MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Workaccount2 | 2025-05-16 15:48:10+00:00
>What am I missing?

That you are trying to use LLMs to create giant sprawling codebase feature packed software packages that define the modern software landscape. What's being missed is that any one user might only utilize 5% of the code base on any given day. Software is written to accommodate every need every user could have in one package. Then the users just use the small slice that accommodates their specific needs.

I have now created 5 hyper narrow programs that are used daily by my company to do work. I am not a programmer and my company is not a tech company located in a tech bubble. We are a tiny company that does old school manufacturing.

To give a quick general example, Betty uses Excel to manage payroll. A list of employees, a list of wages, a list of hours worked (which she copys from the time clock software .csv that she imports to excel).

Excel is a few million LOC program and costs ~$10/mo. Betty needs maybe 2k LOC to do what she uses excel for. Something an LLM can do easily, a python GUI wrapper on an SQLite DB. And she would be blown away at how fast it is, and how it is written for her use specifically.

How software is written and how it is used will change to accommodate LLMs. We didn't design cars to drive on horse paths, we put down pavement.
by PathOfEclipse | 2025-05-16 15:48:13+00:00
I've been working in .NET/C# for the past few years, and while I'm happy with it, I still think the JVM/Java are the best ecosystem overall I've worked in. It's amazing how many things the Java ecosystem gets right that .NET gets wrong.

For instance, Java introduced the fork/join pool for work stealing and recommended it for short-lived tasks that decomposed into smaller tasks. .NET decided to simply add work-stealing to their global thread pool. The result: sync-over-async code, which is the only way to fold an asynchronous library into a synchronous codebase, frequently results in whole-application deadlocks on .NET, and this issue is well-documented: https://blog.stephencleary.com/2012/07/dont-block-on-async-c...

Notice the solution in this blog is "convert all your sync code to async", which can be infeasible for a large existing codebase.

There are so many other cases like this that I run into. While there have been many mistakes in the Java ecosystem they've mostly been in the library/framework level so it's easier to move on when people finally realize the dead end. However, when you mess up in the standard library, the runtime, or language, it's very hard to fix, and Java seems to have gotten it more right here than anywhere else.
by Towaway69 | 2025-05-16 15:48:53+00:00
I keep running into learn you some erlang[1] which seems to be a good online resource. The author of which also wrote the "Erlang in Anger"[2] book.

Then there is the BEAM book[3] which provides an deep dive into Erlang and the BEAM virtual machine.

I'm not the best person to ask since I'm only starting out on Erlang! I much prefer to code visually :)

[1] https://learnyousomeerlang.com [2] https://www.heroku.com/blog/erlang-in-anger/ [3] https://blog.stenmans.org/theBeamBook/
by tootie | 2025-05-16 15:48:59+00:00
The language has/had some rough edges that have been improved over the years, but the developer experience of using a strongly-typed, object-oriented language within a sturdy IDE like Idea is just second to none. The debugging process is so very straightforward. Java became synonymous with enterprisey bloated systems for good reason, but there is no pile of mud Java system that can't be stepped through cleanly with a debugger.

I'd also throw in what was possibly their greatest idea that sped adoption and that's javadoc. I'm not sure it was a 100% original idea, but having inline docs baked into the compiler and generating HTML documentation automatically was a real godsend for building libraries and making them usable very quickly. Strong typing also lined up nicely with making the documents hyper-linkable.

Java was really made to solve problems for large engineering teams moreso than a single developer at a keyboard.
by Cu3PO42 | 2025-05-16 15:49:09+00:00
Occasionally. I find that there is a certain category of task that I can hand over to an LLM and get a result that takes me significantly less time to clean up than it would have taken me to write from scratch.

A recent example from a C# project I was working in. The project used builder classes that were constructed according to specified rules, but all of these builders were written by hand. I wanted to automatically generate these builders, and not using AI, just good old meta-programming.

