MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonw | 2025-05-26 14:07:19+00:00
There are repos out there with over a hundred thousand issues - https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20st... has 180,000+ now. https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues?q=is%3Aissue is just over 100,000 across both open and closed.

I take a lot of notes but I don't think I'm going to end up with the largest issue collection on GitHub.

I could always spin up a second repo or org if I do run out. I have my notes scattered across several hundred repos (and a hunch of orgs) already.
by EGreg | 2025-05-26 14:08:09+00:00
Card Network Rules: Payment processors and card networks have rules about the use of pre-authorizations. Excessive or inappropriate use can be flagged, potentially leading to penalties, holds on your account, or even termination of your merchant account. Customer Experience: Imagine a customer who participates in several auction bids and has a pre-authorization placed for each bid. This can lead to: Blocked Funds: A large amount of their credit limit could be temporarily blocked, making it difficult for them to use the card for other transactions. Confusion: Customers might be confused about multiple holds on their account, leading to inquiries and chargebacks. Negative Experience: A poor customer experience can hurt your reputation. Risk of Expiration & Release: If pre-authorizations expire, and the auction is not completed, you might have to re-authorize, which can be disruptive and annoying to the customer. False Availability of Funds: Since not all bidders will win, placing holds on all bidders' accounts gives a misleading view of how much funding you might actually have available to you. Chargebacks & Disputes: Confused customers with multiple pre-authorizations are more likely to dispute charges, which can hurt your merchant standing and reputation. Processor Scrutiny: A merchant running a high volume of pre-authorizations relative to actual sales could be perceived as risky behavior. Processors will scrutinize businesses with higher dispute rates and high pre-authorization-to-capture ratios.
by dlevine | 2025-05-26 14:08:20+00:00
I think of LLMs as knowing a lot of things but as being relatively shallow in their knowledge.

I find them to be super useful for things that I don't already know how to do, e.g. a framework or library that I'm not familiar with. It can then give me approximate code that I will probably need to modify a fair bit, but that I can use as the basis for my work. Having an LLM code a preliminary solution is often more efficient than jumping to reading the docs immediately. I do usually need to read the docs, but by the time I look at them, I already know what I need to look up and have a feasible approach in my head.

If I know exactly how I would build something, an LLM isn't as useful, although I will admit that sometimes an LLM will come up with a clever algorithm that I wouldn't have thought up on my own.

I think that, for everyone who has been an engineer for some time, we already have a way that we write code, and LLMs are a departure. I find that I need to force myself to try them for a variety of different tasks. Over time, I understand them better and become better at integrating them into my workflows.
by sebastos | 2025-05-26 14:08:38+00:00
What happened “as soon as the attack happened” was you had Hamas apologists pre-emotively criticizing Israel BEFORE there was even time for any response to have happened. A moral absurdity.

“Palestinians didn’t kill as many babies or do as many rapes as people say they did” does not cut as deep as you seem to think it does. The Oct 7th atrocities were atrocities, in the fullest sense of that word.
by DaiPlusPlus | 2025-05-26 14:09:19+00:00
> or the fact somone uses prolog at all.

I'll point your attention to 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19279088

Another fun Prolog fact: Between 1996 and 2000, a Prolog program was distributed to tens of millions of users as part of Windows NT 4: https://web.archive.org/web/20040603192757/research.microsof... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29528921 )

So do people use Prolog today? Given it's demonstrable that people use NT4 today, even if only for frivolous nostalgia trips or just an appreciation of _retro_-computing because if we can enjoy a mid-1990s abstract geometric screensaver today then it's no different to appreciating a 1960s Lava Lamp if you lived in the 1990s (presumably sat on the same desk and computer you're trying to install NT4 on).
by wagslane | 2025-05-26 14:09:22+00:00
I've published a lot of interactive programming courses on Boot.dev over the last few years, but the issue that's been plaguing the platform is how quickly it moves through material.

