MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by klabb3 | 2025-05-16 12:14:39+00:00
> But it's still a flat design, and thus does not properly transport clickability.

And toggled / disabled states. With mobile’s lack of hover, it’s often a game of trial and error to figure out what’s even interactable.

> And their weird approach for the color schemes still leads to an ugly mess, pastel with weird contrasts and color combinations that just are ugly.

It looks like a poster for a party. To extrapolate, it feels like the lineage is digital marketing, especially video centric content on mobile-exclusive byte sized attention-scape. This style draws less attention to your options (what you can do), and more towards content (what’s provided for you). It’s reduced decision making, highlighting the happy/desired path even more. No wonder it scores higher in user testing - it requires less thinking IF you take the happy path.

I’d imagine it works great for simple commercial products with single call to actions. But for apps (not posters) it leaves a lot on the table.
by joshstrange | 2025-05-16 12:14:55+00:00
Related, it’s crazy to me that OpenAI hasn’t already done something like this for Deep Research.

After your initial question, it always follows up asking some clarifying questions, but it’s completely up to the user to format their responses and I always wonder if people are sloppy if the LLM gets confused. It would make much more sense for OpenAI to break out each question and have a dedicated answer box. That way the user’s response can be consistent and there’s less of a chance they make a mistake or forget to answer a question.
by EDEdDNEdDYFaN | 2025-05-16 12:15:39+00:00
Isn't this a failure by the company to recognize free trial abuse sooner? and to not close the loophole immediately seems like even more of a weak behavior. Calling them out but not taking decisive action beyond claiming that they are acting immorally ultimately accomplishes nothing. Businesses are not beholden to your ideas about what is nice and fair, but whatever the rules and constraints are to your system. if you keep a practice like this that allows free trial abuse forever, why would they spend money?
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-16 12:15:39+00:00
A youtuber did a dissection of all the big tech jobs Trump "created" with his talks with big tech, and all of the new US jobs announced by the likes of Apple or Nvidia were jobs they were planning to create anyway, before Trump got elected Trump is just taking credit for it as if he did anything.

Job creation, retention or destruction is a powerful political tool that companies use everywhere as leverage to get politicians to do what they want. You can see the auto sector in Germany. So the US defending Apple is understandable. All countries protect their domestic big players.
by palisade | 2025-05-16 12:15:50+00:00
The research I've cited has indicated this is a genetic transfer among female-to-female births of a need for more cesareans.

"A female-to-female familial predisposition to caesarean section was observed. It could be caused by biologic inheritance, primarily working through maternal alleles and/or environmental factors. The results imply that both mechanisms could be important."

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18540028/

"Large-scale epidemiological studies indeed evidence that women born by C-section are more likely to deliver by Caesarean than women born vaginally, owing primarily to genetic rather than social factors."

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1712203114
by motorest | 2025-05-16 12:15:52+00:00
> Come on. That's nothing compared to the horrors that lay in manual memory management. Like I've never worked with a C++ based application that doesn't have crashes lurking all around, so bad that even a core dump leaves you clueless as to what's happening.

Have you tried fixing the bugs in your code?

That strategy has been followed by people writing code in every single language, and when used (even with C++) you do drive down the number of these crashes to a residual/purely theoretical frequency.

Scenarios such as those you've described are rare. There should be more to them than the tool you're using to do your job. So why blame the tool?
by mtaras | 2025-05-16 12:16:23+00:00
No, I personally don't have notes that would be valuable enough for the system I was looking for, so notes is just how I'm calling my agent's long-term memory. All I do is provide it with tools to message me and manage it's own notes, useful context (recent chat history, its saved notes, calendar events, etc), and it can act upon the info.

The elegance of the system unfolded when I realized that I can not specify any interaction rules beforehand — I just talk to the system, it saves notes for itself, and later acts upon them. I've only started testing it, but so far it's been working as intended.
by infecto | 2025-05-16 12:16:48+00:00
You’ve got a couple of ideas colliding here, let me try to unpack them.

