MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GianFabien | 2025-05-21 02:31:34+00:00
>The code of a working product records the decisions, the designs, solved problems and solved mistakes during the development.

Our experiences apparently differ. I've worked on dozens of large scale systems and due to the lack of up to date documentation and comments in the code the developers have had to re-engineer most of those details in order to make even minor changes as the requirements evolve over the years. The code might work, but the knowledge of how and why is generally lost to entropy.
by skepticATX | 2025-05-21 02:31:39+00:00
The fact that so many feel the same way about this technology (I do too!) is an indictment of humanity, not the technology itself.

We _could_ use this to empower humans, but many of us instinctively know that it will instead be used to crush the human spirit. The end result of this isn’t going to be an expansion of creative ability, it’s going to be the destruction of creative jobs and the capture of these creative mediums by a few large companies.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-05-21 02:32:49+00:00
You don't even need a subscription, just start the conversation with something like "I'm trying to learn x, I'm at a beginner skill level. Can you have a conversation with me and correct my mistakes." and it works superbly.

The Duolingo CEO copped a lot of criticism for it, but I think he is right that LLMs play a huge role in the future of education, though he probably ragebaited everyone by overselling it and calling teachers babysitters. But ChatGPT as it is now is a better language learning tool than their hand crafted app is. Rather than clicking on word blocks, you can actually have a free form conversation and get feedback like "Yes your sentence is understandable but sounds unnatural, you could try ___"
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-05-21 02:33:25+00:00
> the clean energy could displace other dirty generation.

If you would have built 10GW of solar or nuclear to replace other generation and instead the data center operators provide funding to build 20GW so that 10GW can go to data centers, the alternative wasn't replacing any of the other dirty generation. And the economies of scale may give the non-carbon alternatives a better cost advantage so you can build even more.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-05-21 02:33:57+00:00
The first half is this essay asserts that software engineering is like a science because "software development is actually full of discovery" and not the "engineering practice of combining and assembling what is available from the complex system of computing in order to manifest a given vision."

This is extremely poor understanding. All engineering is full of discovery. Electrical engineers are constantly discovering new circuits that do the same task but with different resource usages and performance trade-offs. Civil engineers are doing the same thing with buildings. etc.

> Software development has the benefit of relying on abstraction layers....

So does every other engineering discipline. You think every new machine is built from first principles?

> Computing is so complex that these interfaces are never perfectly clean...

Author seems to imply that this is something unique to computing. Probably because they have never tried to build a complex analog circuit by assembling together a bunch of component circuits.
by xpe | 2025-05-21 02:35:44+00:00
> You talk as though a company exists in its own right independent of the humans.

I didn’t say that, nor do I mean that.

My point is this: don’t be surprised when people or organizations act rationally according to the situations they find themselves in.

Go ahead and blame people and see if that solves anything! What is your theory for change? Mine is about probabilistic realism.

Ethics matters, of course. We can dislike how some (one/org) acts — and then what do we do? Hoping they act better is not a good plan.

I see it over and over — people label something as unethical and say e.g. “they shouldn’t do that” and that’s the end of the conversation. That is not a plan. Shame and guilt can have an effect on people, but often only has a small effect on organizations.

Here’s a start: look at the long-term stock exchange (Eric Ries) and see how it’s doing in trying to align corporate behavior with what meshes better with what people want.
by pabs3 | 2025-05-21 02:38:29+00:00
The website links to GitHub with the usual logo, in the right hand column.

The website has posts from 2025:

https://www.red-lang.org/2025/04/multiple-monitors-support.h...

Unless you mean the theme, thats probably just a standard Google Blogger/Blogspot theme, which has been around for 25 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogger_(service)
by zahlman | 2025-05-21 02:38:42+00:00
I'm trying to make a small, efficient alternative to Pip. I could never realistically get there by starting with Pip and trimming it down, dropping dependencies, reworking the caching strategy etc. etc. But because I've studied Pip (and the problems it solves), I have a roadmap to taking advantage of a new caching strategy (incidentally similar to uv's), etc. - and I'll (probably) never have to introduce (most of) the heavyweight dependencies in the first place.