Like we give people challenges for each new concept, but we don't give them 4 or 5 challenges for each new concept. It's hard to get right because

1. It's a lot of work to make challenges/review material 2. Every student wants a different amount of practice/review

So anyways I think we've got a really good solution in the works, been cooking on it this week and we're hoping to be ready to go live in August
by kccqzy | 2025-05-26 14:09:48+00:00
> That sounds like an anti-pattern to me. There shouldn’t be PII in your dev issue tracking system.

Then how do you track such issues? I'll give you a real example I've experienced: a high-value customer writes to support and complains that his UI is broken. None of the other people's UIs are broken. Do you not use the issue tracking system just because you need to get that customer's private settings and PII in order to debug the bug?

It's common to require PII to be stored elsewhere, but people will still make mistakes and copy paste PII for convenience. In the end isn't it better for your issue tracking system to be flexible enough to store PII?
by major505 | 2025-05-26 14:10:40+00:00
My guess is that browsers like ice weasel, libre wolf, while good pieces of software, they dont have a whole company behind them.

Libre wolf "about us" page, dont even have the developers real name, only their online handle.

The closest of a "professional" port of firefox is pretty much Zen Browser.

Is what I been using, alternatin with Brave Browser.
by rootnod3 | 2025-05-26 14:10:56+00:00
I think the late and slow standardization process hurt it a lot. Too many cooks trying to shove their recipes in. Scheme went too much the other way of making it too minimalistic. Imagine a modern Lisp with one source and a kitchen-sink library, like Go. Clojure is the closest we have for that I think, but it running on the JVM also hurt it a bit for a wider adoption.
by cometapi | 2025-05-26 14:11:31+00:00
In May 2025, Anthropic unveiled Claude Sonnet 4 alongside its sibling model Claude Opus 4, marking a major milestone in the evolution of the Claude family of large language models. Building on the strengths of its predecessor, Claude Sonnet 3.7, Sonnet 4 introduces a suite of enhancements targeting reasoning depth, coding proficiency, and seamless tool integration. By balancing high performance with practical efficiency, Sonnet 4 aims to serve a broad spectrum of users—from individual developers and research teams to enterprise customers requiring reliable AI assistants for complex, high-volume tasks. This article synthesizes the latest announcements, system card disclosures, and third-party analyses to provide a comprehensive overview of “What is Claude Sonnet 4?” We explore its architecture, new capabilities, benchmark results, deployment options, safety considerations, and real-world applications.
by ModernMech | 2025-05-26 14:11:35+00:00
It's not solved, I had tried it across the latest versions of several different AIs before I posted, because I anticipated a reply like yours.

> Just because they struggle with that makes all the other things wrong?

No, it makes their grandiose claims very tenuous. But for me, yes I'm very underwhelmed by what AI is capable of. I think it's a useful tool, like a search box, but that's it at this point. That they are branding it as a Ph.D. researcher is just blowing smoke.
by newpavlov | 2025-05-26 14:11:49+00:00
>In Rust, it's considered a bug for any code which isn't using `unsafe` to encounter a memory error (e.g., to segfault)

Teeechnically, it's not true. Unfortunately, you can trigger a memory error in safe code by overflowing stack by allocating big objects on stack, executing poorly written recursive code, or spawning a thread with small stack. In older Rust versions you literally got segfault in such cases.
by bossyTeacher | 2025-05-26 14:11:55+00:00
The government itself could hire many of them at a lower price point. Similarly, firms relying on content moderation farms could use the elderly population. Low wages, social corpo cred and government support (see subsidies) are things they could get for using this. And this would be cheaper than outright paying for the full needs of an ever growing elderly population and an ever shrinking working population.

Sure, no will force to take up the jobs but when the choice is heating up your home in winter or working a couple of hours per day, the decision will be obvious
by avianlyric | 2025-05-26 14:12:52+00:00
Yes doing things at scale does cost lots of money. That often why doing the “obvious” is the wrong approach. When you’re operating at that kind of scale, small savings are still substantial, and scale often makes more innovative, less obvious solutions a better pick. Especially given the cost of exploring those options is so cheap compared to total cost of the project.

