but the $9 it would cost to fix the issue was considered too expensive.

Convicting an executive for explicitly ordering a hit on a specific person? Fairly easy. Convicting an executive for letting several anonymous people die in order to increase profits? Virtually unheard of.
by Krei-se | 2025-05-26 09:56:37+00:00
Knowing Amazons backends this is just their technical debt creeping up. Coders do repetetive work there because extending from their architecture means lots of code simply to keep the machine running. I would be surprised if they did not assign ASIN (which come from the need to keep ISBN compatibility everywhere) to not only Apps but other virtual goods lol.

From my integrations pov Ebay was ahead of their time with their data structure and pushed for deprecation fast to not keep the debt. Amazon ooth only looks more modern through acquiring new market fields instantly followed by throwing a lot of money to facade up the mess. Every contact like key account managers there were usually pushed for numbers, this has nothing to do with coders being coders.

Bosses always look for ways to instantly measure coders output which is just short-sighted way of thinking. My coworkers were measured by lines of code obviously. I wonder how you measure great engineering.

So no, this has not changed, you can still work uninterrupted on stuff for months or years if you want and skip these places, maybe even proved over your career that previous designs are stable for years to come.
by cube2222 | 2025-05-26 09:57:03+00:00
This looks like a very decent TUI! I'm pretty happy with the CLI (especially since in fish it has extensive auto-complete), but if one is not content with that, this seems very nice.

I've written about JJ[0] when I was starting to use it, and now, a couple months in, it's become an indispensable part of my workflow. Git really does feel clunky now (even though I never had major problems back when using it), whenever I see it used - with jj being compatible with it, fortunately I don't have to ever use it myself anymore.

Historically I never cared much about my git history (and always squashed PRs) - now I find myself occasionally using empty changes with good descriptions to just write out a sort of todo-list on my branch (kinda CDD, as in Change-Driven Development :) ), and it's overall much cleaner.

I've always used a ton of stashes with git for various experiments and in-progress work, now that's just normal local-only jj changes. Also solves the very unpleasant problem of rebasing stashes.

If you're reading this comment section thinking about whether it's worth trying jj out, I would strongly suggest you give it a go!

[0]: https://kubamartin.com/posts/introduction-to-the-jujutsu-vcs...
by internet_points | 2025-05-26 09:57:04+00:00
I've chosen C# for projects because of fear of having to defend other options which I felt might've been better. I've chosen Angular because it seemed like it embodied the virtue of Enterprise and Enterprise was what the customer wanted (I now really hate my past self for that). So it goes both for standard and non-standard tech.

(OTOH, at some point in the past Python was the obscure thing. If everyone only sticks to the safe path we'll never see progress.)

But yes, the main reason I use Emacs is that it makes me happy :-)
by throwaway2037 | 2025-05-26 09:57:59+00:00
> Counterpoint: AI has help me refactor things where I normally couldn’t. Things like extracting some common structure that’s present in a slightly different way in 30 places, where cursor detects it, or suggesting potential for a certain pattern.

I have a feeling this post is going to get a lot of backlash, but I think this is a very good counterpoint. To be clear: I am not here to shill for LLMs nor vibe coding. This is a good example where an "all seeing" LLM can be helpful. Whether or not you choose to accept the recommendation from the LLM isn't my main point. The LLM making you aware is the key value here.

Recently, I was listening to a podcast about realistic real world uses for an LLM. One of them was a law firm trying to review details of a case to determine a strategy. One of podcasters (sp?) recoiled in horror: "An LLM is writing your briefs?" They replied: "No, no. We use it generate ideas. Then, we select best." It was experts (lawyers, in this case) using an LLM as a tool.
by dbspin | 2025-05-26 09:58:43+00:00
It's hilarious to read this discussion on HN, because the mentalities of artists and corporate business folks are so different. Artists aren't making a rational decision to reduce reputational damage by keeping ticket prices low. They're employing empathy to imagine themselves in the position of their audience - as music fans themselves first and foremost.

Why do people create at all? It's certainly not the most effective route to maximum income. It's a form of connection. Performing is sharing the joy of music and creativity with a group of people who've formed a connection to you through your art.

Now while the industry certainly selects for people who do not think this way (i.e.: performers rather than artists), despite itself it's full of artists whose values are not aligned with whatever kind of homo econominicus maximal self interest, war of all against all that pervades here.