Understanding doesn't have to come from "being part of the original core team". Although if you aim to be feature-complete and interface-compatible, I'm sure it helps an awful lot.
by jandrese | 2025-05-21 02:39:18+00:00
I would say nVidia made their own luck. A lot of their success can be attributed to their management never losing sight of the fact that the software is just as important as the hardware. Both drivers and CUDA are key to nVidia's success. ATI and nVidia would trade places on quality of hardware, but there was never a question on the software side.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-05-21 02:40:04+00:00
In case anyone is wondering why that is, it's because they put data centers in the places with the cheapest electricity. Which, in the US, is in places like Virginia and Ohio, where they burn fossil fuels.

If the people always talking about how cheap solar is want to fix this, find a way to make that cheapness actually make it into the customer's electric bill.
by nsonha | 2025-05-21 02:41:24+00:00
You seem to be the only one expected that model to be "smarter than most human"

Leave that part out, I'm excited. I'd love to see this plays some roles in "inference caching", to reduce dependencies on external services.

If only agents can plan and match patterns of tasks locally, and only needs real intelligence for doing self-contained/computationally heavy tasks.
by jen729w | 2025-05-21 02:41:51+00:00
> if any clock in your house was off by six seconds, you wouldn’t spend any amount of time thinking about that

Excuse-me.

I'm so glad I never got in to Instagram. And I'm grateful that YouTube Shorts show up as unique pages in your browser history. Every once in a rare while I'll be tempted there, and it's enough for me to see just how many videos I've just scrolled through to scare me off.

Imagine if Reels had a watched count at the bottom of the screen...
by rxtexit | 2025-05-21 02:42:05+00:00
"Rap isn't even music, they aren't even singing!"

Rap is really the best example of how stupid these discussions are.

The language models are amazing at rhyming so by the logic then anyone can become a rapper and that is going to put current rappers out of business.

Only someone who has never tried to rap could possibly believe this. Same thing with images, same thing with music, same thing with literally everything involving human creativity.
by bediger4000 | 2025-05-21 02:42:10+00:00
Part of the process is slipping incrementally worse stuff past consumers. ATMs were an improvement, they did things 24 hours a day. Ditching the tellers after everyone used ATMs is shoddy. Offering scanners for 10 or fewer items is an improvement. Scanning every damn cart because there's only 1 checker makes the whole thing worse.
by Quarrel | 2025-05-21 02:43:24+00:00
The $250 is just rate limiting at the moment. It isn't a real price; I doubt it is based on cost-recovery or what they think the market can bare.

They need users to make them a mature product, and this rate-limits the number of users while putting a stake in the ground to help understand the "value" they can attribute to the product.
by superkuh | 2025-05-21 02:43:33+00:00
Imagine if a person wrote a serious article on computer hardware but kept calling the RAM the hard drive and talking about the problem of bit decay without power in hard drives. That's how these articles sound when they keep misusing the word addiction in inapropriate contexts to emphasize their point. It really makes one wonder what else they're getting wrong. At best it's like the people who are "so OCD" because they do some completely normal thing. When a medical term is used inappropriately the framing can lead to even more dangerous outcomes than the social issue being addressed because medicalization of behavior leads to use of force.
by pedalpete | 2025-05-21 02:44:59+00:00
What I was attempting to do was change the conversation around sleep. It's a long road.

I'm regularly answering questions from people on Reddit who are saying "I got 8 hours, but I still feel horrible", or "what's going to happen if I don't get 8 hours of sleep". We need to change this entire conversation.

I get the frustration around “where are the new rules", and I probably could have done a better job at recommending a focus on bio-markers, etc. What I’m trying to do is make space for a new direction focused on functional sleep health. That’s what we’re actively building toward.

I wrote this post to explain why we’re working on what we’re working on, and to engage with people who see the world as we do, or open their eyes to a new way of looking at the sleep.