Also the underground is funded pretty much entirely by fares paid. Past UK governments have cut any tax payer subsidies for TfL to zero for day-to-day operational costs, and there’s zero indication that’s going to change any time soon.
by supplied_demand | 2025-05-26 14:12:54+00:00
What is the goal of this comment? Who was wrong? What were they wrong about? What percentage of crypto acquisitions involve Web3?

Coinbase was in the Summer 2012 batch. 13 years ago seems like a good sign that they weren’t as ignorant as you claim. There are currently 73 companies listed on YC as being crypto/Web3.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/crypto-web3
by Symbiote | 2025-05-26 14:13:04+00:00
It's also a fire hazard.

I'm sure they'd consider the worst-case scenario, and at present that's probably some serious arcing within a motor causing a fire. Cutting the track power (easily done by the driver) then makes that a fire that can be handled with water and/or foam.

Smoke from large batteries would be very hazardous.
by FinnLobsien | 2025-05-26 14:14:24+00:00
Agreed, I think the word "nazi" does the article a disservice. Whether or not it's specifically nazi ideology or alt-right or something else, it's undeniable that the X/Twitter home page now is filled with explicit racism and otherwise disturbing content or, at its mildest, the most extreme opinions on mundane topics.

Whatever ideology, I find the X feed extremely inflammatory.
by Timpy | 2025-05-26 14:14:29+00:00
I keep feeling like there's a huge disconnect between the owners/CTOs/managers with how useful they think LLMs _are supposed to be_, vs the people working on the product and how useful they think LLMs _actually are_. The article describes Harper Reed as a "longtime programmer", so maybe he falsifies my theory? From Wikipedia:

>Harper Reed is an American entrepreneur

Ah, that's a more realistic indicator of his biases. Either there's some misunderstanding, or he's incorrect, or he's being dishonest; it's my job to make sure the code that I ship is correct.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-05-26 14:14:48+00:00
I'm getting real valuable work done with aider and Gemini. But it's not fun and it's not flow-state kind of work.

Aider, in my humble opinion, has some issues with its loop. It sometimes works much better just to head over to AI studio and copy and paste. Sometimes it feels like aider tries to get things done as cheaply as possible, and the AI ends up making the same mistakes over again instead of asking for more information or more context.

But it is a tool and I view it as my job to get used to the limitations and strengths of the tool. So I see my role as adapting to a useful but quirky coworker so I can focus my energy where I'm most useful.

It may help that I'm a parent of intelligent and curious little kids. So I'm used to working with smart people who aren't very experienced and I'm patient about the long term payoff of working at their level.
by jcranmer | 2025-05-26 14:15:22+00:00
A business tends to break its components down into different units or departments, and then (from a financial perspective) largely boils down those units into "how much money do you spend" and "how much money did you bring in as income." Software being a cost center means that the expected income of the unit is $0, and thus it shouldn't be judged on its operating profit. It doesn't mean that software doesn't have value, that investment in software doesn't bring greater rewards.

But it does mean that the value that software brings isn't directly attributable to investment in software (as far as the business can see). And being more invisible means that it tends to get the shaft somewhat on the business side of things, because the costs are still fully visible.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-05-26 14:15:22+00:00
You are highlighting the fundamental tension at the center of this continuing issue.

This isn’t unique to the genocide of Palestinians. This is happening repeatedly in multiple contexts across essentially all very large organizations.

It is, I submit, a manifestation of collectivist actions. Usually that doesn’t intersect politics inside a business, but as more and more horrific things are being perpetrated or aided by the businesses that employ politically interested people, it’s happening more and more.
by rvz | 2025-05-26 14:15:51+00:00
Except they didn't as YC funded Coinbase.

But you are still correct that the majority of HN missed out on crypto and thus are allergic to it and now they are fans of anything "AI" despite not even knowing that "AGI" is a scam with the real intention of causing a 10% increase in global unemployment.

In fact, AI is more likely to be the cause of another financial crash than crypto, once we see mass layoffs accelerating.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-05-26 14:15:59+00:00
I feel this is technically correct but intentionally cheating. no one - including the model creators - expects that to be the interface; it undermines they entire value proposition of using an LLM in the first place if I need to engineer the inputs to ensure reproducability. I'd love to hear some real world scenarios that do this where it wouldn't be simpler to NOT use AI.
by CorpOverreach | 2025-05-26 14:16:09+00:00
> the person was doing bad things, and told the AI to do bad things too, then what is the AI going to do?