Source - I'm not a musician, but I am a writer and I've directed music videos for numerous artists over the years. The idea that they're all motivated by the same mechanics as faceless entities like ticket master is silly.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-05-26 09:58:51+00:00
It isn't odd at all. Ollama uses an ancient version of llama.cpp, and was originally meant to just be a GUI frontend. They forked, and then never resynchronized... and now lack the willpower and technical skill to achieve that.

Ollama is essentially a dead, yet semi-popular, project with a really good PR team. If you really want to do it right, you use llama.cpp.
by cube2222 | 2025-05-26 09:59:25+00:00
Merges / conflict resolution in jj generally work much better than in git.

When rebasing a big branch in git with conflicts, you usually end up having to manually resolve conflicts in multiple commits in a row - in jj you just have to resolve the conflict in the first conflicted change, and it usually adapts subsequent changes automatically.

Overall, rebasing branches with conflicts used to be a chore for me with git, and is now mostly a nothing-burger. Of course, I don't know the exact details of your scenario, so I'm not sure if it'd help, but I'd say it's worth trying, esp. if it's a common pain-point for you.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-05-26 10:02:47+00:00
Before I started using advanced IDEs that could navigate project structures very quickly, it was normal to have a relatively poor visibility -- call it "fog of war/code". In a 500,000 line C++ project (I have seen a few in my career), as a junior dev, I might only understand a few thousand lines from a few files I have studied. And, I had very little idea of the overall architecture. I see LLMs here as a big opportunity. I assume that most huge software projects developed by non-tech companies look pretty similar -- organic, and poorly documented and tested.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-05-26 10:03:14+00:00
I don't bother with Nvidia products anymore. In a lot of ways, they're too little too late. Nvidia products generally perform worse per dollar, perform worse per watt.

In a single GPU situation, my 7900XTX has gotten me farther than a 4080 would have, and matches the performance I expect from a 4090 for $600 less, and also 50-100w less.

Now, if you're buying used hardware, yeah, go buy used, not new high-VRAM Nvidia models, the ones with 80+GB. You can't buy those used from AMD customers yet, as they're happily holding onto them; they perform so well, the need to upgrade isn't happening yet.
by cassianoleal | 2025-05-26 10:03:19+00:00
There's no escape, is there? I'm not even talking about recycling at this point. If metal cans are plastic-lined inside, is there any way to avoid microplastics in drinks? I guess glass, but that's exceedingly rare and some drinks don't have a glass option where I live. Mostly it's sugary soda that does, or alcoholic beverages.
by r0x0r007 | 2025-05-26 10:03:19+00:00
Trying to leverage LLMs for creating custom lessons(from prompts)that use stuff like dev-typing simulation(instead of just copy/paste), narration, theoretical concepts and quizzes. Basic idea is to use 'AI'(yeah I know...) to increase our coding knowledge and curiosity about other languages and overall fingers memory, instead of just copy/pasting from LLMs.

https://thecoderssage.com/
by margalabargala | 2025-05-26 10:04:01+00:00
Depends on your definition of "works".

Do they YOLO the angles of tools and then produce 10,000 misshapen cars? Yes. But do they also sell those cars? Impressively, also yes, at least up until a couple months ago. Prior to Elon's political shenanigans of the last few months consumers were remarkably tolerant of Tesla's QC issues.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-05-26 10:04:30+00:00
I assume you are in a country with fire-at-will policies. In Germany you have a job security, you can't just fire people without a reason. The difficulty is actually proving their incompetence or unwillingness to work. Thus in my experience (working a self-employed contractor in Germany) this group is far larger than 50%. Also one of my reasons why no good software comes out of germany (and this includes SAP, as long as you show me a single end-user that is happy with working with SAP software).
by davidguetta | 2025-05-26 10:05:40+00:00
A few years ago i bought a Samsung with a feature that when possible, it gives me the name of unknown caller, i guess from the database they were gathering from other people's contacts.

One day my neighbor call me, and i had not register his number, so Samsung shows "<his name> GRINDER", because someone else had him like that in their contacts ^^.

He was openly gay within the neightborhood but he was also working as some sales representant for real estate and he was not exactly happy when i told him Samsung was broadcasting his sexual orientation to unknown people he would call >< (not to mention he told me hadn't used grinder in like 7 years).
by Krei-se | 2025-05-26 10:06:28+00:00
Thanks for pointing out JIRA. I think the problem comes from needing to keep the codebase running next month while trying to up scalars / numbers, not thinking years ahead or how to improve both inside culture and outside image of a company which are more complex structures with lots of little metrics and interdependent components than a win/loss output or an issue tracker that ignores the fact issues solved != issues prevented.