I appreciate you taking the time to comment, is it safe to say the idea struck a nerve, but that you were wanting more?

Just so you know, this isn't a "let's throw up a web-page and see if we can harvest emails", we've been developing this technology for almost 5 years, and it is being used by researchers in clinical studies.
by hansvm | 2025-05-21 02:45:05+00:00
C# is definitely not the only possible language, but some things stand out:

1. You can extend other people's interfaces. If you care about method chaining, _something_ like that is required (alternative solutions include syntactic support for method chaining as a generic function-call syntax).

2. The language has support for "code as data." The mechanism is expression trees, but it's really powerful to be able to use method chaining to define a computation and then dispatch it to different backends, complete with optimization steps.

3. The language has a sub-language as a form of syntactic sugar, allowing certain blessed constructs to be written as basically inline SQL with full editor support.
by robocat | 2025-05-21 02:45:08+00:00
> web portal I was involved in developing as part of an all remote team back just before the turn of the millennium. > I can conclude that of the 6 months of time spent by 7 people creating this solution, hardly any of it related to the code. It could be completely discarded and rebuilt by one person in under two weeks.

I bet he did it recently and that undermines his whole thesis. He would need to have redeveloped it before 2000, to support his argument. I would also suspect he only made a toy 80% working example and that it only needed the other 90% to be completed (e.g. administrative or developer focused features). I'm pattern matching with other developers I've heard say similar things.

Information that articles ignore is often critical; moreover we judge articles based on the meta-decision of "what critical information was ignored". The article severely misses some key points.

A better example that a developer is more valuable than the code: when a key member of a company goes off and greenfield develops a competitor that wins (but still not an independent measure due to confoundering effects).

In some situations I would agree with the thesis, but unfortunately the article poorly argues the point.
by jt2190 | 2025-05-21 02:46:46+00:00
The author writes:

> Just like with software, where deep understanding is often the basis for discovery, an organization has to truly understand itself to be primed for innovation. When teams operate as impenetrable black boxes, vision becomes myopic, and potential withers. Despite having immense talent, the large engineering organizations of SV often structure themselves in ways that isolate expertise. As a result, they’re probably sitting on a huge amount of untapped potential – creative and technical ideas that never connect.

Then continues:

> If you’re building a company or an engineering team today, I think the real opportunity lies in understanding that you’re not bound by the conventions that have been passed down as “standard.”

It feels like there would be very few people who would have bota (a) a deep understanding of the different ways that software devs can be organized and (b) the conviction to “compose” a radically different organization based on that understanding. (Bryan Cantrill is popping into my head for some reason as someone who might fit this mold.)
by AnIrishDuck | 2025-05-21 02:47:29+00:00
What other system of value are you using here? Bottle caps? Nostalgia?

While the dollar remains the global reserve currency, this is just a wild theory of trade. If the $450 of value was so easy to extract, why wouldn't China simply assemble it in their own country and take the whole pie?

(they clearly already do this everywhere they can)
Show HN: Toffu AI is a Vibe Marketing agent
by orarbel1 | 2025-05-21 02:49:31+00:00
I’m Or (YC S18), i previously founded the Yo app and co-founded Anima.

I’m now building an AI agent that’s like Devin for marketing.

While building the agent I’ve realized how different it is than conventional SaaS.

For example, I realized that if I use schema for the db, I limit what the agent can do (As it can only store structured data based on my schema).

I no longer think of features, as that would limit the capabilities of the agent. The moment I add features, that’s when the agent can only do these features. I only add capabilities. Features are what each user decides to do with the agent.

I minimize the UI surface and focus and making the agent live in the apps we already use - I.e inside Google docs, slack, email, etc

Happy for feedback
by redsh | 2025-05-21 02:50:12+00:00
I'm trying to solve the problem of unlimited conversation practice for various languages with "CallAnnie", an iOS/android app with various kind of AI friends, powered by real time voice and avatars.