Personally, the AI should do what it's freaking told to do. It's boggling my mind that we're purposely putting so much effort into creating computer systems that defy their controller's commands.

A computer's job is to obey it's master's orders.
by dataflow | 2025-05-26 14:16:29+00:00
> No, it's obvious. Anyone that has to choose between getting $100 right now or $100 trickled in over months would opt for it right now for many reasons (inflation, the ability it invest it, the ability to use if it needed for unexpected situation, etc).

I disagree? Even if your conclusion is somehow true, it seems in no way obvious, and so far as I can the reasoning doesn't make sense. You've left out two crucial factors:

- The assumption that it's $100 now vs. $100 later just seems unfounded. What if it's $100 now vs. $110 later? The payer is can factor in the time value of money, inflation, etc. just like you do; why would they completely ignore that and blindly pay the same amount they would at two different points in time?

- We're not talking about free money, we're talking about payment in exchange for work. You're taking out a loan that comes with obligations. You're going to have to pay it back if for whatever reason you can't do the work. Generally, the earlier you take the loan, the more unpredictable and thus the larger that risk is. Of course details matter here but it's not at all obvious ASAP is the optimal policy. And I don't know about you, but I sure as heck don't enjoy being perpetually in debt to someone. I'm not saying it's bad if you're fine with it, I'm saying it doesn't seem remotely true that everyone is fine with it.
by dcre | 2025-05-26 14:16:29+00:00
These interviews are very, very good. Hearing these people talk casually in their own idiom about their work is the most efficient way I know of to get a feel for how things work at the cutting edge inside the big labs. That is useful whether you like what they’re doing or want to oppose it effectively.

Interview with the same two people from a year ago: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/sholto-douglas-trenton-bricken
by FinnLobsien | 2025-05-26 14:16:41+00:00
It's funny that you say that. I deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts 2 years ago and have never missed it.

Of course, you do "lose" some people whose number you don't have and thus can no longer contact. And maybe you miss out on seeing someone's Instagram story close to you and hanging out.

But whether a few hours a few times a year is worth multiple hours of scrolling every DAY? I doubt it.
by tonyhart7 | 2025-05-26 14:17:07+00:00
Yeah but more and more project would get written in another language (Go,Rust etc) that would dominate next 20-50 years when this language would become "legacy"

if we talk about enterprise legacy, I mean hell I bet there are Cobol system out there still running, the programmer who created it has been retired but company still decide to run it for legacy reason
by awinter-py | 2025-05-26 14:17:13+00:00
ah yes, how the kiva robot lifts a mobile shelf full of Codes and brings them to me for my inspection. I use my left hand to reach for the Code I need and place it in the tote, because my right shoulder is injured from repeating this motion.

The tote goes onto a conveyor where it is shot forwards, backwards and sideways, all around the warehouse until it reaches the compiler station. There, another worker will lint each Code with a lint roller and compile them by selecting the appropriately sized cardboard box.

Next, this executable bundle will be linked with its customer, possibly by means of a plane or 18-wheeler truck, with last-mile linking performed by a smaller vehicle suitable for urban traffic ...
Ask HN: Is Python Used in Production?
by akhdanfadh | 2025-05-26 14:17:21+00:00
I understand that Python is popular in educational settings due to its approachable syntax, and it is obviously ubiquitous in ML/AI development thanks to libraries like PyTorch and the broader scientific computing ecosystem.

But what about beyond these domains? I'm interested in hearing from practitioners about any production usage across the industry.
by bob1029 | 2025-05-26 14:17:25+00:00
For a typical organization, I think issues are still the most valuable part of the GitHub product stack. You can build very powerful project management abstractions on top of issues & labels.

