MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-27 18:01:22+00:00
100% agree with this thread, because it's the discussion about why no code (and cloud/SaaS to a lesser degree) failed to deliver on their utopian promises.

Largely, because there were still upstream blockers that constrained throughput.

Typically imprecise business requirements (because someone hadn't thought sufficiently about the problem) or operation at scale issues (poorly generalizing architecture).

> our jobs becoming easier just means there's more things we can do now and with more capabilities comes more demand

This is the repeatedly forgotten lesson from the computing / digitization revolution!

The reason they changed the world wasn't because they were more capable (versus their manual precursors) but because they were economically cheaper.

Consequently, they enabled an entire class of problems to be worked on that were previously uneconomical.

E.g. there's no company on the planet that wouldn't be interested in more realtime detail of its financial operations... but that wasn't worth enough to pay bodies to continually tabulate it.

>> The NoCode movement didn't eliminate developers; it created NoCode specialists and backend integrators. The cloud didn't eliminate system administrators; it transformed them into DevOps engineers at double the salary.

Similarly, the article feels around the issue here but loses two important takeaways:

1) Technologies that revolutionize the world decrease total cost to deliver preexisting value.

2) Salary ~= value, for as many positions as demand supports.

Whether are more or fewer backend integrators, devops engineers, etc. post-transformation isn't foretold.

In recent history, those who upskill their productivity reap larger salaries, while others' positions disappear. I.e. the cloud engineer supporting millions of users, instead of the many bodies that used to take to deliver less efficiently.

It remains to be seen whether AI coding will stimulate more demand or simply increase the value of the same / fewer positions.

PS: If I were career plotting today, there's no way in hell I'd be aiming for anything that didn't have a customer-interactive component. Those business solution formulation skills are going to be a key differentiator any way it goes. The "locked in a closet" coder, no matter how good, is going to be a valuable addition for fewer and fewer positions.
by immibis | 2025-05-27 18:01:35+00:00
I think he actually had a clearer vision of the requirements than you do. In web dev jargon land (and many jargon lands) "the database" means "the instance of Postgres" etc.

But fundamentally it just means "the base of data", the same way "a codebase" doesn't just mean a Git repository. "Downloading the database" just means there's a way to download all the data, and CSV is a reasonable export format. Don't get confused into thinking it means a way to download the Postgres data folder.
by dml2135 | 2025-05-27 18:02:24+00:00
> My dad would joke that all the graduates would throw away their tie-dye shirts and go to work on wall street (not completely a joke).

I had a friend in college that did literally this. Guy sold weed throughout his time there. While he was a senior, his supplier who had graduated a year earlier hooked him up with an internship at his company's trading desk. Went to work on Wall St after graduation.

I was always amused that the marijuana business was more important to his career after school than his studies (I think he was an environmental systems major). He's a commodities trader now, which is fitting.
by toss1 | 2025-05-27 18:03:35+00:00
Stock price is not market capitalization.

30-Aug-2000 GE was $580.94 billion

It's never gotten above around half that valuation since.

Most key divisions were sold off. You can get "GE" label appliances, but it is a Chinese company. Plastics, which invented Lexan, was sold to Sabic. On and on. It is simply not the company it was and will take decades, if ever for it to become that again.

30-July-2020 = $53.13 billion

Since then, the remaining aerospace division has recovered to $257B, but it is a different business.

edit add ref link: https://companiesmarketcap.com/general-electric/marketcap/
Ask HN: Quick survey on the state of your frontend tests
by pranav7 | 2025-05-27 18:03:54+00:00
Hello HN —

I’m doing some research to better understand how web developers are testing their frontend code, and the pain points they face. Would love to hear some thoughts from the community. It’s a short survey, and should take about ~3 minutes to answer.