Now I knew enough to know that I needed a C# source generator, but I had absolutely no experience with writing them. Could I have figured this out in an hour or two? Probably. Did I write a prompt in less than five minutes and get a source generator that worked correctly in the first shot? Also yes. I then spent some time cleaning up that code and understanding the API it uses to hook into everything and was done in half an hour and still learnt something from it.

You can make the argument that this source generator is in itself "boilerplate", because it doesn't contain any special sauce, but I still saved significant time in this instance.
by steveklabnik | 2025-05-16 15:49:18+00:00
It really depends on what you mean by “mainframe.” Architecturally, we are nothing like mainframes. But for what mainframe seems to mean for you, I can see your perspective.

(While the rack is the unit of delivery overall, we can ship individual sleds and they’re operator replaceable, if say, one of your sleds dies, incidentally.)
by uludag | 2025-05-16 15:49:27+00:00
I feel things get even worse when you use a more niche language. I get extremely disappointed any time I try to get it do anything useful in Clojure. Even as a search engine, especially when asking it about libraries, these tools completely fail expectation.

I can't even fathom how frustrating such tools would be with poorly written confusing Clojure code using some niche dependency.

That being said, I can imagine a whole class of problems where this could succeed very well at and provide value. Then again, the type of problems that I feel these systems could get right 99% of the time are problems that a skilled developer could fix in minutes.
by tolarewaju3 | 2025-05-16 15:49:29+00:00
It's a real-world game to beat social anxiety called Roadmap. It's not super complex. Here are the main technologies I'm using.

AWS DynamoDB

AWS Cognito

AWS Lambda for AI calls

Cocoa Control libraries for showing players challenges, progress, and unlocks

OneSignal Push Notifs to notify players of changing game state

I know that all of these have Swift libraries or probably some similar ones. And I've written some swift code. But I'm just wondering about the syntax shift or other gotchas that I may not be thinking about. Even things like connecting to the storyboard seem like they might have minor differences
by bmink | 2025-05-16 15:50:38+00:00
Weather forecast is best told as a narrative and reducing it to a sports score like temperature / rainfall will always be problematic for many regions.

I’m in SF and I have not looked at a “TV/app style” forecast in years. Instead every morning I read:

https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?format=CI&glossary=...

During the day I look periodically at:

https://fog.today
by rfoo | 2025-05-16 15:50:56+00:00
That's the mindset that leads to the funny result that `uv pip` is like 10x faster than `pip`.

Is it because Rust is just fast? Nope. For anything after resolving dependency versions raw CPU performance doesn't matter at all. It's writing concurrent PLUS parallel code in Rust is easier, doesn't need to spawn a few processes and wait for the interpreter to start in each, doesn't need to serialize whatever shit you want to run constantly. So, someone did it!

Yet, there's a pip maintainer who actively sabotages free-threading work. Nice.
by samgranieri | 2025-05-16 15:51:29+00:00
Let’s say I want to be in full control of my own email. I buy a domain, set things up securely, and use let’s encrypt to automate setting up a TLS cert.

Let’s say I’m not using something like Caddy which does all this for you, I’m using something like a systemd timer to get that new cert and reload nginx and my smtp server.

This ostensibly should still work next year like it does now, no?

FWIW, I’ve never even heard us using a tls client certificate for smtp connections.
by dhosek | 2025-05-16 15:51:36+00:00
I don’t know much about Náhuatl, but the term “Mayan Language” is a bit misleading as there are actually numerous Mayan languages, something I’d never really thought about before I did a service trip to Chiapas and Guatemala in the early 90s and was exposed to the Jacalteco language which is just one of many Mayan languages.

Mexico is probably the most linguistically diverse country of the world with 68¹ indigenous languages spoken (I had thought India might be a close competitor where it seems there’s a different language in every state, each with its own alphabet, but Wikipedia says that there are “only” 22 scheduled languages in India).

We have a tendency to flatten indigenous cultures (like the bizarre mixing of culturally and linguistically distinct Native American cultures) and this is even more true of the Mesoamerican cultures where a diverse group like the Mayans is treated as a monolithic entity (as well as one that’s extinct) rather than as the diverse and living culture that it is.