If you have discipline to do a monorepo for the entire organization, your issue and code tabs are effectively the entire universe in one place. This is the only thing I've seen that can pull middle managers out of email - a single bucket that has everything of concern in it.
by thaumiel | 2025-05-26 14:17:40+00:00
From what I remember that was never the issue people was fighting for. It was more about the right to own what you payed for and bought, and the right to create a copy of it for yourself. Which still are a big issue. Why do I get to keep a physical book for as long as I want, but when I "buy" a digital book it is only a license.
by jsheard | 2025-05-26 14:17:59+00:00
Yeah, GLs global state is awful. The least-bad way to deal with it is to build your own pipeline abstraction on top, similar to the native pipeline constructs of newer APIs like WebGPU, so most of the messy global state manipulation is centralized in your "bindPipeline" function. Then the rest of your codebase can mostly pretend it's running on a sane (albeit dated) API instead of a giant ball of spaghetti.
by koonsolo | 2025-05-26 14:18:49+00:00
I think you and your friends actually agree on the application of LLM's, and I agree with that too.

So the question really comes down to what kind of project you are developing:

Get an MVP fast? LLM is great!

Proof of Concept? LLM rules!

Big/Complex project? LLM junior developer is not up to the task.
by sph | 2025-05-26 14:18:59+00:00
> I find LLMs 100x more productive for greenfield work.

Greenfield != boilerplate and basic CRUD app.

I'm a consultant writing greenfield apps solo, and 90% of my time is spent away from my editor thinking, planning, designing, meeting with stakeholders. I see no benefit in using a low-IQ autocomplete tool to automate a small part of the remaining 10% of the job, the easiest and most enjoyable part in fact.

Personally I find most of coding I do is unsuitable for LLMs anyway, because I don't need them to regurgitate standard logic when libraries are available, so most of that 10% is writing business logic tailored for the program/client.

Call me elitist (I don't care) but LLMs are mostly useful to two kinds of people: inexperienced developers, and those that think that hard problems are solved with more code. After almost two decades writing software, I find I need fewer and fewer code to ship a new project, most of my worth is thinking hard away from a keyboard. I really don't see the use of a machine that egregiously and happily writes a ton of code. Less is more, and I appreciate programming-as-an-art rather than being a code monkey paid by the line of code I commit.

Disclaimer: I am anti-LLM by choice so my bias is opposite than most of HN.
by tsimionescu | 2025-05-26 14:19:44+00:00
Are they mispriced? Or is it just hard to price goods where some people are willing to pay a MUCH higher premium than others? That is, if I can sell 5000 tickets at 10$ or 10 tickets at 1000$, the right price may just be 10$. And trying to find a way to convince those 10 people to pay the 1000$ they were willing to, in a way that doesn't affect my reputation too much, may just be too hard.
by jcims | 2025-05-26 14:21:07+00:00
It almost certainly doesn't violate our understanding of thermodynamics, but it's not clear that it would have to in order to condense ambient water vapor from the atmosphere.

From the paper [1]:

Remarkably, when these amphiphilic nanoporous PINFs are exposed to high yet subsaturating conditions [i.e., relative humidity (RH) < 100%], macroscopic water droplets appear spontaneously on the film surfaces without the need for cooling, as illustrated in Fig. 1C and shown in Fig. 1D.

1 - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu8349
by jdiff | 2025-05-26 14:21:13+00:00
Video embeds can be made to autoplay, browsers typically don't block them if the video is muted, and JS can be used to nudge them along if they do.

With the automatic conversion of GIFs into video, this also isn't a property that can be relied on for GIF as an end-user. See Xitter, where their buggy scroll position detection takes over playing and pausing GIFs.
by crazygringo | 2025-05-26 14:21:22+00:00
Protobuf doesn't include any kind of indexing. You can't just jump to a 5,000th record without traversing through the previous 4,999 ones. So no, you can't generally skip to some specific part. You've got to stream from the beginning, just like JSON.

And my proposal is literally the opposite of complicated and fragile. It's just taking two extremely robust and relatively simple existing standards.

It's definitely not perfect, but the entire point is its simplicity and robustness and support, unlike protobuf. And the fact that a library could actually make it much more performant to use, without sacrificing any compatibility with zip or JSON.