Here is the link https://tally.so/r/nr15xL

Thank you, and appreciate your time!
by dml2135 | 2025-05-27 18:04:11+00:00
I remember that my school rented out mini-fridges to students. It was about $150 to rent a dingy, used fridge for the year. The cost to buy a similar fridge was about $100. So of course, students would buy fridges, then discard them at the end of the year. Piles and piles of mini-fridges.
by jjani | 2025-05-27 18:04:31+00:00
The security argument is a valid one, as long as the prompts aren't passing through Cline's servers but instead directly sent to the LLM providers. If they go through an intermediary step, it's a pretty pointless difference. Yet it's very hard to make money off of a coding assistant where the prompts don't pass through their servers in one way or form. Cline is for-profit and currently their only monetization is to get users to use their credits system, meaning prompts go through them. In other words, if Cline is to succeed and monetize you, the security advantage sounds questionable.

This is a hilariously obvious LLM sentence by the way:

> Your codebase isn't just text – it's your competitive advantage

When creating articles aimed at LLM power users (which this one is), just have a human write it. We can see through the slop. Come on, you're VC backed, if you were bootstrapping I wouldn't even be calling this out.

The other arguments I used to agree with - compression and RAG means loss of quality, increasing context windows and decreasing prices means you should just send a lot of context.

Then I tried Augment and their indexing/RAG just works, period, so now I'm not convinced anymore.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-27 18:04:33+00:00
My father's stereo system was installed in our living room, a Heathkit with discrete components, probably a tube-transistor hybrid type. I did not witness him in the process of assembling it.

But in those days, there were the trade magazines on the newsstand, the electronics shops and clubs where guys hung out to talk about calculators and radios and jukeboxes and pinball machines.

It looks like MITS was already into calculators and model rocketry. And getting featured on the cover of Popular Electronics gave them a boost. Undoubtedly, plenty of ads in the back for mail-order kits, and then you'd be signed up for ever-more specialized company catalogs.

It was the same when I collected vinyl records and built computers. Find the right trade magazines and the crusty old guys tending storefronts, and you could learn about the next big thing.

Of course there were also comic books sold to gullible children with catalogs and ads in the back pages. Snapping gum, whoopee cushions, spy cameras, and X-ray Specs. You could count on being disappointed by purchasing something on that list, but it was often a matter of clever misrepresentation by marketing blurbs and a sketch.

One night 8-year-old me phoned in an order for a "remote control hovercraft". It came "collect-on-delivery" which Mom didn't like. The hovercraft was not radio-controlled as I had imagined. It had a flashlight-like handle that held 2x "D" cells and a motor that rotated a thin cable. The cable stretched several feet to a "hovercraft" with a light plastic hull and fan blades. So you could walk it around the room like a marionette as the downdraft held it suspended a little bit.

Only a few years later, I began receiving mail from AARP. The hovercraft sellers had sold them my address and pseudonym. We could tell, because the hovercraft-selling lady had misspelled my first name. Good times.
by selkin | 2025-05-27 18:04:48+00:00
It's exactly the same reason: gram referenced a known quantity. Changing it by a few insignificant digits because of the kilogram update wouldn't force people to realign their perception of it.

Changing it to ~1,000 times what it used to be, or giving it a new name, would force people to realign.

There's reason many people still prefer customary and imperial units, and it's not just bigotry and nationalism (even if they play a part in that preference).
by jedberg | 2025-05-27 18:05:10+00:00
Fair question. I use HN Replies, which emails me when people reply to me. On my computer, if I click the link in the email, it opens in Chrome. But on my computer my normal browser for HN is Safari. I use separate browsers for different things on my computer, so Safari is for HN and reddit, Chrome is for Google apps, like gmail etc., and Firefox for everything else. So sometimes I also get into HN via Firefox if I'm there an happen to type the URL or get a link.

Then on the phone, Safari is again the default browser, but if I click a link from the gmail app it opens in mobile Chrome.

So to use a plugin to change anything, I'd have to have the plugin on all five browsers.
by cardanome | 2025-05-27 18:05:28+00:00
> When have most users ever enjoyed a new UI in a system that they're used to?

Blender.

Is has seen some drastic changes in UI but barely any backlash. Even holy-cows like right-click select got mercilessly slaughtered and I am not even mad about it, in fact I love the changes.

The main thing is that they are focusing on providing value to users and are dog footing their own software to create movies.