⸻

1. The Wikipedia article on languages of Mexico has differing numbers throughout the article, offering 68, 65 and 62 as the number of officially recognized languages (and maybe more options if I weren’t skimming so quickly).
by yodsanklai | 2025-05-16 15:51:38+00:00
> I do not believe that people are more productive after about 4-5 hours a day of work.

You may be less productive after 5 hours of work, but even if your output 50% less in the next 5 hours, you'll still produce more by working more.

Employers don't care about productivity, they care about your total output. And it's not only employers, if you want to improve or pass a selective test or anything, you have to put the hours.

There may be some threshold where more work becomes detrimental, but it's definitely not 5 hours.
by lnenad | 2025-05-16 15:52:00+00:00
> The analogy with "monkeys with knives" is apt. A sharp knife is a useful tool, but you wouldn't hand it to an unexperienced person (a monkey) incapable of understanding the implications of how knives cut.

Could an experienced person/dev vibe code?

> "Obviously working" how? Do you mean prototypes and toy examples? How will these people put something robust and reliable in production, ever?

You really don't think AI could generate a working CRUD app which is the financial backbone of the web right now?

> If you meant for fun & experimentation, I can agree. Though I'd say vibe coding is not even good for learning because it actively encourages you not to understand any of it (or it stops being vibe coding, and turns into something else). It's that what you're advocating as "obviously working"?

I think you're purposefully reducing the scope of what vibe coding means to imply it's a fire and forget system.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-16 15:52:07+00:00
The terminal guidance sensors could pretty trivially discriminate decoys since the 1980s, when they stopped using radar guidance and switched to broad-spectrum imagers. The decoys really only worked on radar. A decoy capable of spoofing the imagers would have to be so large, complex, and heavy that it would be tantamount to adding another warhead which defeats the purpose.

This is why they stopped testing against decoys. They had tons of test data that the terminal guidance systems could reliably discriminate them so it didn’t add anything to the tests other than cost.
by asveikau | 2025-05-16 15:52:07+00:00
I recall hearing that WordPerfect usage survived longer in the legal field.

I also remember in the late 90s, before StarOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice took off, WordPerfect had a resurgence on Linux, because there was a need for a word processor. I seem to recall a distro shipping with it prominently. Was it Corel Linux?
by ilaksh | 2025-05-16 15:52:17+00:00
As someone who works on his own open source agent framework/UI (https://github.com/runvnc/mindroot), it's kind of interesting how announcements from vendors tend to mirror features that I am working on.

For example, in the last month or so, I added a job queue plugin. The ability to run multiple tasks that they demoed today is quite similar. The issue I ran into with users is that without Enterprise plans, complex tasks run into rate limits when trying to run concurrently.

So I am adding an ability to have multiple queues, with each possibly using different models and/or providers, to get around rate limits.

By the way, my system has features that are somewhat similar not only to this tool they are showing but also things like Manus. It is quite rough around the edges though because I am doing 100% of it myself.

But it is MIT Licensed and it would be great if any developer on the planet wanted to contribute anything.
by fkyoureadthedoc | 2025-05-16 15:52:32+00:00
Grok is run by a US company and can be regulated, so if the system prompt of the twitter bot version of Grok is important to national security it's easily within reach of legislators. Given our general stance on propaganda and manipulating public via media, news as entertainment not delivery of facts, etc, they probably won't though.

And to me that's a completely different concern than trying to limit another country's access to hardware for training large models, for example.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-05-16 15:52:38+00:00
> you can turn energy into bitcoins, but not bitcoins into energy

Use bitcoin to pay your energy bill (e.g. gas, electricity, ...).

> In the same manner you can turn time into money, but not money into time.