I guess these strategies boil down to having some MBA on top or an engineer that has no board of MBAs to bow down to. I strive to stay with private owned companies for this reason but ofc these are less loud on the internet, so you can easily miss them while jobhunting.
by jumski | 2025-05-26 10:07:03+00:00
I’m tinkering on pgflow – an open-source, DAG-based workflow engine that uses Postgres to orchestrate workers on top of PGMQ queues. It seamlessly integrates with Supabase (no new infra needed!) and executes code on Edge Functions using custom, serverless task queue worker. All the current and past state of all executions is stored in Postgres and can be queries with simple SELECTs and flows can be started from within the db (think: pg_cron, triggers).

I have strong focus on db consistency and Type safety between steps.

### Built so far – core SQL orchestration (state machine, retries, observability, queue management) – strictly typed TypeScript DSL + compiler that turns flow definitions into migrations – a minimal Edge Function worker that polls, executes and reports back

### Current focus I’m heads-down on a dedicated client library. It leverages Supabase Realtime to stream events and progress of each flow run back to the browser, while having strict compile-time safety for flows defined with the TypeScript DSL.

### Next on the roadmap - Fanouts for processing arrays of data in parallel, with per-item retry logic. - SQL-based conditionals/branching that leverages JSONB containment operator and step outputs

Docs: https://www.pgflow.dev/concepts/how-pgflow-works/ Repo: https://github.com/pgflow-dev/pgflow
by formerly_proven | 2025-05-26 10:07:03+00:00
The way this tends to turn out is that the type of assets accessible to younger/working people is taxed and the type of assets held by older/non-working people is not.

E.g. look at Ireland. Ireland has a de-facto wealth tax ("deemed disposal" - taxing the unrealized gains) on ETFs starting at the first euro, which makes investing basically pointless. Meanwhile it also has one of the lower tax levels on property in the EU.
by Mashimo | 2025-05-26 10:07:07+00:00
Maybe they don't do sprints.

Yeah, could be user feedback. And if it's a public beta release why not?

3 devs working for 5 days on each their feature means 3 releases per week.

For the last 10+ years I have been working on the same project with 2 releases per year, so what do I know. But I have used projects with quick release cycles that work very closely with the community. Push new beta, feedback on discord. Was also fine from my (limited) perspective.
by crote | 2025-05-26 10:08:12+00:00
"Not being personally liable" was never intended to mean "you can do literally anything you want - provided you first say the magic phrase 'I am a company'".

Limited liability makes a lot of sense in the context of protecting small business owners from being in debt until their death if anything goes wrong in their business - even if it wasn't through any fault of their own. It has been extended an awful lot since then.
by fireflash38 | 2025-05-26 10:09:40+00:00
I'd love to blame shitty web apps on outsourcing of computing power to your users... But you'll hear countless stories of devs blowing up their AWS or GCP accounts with bad code or architecture decisions (who cares if this takes a lot of CPU to run, throw another instance at it!) , so maybe it's just a lazy/bad dev thing.
by gwd | 2025-05-26 10:09:47+00:00
Basically yes, once the "problem" gets too big, the LLM stops being useful.

As you say, it's great for automating away boring things; as a more complicated search & replace, for instance. Or, "Implement methods so that it satisfies this interface", where the methods are pretty obvious. Or even "Fill out stub CRUD operations for this set of resources in the API".

I've recently started asking Claude Opus 4 to review my patches when I'm done, and it's occasionally caught errors, and sometimes has been good at prompting me to do something I know I really should be doing.

But once you get past a certain complexity level -- which isn't really that far - it just stops being useful.

For one thing, the changes which need to be made often span multiple files, each of which is fairly large; so I try to think carefully about which files would need to be touched to make a change; after which point I find I have an idea what needs to be changed anyway.

That said, using the AI like a "rubber duck" programmer isn't necessarily bad. Basically, I ask it to make a change; if it makes it and it's good, great! If it's a bit random, I just take over and do it myself. I've only wasted the time of reviewing the LLM's very first change, as nearly everything else I'd've had to do if I wrote the patch myself from scratch anyway.