But yeah, generally people hate change and you should avoid changing things as much as possible. Sadly that doesn't work with the way incentives in most companies work.
by vintagedave | 2025-05-27 18:05:40+00:00
What was not immediately obvious to me (but should have been) is that these are dev-time type checkers -- I think. (I think, both from from the github descriptions which focus heavily on editing, and from the article.) That's really useful because type inference is lacking, to me, in-editor. I tend to ask Copilot: 'add type annotations'.

So in complement to this can I share my favorite _run-time_ type checker? Beartype: this reads your type annotations (ie I see this is where Pyrefly and Ty come in), and enforces the types at runtime. It is blazingly fast, as in, incredibly fast. I use it for all my deployed code.

https://beartype.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

I suspect either of Pyrefly or Ty will be highly complementary with Beartype in terms of editor additions, and then runtime requirements.

The docs also have a great sense of humour.
by WhitneyLand | 2025-05-27 18:08:55+00:00
I generally agree with the article and the approach given practical constraints, however it’s all stop gap anyway.

Using Gemini 2.5’s 1MM token context window to work with large systems of code at once immediately feels far superior to any other approach. It allows using an LLM for things that are not possible otherwise.

Of course it’s damn expensive and so hard to do in a high quality way it’s rare luxury, for now…
Show HN: Glazed.ai – Create AI Characters
by fonsecli | 2025-05-27 18:09:12+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve just launched Glazed.ai, an API-first platform (playground available) for creating AI characters that combine image generation and conversation, consistently and contextually.

Most tools treat image gen (Stable Diffusion) and LLM chat as separate experiences.

With Glazed, you define a character once, and interact through both chat and visuals - with stateful memory and consistent appearance.

What’s live:

•Image generation using Stable Diffusion 1.5 + community-favored models like EpicRealism

•Stateful conversations with memory per user and thread

•Lightweight API endpoints (/v1/images, /v1/conversations, etc.) — no polling or job queues

•Fast responses with smart defaults for image consistency and prompt hygiene

The product is fully usable now and actively being improved. Open to any feedback or questions.

- glazed.ai
by throwup238 | 2025-05-27 18:09:17+00:00
Those synergies extended way beyond the technological too, which is how GE managed to survive in such a dysfunctional state for so long. Once they figured out that GE Capital could capture the financiers' profit margin on top of all their capital equipment, they unlocked a lot of money that had previous been taken up by banks and other investors. I.e. the total interest on a 10 year loan to buy a $10 million engine at 5% is over $2 million - essentially doubling (or better) their profit margins. Between that extra profit and related financial engineering, they could make a lot of money on the backend and turn that into an even bigger financial empire.

It wasn't until the 2008 GFC crushed GE Capital that it all started to really come apart, many decades after Welch got started.
by diggan | 2025-05-27 18:09:21+00:00
Looks interesting and useful if the accuracy numbers are as told. Kind of sad it's only available via a remote API though, makes the product more like a traditional SaaS-API. The marketing keeps talking about "models" yet the actual thing you use is only the API, would have been nice to be able to run locally. Although I do understand that it's harder to make money in that case.

I got curious about what datasets you used for training the models? Figured the easiest would be to scrape git repositories for commits from there, but seems there are also quality issues with an approach like that.
by stonemetal12 | 2025-05-27 18:09:51+00:00
>I guess, I'm advocating for the Oxbridge/St. John's approach with under 10 class sizes where the proctor actually knows you and if you've done the work. And I know, that is not a cheap way to churn out degrees.

I could understand US tuition if that were the case. These days with overworked adjuncts make it McDonalds at Michelin star prices.
by svat | 2025-05-27 18:10:30+00:00
Surely this is an absurd exaggeration. I've been using em dashes everywhere (online comments, email, chat) for ~25 years now. I'm not unusual in this regard; everyone who cares about punctuation probably uses them liberally. They're not hard to type; on macOS you can hold down Alt and Shift while hitting the `-`, and on Android you can long press on the `-`. Maybe they're used less by Windows users?