Partially, you can:

- Hire a maid to do household chores instead of having to do them yourself

- Hire employees that do various aspects of your daily job

- Buy some expensive medical treatments that give you a few more years

- Buy healthy stuff, and have a healthy lifestyle; invest money in your wellness

- Less of a necessity to work lots of hours a day, i.e. have more free time
by b112 | 2025-05-16 15:52:59+00:00
We have a single body deciding this, non-democratically. This isn't how RFCs used to work, how html used to be decided, how standards are crafted. The "big boys" aren't the standard setters of the older internet.

For example, the more often you need to get a key, the more interactions you have where a leak may occur. If you get keys 36 times in 3 years, instead of once in 3 years, you're that many times more exposed.

Further, automation provides many edge cases for non-human monitored issues to occur. A process that requires human intervention at least requires someone to see the process. Automation can be setup years ago, and people may not even realise it is occurring. That doesn't help security. At all.

As I said, it's NIST forced password rotation all over again. Attempts to make things better, but the end result is worse.

And of course Google thinks this is all grant. After all, in their eyes small mail servers, hobby mail servers, small orgs doing it on their own are a hassle. Everyone should just use gmail, yes?
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-16 15:53:14+00:00
You like the Tailwind-based approaches? That's not the direction I would go either. I've never seen anything Tailwind-based not feel bloated. It's such interesting malicious compliance with "no inline-styles" lint rules by just moving the inline styles into the class field. I see the same problems, including variations on the same performance problems, I remember from the bad old jQuery days of everyone just smashing inline styles everywhere all the time that lead to the "no inline-styles" lint rules in the first place.

But I'm a fan of the cascade done right and with CSS Grid and CSS Variables and @layer vanilla CSS cascade is at an all time jam right now. I'd be surprised we aren't seeing more "Design Systems" in that space, but I've got a feeling given how much you can cut from a Bootstrap or Bulma today for CSS Grid/CSS Variables that maybe we aren't seeing a lot happening there simply because not a lot needs to happen there. People happy with the cascade are getting closer and closer to also being happier with "no frameworks" again. Vanilla CSS feels good to work in again.
by beeflet | 2025-05-16 15:53:19+00:00
No, I just thought it was too long and distracted from my initial point. I can't edit it back, but for anyone else interested it was like this:

"In the same way it's better to fund public services by taxing things directly than by inflating the currency because it's easier to manipulate the metrics for inflation than to manipulate direct taxation, and the taxpayer ultimately needs to make sense of what they're paying for in a democracy."
by wapeoifjaweofji | 2025-05-16 15:53:57+00:00
> for 5 seconds spent on finding the button the first time, one will use this same button thousands of time and know perfectly where it is.

Quite a lot of UX design these days is only made for initial interactivity smoothness without the realization that it really does matter how something feels the 1000th time you do it (especially with how often we use our phones now).
by kstrauser | 2025-05-16 15:54:07+00:00
Note I wasn’t the one who said EEE upstream. I was just replying to the thread.

Hanlon’s razor is a thing, and I generally follow it. It’s just that I’ve seen Microsoft make so many “oops, our bad!” mistakes over the years that purely coincidentally gave them an edge up over their competition, that I tend to distrust such claims from them.

I don’t feel that way about all corps. Oracle doesn’t make little mistakes that accidentally harm the competition while helping themselves. No, they’ll look you in the eye and explain that they’re mugging you while they take your wallet. It’s kind of refreshingly honest in its own way.
by nyrikki | 2025-05-16 15:54:19+00:00
While I agree, sometimes working to repair problems is required to get there.

Sometimes one has to demonstrate value to counteract the cultural erosion caused by action and outcome bias to enable that empowerment.

These big wasteful meetings are typically a product of action and outcome biases, and one needs to have a medium and longer term strategy to address them which is exactly why my manager was willing to sponsor it.

My intention was to deliver value when the team thought it was impossible.
by mightymosquito | 2025-05-16 15:54:27+00:00
I came to hackernews to ask the question - Is being in tech even worth it anymore?

Any business is truly about value creation, I honestly think coding as leverage is getting pretty useless.

Tangible value creation is something I think we should be optimizing for. AI can't walk upto people and sell. You might be selling a service, a product or lemonade it doesn't honestly matter.