The interface is specifically made for advanced learners that want to simulate a conversation as close as possible to a real one (in terms of latency and without pushing any button). Learning to respond fast in a new language is important, so we're trying to keep a natural pace.

We support audio or video-calling the characters (with subtitle translations), guided conversations and we recently added mini games to learn vocabulary.

You can see a quick intro and demo video here: https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1013961

We don't have a Dutch speaking character in the default character list, but you can follow this link https://app.callannie.ai/a/mhLnHflAyf1Ygb0D0wm6 after installing the app to use a custom character speaking Dutch (or you can create a custom character).

If you'd like to try it, check out: callannie.ai . I would love to get your feedback (here or francesco a t callannie.ai) and suggestions - we're trying to solve this speaking practice use case.
by kllrnohj | 2025-05-21 02:51:25+00:00
1080 Ti -> 2080: 10% faster for same MSRP 2080 -> 3080: ~70% faster for the same MSRP 3080 -> 4080: 50% faster, but $700 vs. $1200 is *more than 50% more expensive* 4080 -> 5080: 10% faster, but $1200 (or $1000 for 4080 Super) vs. $1400-1700 is again more than 10% more money.

So yes your 1080 Ti -> 4080 is a huge leap, but there's basically just 2 reasons why: 1) the price also took a huge leap, and 2) the 20xx -> 30xx series was actually a generational leap, which unfortunately is an outlier as the 20xx series, 40xx series, and 50xx series all were steaming piles of generational shit. Well I guess to be fair to the 20xx, it did at least manage to not regress $/performance like the 40xx and 50xx series did. Barely.
by cjohnson318 | 2025-05-21 02:51:43+00:00
It really is insane. I deleted Instagram too, but so many other apps have the exact same formula, like YouTube and Reddit. All you can do is repeatedly delete these apps, and journal or read to keep them at bay. I bought a notebook for tricky Spanish verbs, and I've got another one for Jazz music theory. I am terrible at Spanish AND Jazz, but it helps me stay off my phone, and when I am doomscrolling, I make an effort to change course, look up something I'm really curious about and write it down. Hope that helps literally anyone.
by rasz | 2025-05-21 02:52:50+00:00
> It just wasn’t possible to compete with the price cuts and CPU performance gains that came with volume and scaling.

Commodore could if it tried, sadly Commodore was all about milking it. They were buying 68000 CPUs from Motorola at something ridiculous like $2 in mid eighties! Very slim margin over manufacturing cost thanks to good negotiations (owning foundry means you know how much it really cost to make chips, multiple 3rd party sources available). By 1991 Commodore was selling $100 BOM A500 for $300 retail. Amiga was printing money just like C64 before it, all with close to zero R&D cost. And then suddenly it stopped in 1992 https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/commo...

1992 was the year of market being flooded with cheap 386/VGA clones running Win3.1 thanks to Intel lost AMD Am386 lawsuit forcing wide price drops at the low end. i386SX-25 went from Q1 1990 $184 to Q4 1992 $59, AM386DX-40 Q2 1991 $231 to Q1 1993 $51. Brand name 386@40 + cache, 4MB ram, 170MB HDD, dual floppy, SVGA + Monitor, Win 3.1, keyboard + mouse systems were ~$1500 while 386SX mom&pop builds started below $1000.

Turns out there are limits to how long you can sell same low end computer by just dropping price. C64 lasted impressive !12! years with majority of sales between 1983-1990, $600 down to $150 (afair at the end manufacturing cost was something silly like $30). Amiga 6 years with no upgrades $1000 to $300 + 2 more bumbling with fail half upgrades until bankruptcy.

Btw in 1990 68000 CPUs were finally $3 closing in on crazy Commodore negotiated price from 1985. Enabled SEGA to sell Genesis at $100-150 retail.