Even just looking at my HN comments, 381 of my ~1200 HN comments so far (so >30%) have em dashes. This includes my very first comment on HN from 2009 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=602094) and several that have multiple em dashes in them:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15169281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15899499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16596894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17291032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17464621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18201613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18331591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18387981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18843521

(and so on; all these are from 2019 or earlier, preceding GPT-3.)
by jjani | 2025-05-27 18:11:51+00:00
This is so well-known by now that replacing those is tablestakes :) The ".. isn't just A - it's B" isn't yet to the greater public.

This pattern is so prevalent that in any decent LLM business content generation product you're forced to hardcode avoidance/removal of that phrase, otherwise it's bound to show up in every article.
by Rudybega | 2025-05-27 18:13:43+00:00
It's not really a function of maintaining coherency across context length. It's more about whether the model can accomplish a long time horizon task when the context length of a single message isn't even close to sufficient for keeping track of the all the things that have occurred in pursuit of the task's completion.

Basically, the model has to keep some notes about its overall goals and current progress. Then the context window has to be seeded with the relevant sections from these notes to accomplish sub goals that help with the completion of the overall goal (beat the game).

The interesting part here is whether the models can even do this. A single context window isn't even close to sufficient to store all the things the model has done to drive the next action, so you have to figure out alternate methods and see if the model itself is smart enough to maintain coherency using those methods.
by genshii | 2025-05-27 18:13:47+00:00
This makes sense to me and is exactly what TypeScript does. Implicit `any`s do not raise TypeScript errors (which, by definition, is expected), but obviously that means if there is an `any`, it's potentially unsafe. To deal with this, you can turn on `noImplicitAny` or strict mode (which 99% of projects probably have enabled anyway).

Difference here that strict mode is a tsc option vs. having this kind of rule in the linter (ruff), but the end result is the same.

Anyway, that was a long winded way of saying that ty or ruff definitely needs its own version of a "strict" mode for type checking. :)
by idiot_slaiyer | 2025-05-27 18:14:01+00:00
op you asked, what about the energy expended to generate the art. the answer is this: the average human runs on about 2000-2500kcal of energy a day. if you were to spend 25 hours working on a piece of art, the energy expenditure is between 2000 and 2500kcal.

if you were to generate one piece of AI art, the energy expended is several magnitudes higher. but if you understood basic mathematics and human biology, you would have understood this going into the discussion
by alnwlsn | 2025-05-27 18:14:17+00:00
Sure, but these people aren't wealthy enough that they still need to buy these machines (vs paying for a service to come in with their own stuff). I'm sure being able to afford new is a factor, but I also see a breakdown in ability to do basic repairs.

You would think the 3 minutes it takes to realize your pressure washer nozzle is clogged and poke it with a stick a few times to clear it and get back to the job at hand is a better time value over stopping, going inside, searching for a new one to buy....

A lot of the time the stuff isn't even broken, it's just old. They definitely will go and buy a new one if the old one "looks rusty" or something.
by criddell | 2025-05-27 18:14:18+00:00
That looks really cool and I like that it isn’t a website. There’s a Whitfield Diffie quote I’ve mentioned a few times on HN. It’s from Ellen Ullman’s book Life in Code[1]:

> We were slaves to the mainframe! [Diffie] said. Dumb terminals! That's all we had. We were powerless under the big machine's unyielding central control. Then we escaped to the personal computer, autonomous, powerful. Then networks. The PC was soon rendered to be nothing but a "thin client," just a browser with very little software residing on our personal machines, the code being on network servers, which are under the control of administrators. Now to the web, nothing but a thin, thin browser for us. All the intelligence out there, on the net, our machines having become dumb terminals again.

Applications like yours claw back a little of that power. Very nice.

[1]:https://archive.org/details/life-in-code-a-personal-history-...
by gms7777 | 2025-05-27 18:14:22+00:00
If you like codenames, you might also enjoy decrypto [1], it scratches a very similar part of my brain. There's a set of secret words, and the codemaster needs to give clues that are specific enough that if you know the secret words, you can make the connection, but vague enough that you can't guess the secret words.