On a lighter note, I am thinking of getting into farming, everyone's gotta eat right?
by bethekidyouwant | 2025-05-16 15:54:31+00:00
I don’t think the argument that English's book comes from novel as in new and in French book comes ‘of the roman vernacular’ and that this changes the meaning in some profound way. I don’t speak German, but it sounds like it the meaning has been fully lost and now it just means of the French. (unless you know all three languages and then I guess it has more meaning) At most, it is vaguely interesting to think of the etymology when hanging on a word, I guess more so if you know multiple languages
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-05-16 15:56:09+00:00
Im a Canadian and go to the US for work fairly regularly. Something I didn’t realize is that the laws are different in preclearance areas. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/P-19.32/FullText.ht...

For example, you are allowed to withdraw your application to enter the US and leave the preclearance area. Additionally you are bound by different laws for search and siezure.

At this point I am only going to the US through preclearance areas because you are still on Canadian soil and bound by Canadian laws. That doesn’t necessarily mean that USBP won’t break those laws, but the Canadian courts get to decide if laws were broken instead of the US courts.

One thing I have not found a straight answer on yet is if USBP can compel you to unlock your electronic devices in a preclearance area. My current strategy is if I am asked to do that in preclearance I will withdraw my application to enter because Im not letting anyone access to my phone.
by barry-cotter | 2025-05-16 15:56:29+00:00
> A counter to this that I'm aware of is Ukrainian and Polish. The soviet union tried to exterminate both during its heyday yet they've mostly completely revived despite the effort.

Ukrainian and Belarusian were both standardised and made official languages of education and administration under the early Soviet Union, with substantial state investment. Policies did later shift toward Russification, especially under Stalin, but even then Ukrainian continued to be used widely. There was no consistent Soviet attempt to “exterminate” Polish. Poland remained outside the USSR, and while the Soviets repressed Polish culture during occupations, they never pursued linguistic elimination in the way the Russian Empire once had.

> Hindi is probably another example of a language that the british empire tried to exterminate yet it has seen a pretty decent resurgence.

Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani was one of the main administrative and cultural languages under the Raj, particularly in the north. It coexisted with English and was used extensively by colonial authorities. Far from trying to wipe it out, the British helped entrench it across large parts of India. In Congress India, Hindi has been promoted heavily by the state, often to the frustration of non-Hindi speaking regions.

> I don't think any of these languages really stayed around via force. They simply had a critical mass of speakers that never went away.

Agreed.

> For Irish and Welsh, the British empire arguably committed a genocide to eliminate them.

“Arguably.” In Ireland, British policy during the famine amounted to criminal negligence or depraved indifference, but not genocide in the strict sense. In Wales, there was systematic suppression of the language, especially in education, but nothing close to genocide.
by paddy_m | 2025-05-16 15:56:42+00:00
This is related to visual programming, not flow based programming.

I modified a python hosted lisp interpreter to read JSON flavored lisp - JLISP. It's much easier to get a web frontend to output JSON then lisp. Then I made a simple Low Code UI built around this language. The editor has operations (invocations of lisp functions) organized left to right like a timeline in CAD software, then you can click on an individual operation to edit the arguments.

Here is a video walking through the system https://youtu.be/3Tf3lnuZcj8

Live edittable notebook (slow to load, runs python in WASM) https://marimo.io/p/@paddy-mullen/jlisp-in-buckaroo

I'll make a statically exported Jupyter notebook shortly
by jleyank | 2025-05-16 15:57:05+00:00
They didn’t solve protein folding, in that they did not generate an explanation as to why common structural motifs are common, etc. people have been trying to explain things at that level for decades.

What it did was provide a perhaps better, perhaps more general structure generator than existing tools such as protein homology. Both, I think, rely on structural similarity as a means of guesstimating the structure of a new protein. No clue how any of these approaches would work with truly novel structures that are outside the training set.

A first principles approach would probably do better as the energetics of the structural motifs would be modeled properly.