Prices according to "Semiconductor procurement worldwide" 1991-1993 by Dataquest.
by low_tech_punk | 2025-05-21 02:53:25+00:00
Thanks for drawing the connections. I think hacking on PKMS is so satisfying because it combines multiple hard problems: text editor, search engine, graph database, sync engine, CMS; and you can go down a rabbit hole in any of them!

Btw, I can't access https://notes.holeytriangle.com/admin/files/a969c5f6-fa9c-44... is that your private admin link?
by jasonthorsness | 2025-05-21 02:54:20+00:00
IMHO most companies touting AI agent capabilities today are just participating in the hype cycle to get attention and funding. But don't let that lead you to think AI agents will never actually work. They are inevitably going to happen as a simple evolution of non-AI bots that already exist and have proven applications.

How capable and flexible agents will become and how cost-effective they will be is completely unknown. Cost is going to matter a ton. I'd love to just have an agent that constantly watches dashboards for me powered by o3 but I'd be bankrupt before the end of the day.
by gcr | 2025-05-21 02:54:35+00:00
The TL;DR is that Amazon S3 now supports "conditional writes" which are guaranteed to fail if the file was written by some other writer. This is implemented by sending the ETag of an object's expected version alongside the write request.

Litestream now depends on this functionality to handle multiple writers. Think of optimistic locking.

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/amazon-s3...
by sean_ | 2025-05-21 02:55:39+00:00
Thank you for all your feedback, I made a new video which is more straight forward here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUTlF-KPEcw

Cloud Coding is a way to use claude code in a VM Sandbox.

The key feature of it is that you can script claude code to preform a sequence of prompts such as: - prompt 1: write a plan - prompt 2: implement the plan

This is extremely powerful and is what most "agents" apps are.

From using it everyday myself (mostly to build the site/coding agent), I've gotten better results than codex and at a much cheaper cost. I can more easily predict how much a run will cost because i control the workflow claude goes through.

The roadmap for this product isn't exactly clear:

I can compete head on with codex as a friendly UI general purpose coding agent or I could have it be made for workflows and integrations such as being triggering a template whenever a user commits to a repo with the template being a series of steps telling claude code to either create/run tests, lint, write docs, etc.

There's a huge range of possibilities so I'm looking for early users' feedback. This is why i've given each new user $5.00 of free credits to easily try it out!

Let me know what you guys think and I'm open to all feedback!
by Nevermark | 2025-05-21 02:57:33+00:00
Anyone who has widely read topics across philosophy, science (physics, biology), economics, politics (policy, power), from practitioners, from original takes, news, etc. ... has managed to understand a tremendous number of relationships due to just words and their syntax.

While many of these relationships are related to things we see and do in trivial ways, the vast majority go far beyond anything that can be seen or felt.

What does economics look like? I don't know, but I know as I puzzle out optimums, or expected outcomes, or whatever, I am moving forms around in my head that I am aware of, can recognize and produce, but couldn't describe with any connection to my senses.

The same when seeking a proof for a conjecture in an idiosyncratic algebra.

Am I really dealing in semantics? Or have I just learned the graph-like latent representation for (statistical or reliable) invariant relationships in a bunch of syntax?

Is there a difference?

Don't we just learn the syntax of the visual world? Learning abstractions such as density, attachment, purpose, dimensions, sizes, that are not what we actually see, which is lots of dot magnitudes of three kinds. And even those abstractions benefit greatly from the words other people use describing those concepts. Because you really don't "see" them.

I would guess that someone who was born without vision, touch, smell or taste, would still develop what we would consider a semantic understanding of the world, just by hearing. Including a non-trivial more-than-syntactic understanding of vision, touch, smell and taste.

Despite making up their own internal "qualia" for them.

Our senses are just neuron firings. The rest is hierarchies of compression and prediction based on their "syntax".
by tgma | 2025-05-21 02:57:41+00:00
The point I am making is it does not matter if you are cutting 3%. Sure you might end up taking out a third of the bottom 0-10% instead of 0-3% but what difference does it make? It won't be a material political concern for your 50+ percentile employee base.

It does, however, make a difference on the promotion side.