Furthermore, I often find it much easier to take a framework that's mostly in the right direction and modify it the way that I want, than to code up everything from scratch. So if I say, "Implement this", and then end up modifying nearly everything, it still seems like less effort than starting from scratch myself.

The key thing is that I don't work hard at trying to make the LLM do something it's clearly having trouble with. Sometimes the specification was unclear and it made a reasonable assumption; but if I tell it to do something and it's still having trouble, I just finish the task myself.
by Veen | 2025-05-26 10:10:25+00:00
Perhaps it's not really intended to be of widespread practical use. It's useful to the person who made it because it powers his website. But sometimes people do stuff just because they think it's fun or cool. Or as a sort of exhibit with little practical value — like apprentices used to make a "masterpiece" to show off their skills. Or because it's a way to learn a skill or technology in a low-pressure environment.
by sam_goody | 2025-05-26 10:11:52+00:00
No really related, but I'm surprised that jj has no good GUI.

With so much VC money chasing so many established niches (eg bun -> node), and so much potential growth for jj - especially considering it has so much dev interest, and has the advantage of not requiring lock-in [a jj repo can be converted to a regular git repo].
by Amadiro | 2025-05-26 10:14:12+00:00
In my view, there is a major flaw in his argument is his distinction into pure engineering and science:

> We can make a rough distinction between pure engineering and science. There is no sharp boundary, but it’s a useful first approximation. Pure engineering seeks to produce a product that may be of some use. Science seeks understanding. If the topic is human intelligence, or cognitive capacities of other organisms, science seeks understanding of these biological systems.

If you take this approach, of course it follows that we should laugh at Tom Jones.

But a more differentiated approach is to recognize that science also falls into (at least) two categories; the science that we do because it expands our capability into something that we were previously incapable of, and the one that does not. (we typically do a lot more of the former than the latter, for obvious practical reasons)

Of course it is interesting from a historical perspective to understand the seafaring exploits of Polynesians, but as soon as there was a better way of navigating (i.e. by stars or by GPS) the investigation of this matter was relegated to the second type of science, more of a historical kind of investigation. Fundamentally we investigate things in science that are interesting because we believe the understanding we can gain from it can move us forwards somehow.

Could it be interesting to understand how Hamilton was thinking when he came up with imaginary numbers? Sure. Are a lot of mathematicians today concerning themselves with studying this? No, because the frontier has been moved far beyond.*

When you take this view, it´s clear that his statement

> These considerations bring up a minor problem with the current LLM enthusiasm: its total absurdity, as in the hypothetical cases where we recognize it at once. But there are much more serious problems than absurdity.

is not warranted. Consider the following, in his own analogy:

> These considerations bring up a minor problem with the current GPS enthusiasm: its total absurdity, as in the hypothetical cases where we recognize it at ones. But there are much more serious problems than absurdity. One is that GPS systems are designed in such a way that they cannot tell us anything about navigation, planning routes or other aspects of orientation, a matter of principle, irremediable.

* I´m making a simplifying assumption here that we can´t learn anything useful for modern navigation anymore from studying Polynesians or ants; this might well be untrue, but that is also the case for learning something about language from LLMs, which according to Chomsky is apparently impossible and not even up for debate.
by chaosbolt | 2025-05-26 10:15:36+00:00
This is good, it means they'll optimize for this kind of coding to have less coders to save pennies here and there and please the shareholders short term, and get left behind in the long term once an old school startup that tries to do everything better comes up.

Of course I'm fantasizing and we sadly don't live in this kind of world (Amazon or Google would stomp you if you come for their users) but hey a man can dream.
by acidburnNSA | 2025-05-26 10:16:45+00:00
There's a ton of money pouring into nuclear power right now, both fusion and fission. There are dozens of small VC-funded startups now in addition to the more "traditional" billionaire-funded nuclear startups. Each of them need SWEs to help with automating the physics/design simulations, document creation/management, plant design configuration/change management, QA compliance, construction management, experiment IT (instruments, controls, data collection, data reduction). Most companies have nuclear engineers like me who picked up some software skills along the way, but I've found it's always a huge benefit to bring in some nuclear-interested SWEs to help get things running with best practices. Some SWEs I've hired in the past felt a little isolated, but others have engaged well with the nuclear and mechanical engineers and had a great time. Be prepared for some weird fights with nuclear IT teams who are extra afraid of criminal penalties associated with export control laws.