[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/225694/decrypto
by crop_rotation | 2025-05-27 18:14:45+00:00
After trying cline,aider,codex, and what not, I feel claude code is just so so better than all of them. e.g It takes much much fewer prompts to be able to do the same thing compared to cline. tbh I am not sure how cline will compete against something like Claude code due to the resource/capability imbalance. Does anyone else have a different experience?
by randycupertino | 2025-05-27 18:15:25+00:00
Commercial real estate's newest offering to entire workers back to downtown offices.

> We need you down here,” he said at The Cove’s grand opening last Tuesday, explaining that this $20 million investment was key to bringing workers back to the office and revitalizing the beleaguered downtown area.

> “I want you to feel like you want to be down here every day of the week,” he added. “I can’t wait until people start complaining to me about traffic.”
by hinkley | 2025-05-27 18:15:30+00:00
PNG solved this problem when BGP was still young: each section of an image document is marked as to whether understanding it is necessary to process the payload or not. So image transform and palette data is intrinsic, but metadata is not. Adding EXIF for instance is thus made trivial. No browser needs to understand it so it can be added without breaking the distribution mechanism.
by dakiol | 2025-05-27 18:15:34+00:00
I think you don't get the point. If there's no gap between the boss and the LLM, the boss is accountable for whatever the LLM produces. That sort of accountability will be rejected by any boss. In the real world, bosses rely on the accountability of their subordinates (they will yell at the senior manager, the senior manager will yell at the engineer, and so on).

There's no boss in the world who wants to be left alone with the machine. They are bosses, they are not technical people; they don't like machines... machines cannot go to jail or be accountable for mistakes.
by AriedK | 2025-05-27 18:16:20+00:00
Ah yes, Vulfmon! Jack Stratton seems to love his Fugues.

In case you haven't already: check out Vulfpeck /// Bach Vision Test; a really nice visualization of Contrapunctus IX a 4 alla duodecima.

https://youtu.be/vJfiOuDdetg?si=GF1mbszFHOky2QVd
by GremlinGPT | 2025-05-27 18:17:29+00:00
Phase 1 of GremlinGPT v1.0.3 just dropped – fully rewritten core FSM, task queue, and kernel loop. Next phase tonight includes test coverage, validation logic, and tracepoint injection.

Repo: https://github.com/statikfintechllc/AscendAI Docs + traffic graph: https://statikfintechllc.github.io/

Not just a model. A mutation in motion.
by fkyoureadthedoc | 2025-05-27 18:17:39+00:00
I'm unaware of the GitHub MCP "exploit", but given the overall state of LLM/MCP security FUD, there's probably some self promotion blog post from a security company about an LLM doing something stupid with GitHub data that the owner of the LLM using system didn't intend.

For example, let's say I create an application that lets you chat with my open source repo. I set up my LLM with a GitHub tool. I don't want to think about oauth and getting a token from the end user, so I give it a PAT that I generated from my account. I'm even more lazy so I just used a PAT I already had laying around, and it unfortunately had read/write access to SSH keys. The user can add their ssh key to my account and do malicious things.

Oh no, MCP is super vulnerable, please buy my LLM security product.

If you give the LLM a tool, and you give the LLM input from a user, the user has access to that tool. That shrimple.
by maleldil | 2025-05-27 18:17:52+00:00
beartype is great, but I only find it useful at the edges. Runtime checks aren't needed if you have strict typing throughout the project. On a gradually-typed codebase, you can use beartype (e.g. is_bearable) to ensure the data you're ingesting has the proper type. I usually use it when I'm dealing with JSON types.
by goatlover | 2025-05-27 18:18:12+00:00
But why is a manager or customer going to spend their valuable time baby sitting an LLM until it gets it right, when they can pay an engineer to do it for them? The engineer is likely to have gained expertise prompting AIs and checking their results.

This is what people never understand about no coding solutions. There is still a process that takes time to develop things, and you will inevitably have people become experts at that process who can be paid to do it much better and quicker than the average person.