First, most of the major players already have their own models or have been developing them for some time. Your take feels a bit reductive. Take Windsurf pre-acquisition, for example, their risk was being too tightly coupled to third-party vendors. It’s only logical to assume that building task- or language-specific models will ultimately help reduce costs and offer more control.

As for the other point: in my experience, trying to fully leverage LLMs actually makes me more prescriptive in my designs. I spend more time thinking through architecture and making my code modular, more so than when I wasn’t using an LLM. I’m sure others may design less or take shortcuts, but for me it’s pushed the opposite behavior. Is it the “right” way? I’m not sure, but I’m enjoying it and staying productive.
by sattard | 2025-05-16 12:16:49+00:00
Why haven't AI code editors not built this at their core yet, to automatically consolidate previous conversational turns into a more structured context summary. Instead of relying solely on the model’s memory of all prior exchanges, surely these tools should take responsibility for intermittently “restating” the clarified requirements so the model doesn’t have to reconstruct context from scratch (or worse, pick up mistakes). This might mitigate compounding errors and reduce verbosity.
by captainmuon | 2025-05-16 12:16:51+00:00
I feel like most people only use Tor via the Tor browser or a socks proxy, and the developers in the ecosystem cater only to these users. But there are a bunch of other creative uses of Tor around.

A couple of years ago, I used the TransPort feature of Tor combined with an iptables rule to redirect certain applications over Tor, like a web browser. The goal was a poor man's VPN. Access some websites without your local network admin to know about it, and without the website to know who you are. Back then there was Java applets and Flash, and this worked to hide network requests from them, too, as opposed to other solutions. Later iptables removed the feature that allowed you to filter on PID and broke my workflow. I changed it to use a dedicated unix user for tor, but that broke at some point, too, and I just got a commercial VPN.

Tor discouraged my use case, and I guess if you are afraid of being tracked or recognized as a returning user, then you should stick to Tor browser. But everybody has their own use cases.
by ekidd | 2025-05-16 12:17:24+00:00
> You have the copilot mode which takes no learning at all which might give you some speedup, especially if you are doing repetitive stuff, it might even 10x+ you.

I have some grey hair and I've been programming since I was a kid. Using CoPilot autocompletion roughly doubles my productivity while cutting my code quality by 10%.

This happens because I can see issues in autocompleted code far faster than I can type, thanks to years of reading code and reviewing other people's code.

The 10% quality loss happens because my code is no longer lovingly hand-crafted single-author code. It effectively becomes a team project shared by me and the autocomplete. That 10% loss was inevitable as soon as I added another engineer, so it's usually a good tradeoff.

Based on observation, I think my productivity boost is usually high compared to other seniors I've paired with. I see a lot of people who gain maybe 40% from Copilot autocomplete.

But there is no world in which current AI is going to give me a 900% productivity boost when working in areas I know well.

I am also quite happy to ask Deep Research tools to look up the most popular Rust libraries for some feature, and to make me a pretty table of pros and cons to skim. It's usually only 90% accurate, but it cuts my research time.

I do know how to drive Claude Code, and I have gotten it to build a non-trivial web front-end and back-end that isn't complete garbage without writing more than a couple of dozen lines myself. This required the same skill set as working with an over-caffeinated intern with a lot of raw knowledge, but who has never written anything longer than 1,000 lines before. (Who is also a cheating cheater.) Maybe I would use it more if my job was to produce an endless succession of halfway decent 5,000-line prototypes that don't require any deep magic.

Auto-complete plus Deep Research is my sweet spot right now.
by dmazin | 2025-05-16 12:17:29+00:00
I know what you’re saying, but I’m saving time by: * getting ideas for how logic etc could be implemented * boilerplate is a thing of the past

The other thing is that I have the LLM make the modifications I want.

I know how long it takes to get an extremely bad programmer to do what you want, but the LLM is far better than that, so I do come out ahead.
by sevensor | 2025-05-16 12:17:54+00:00
Where are these people who use Matlab properly? All I ever see in other people’s Matlab code is for loops. Their idea of speeding up their code is using parfor.

Obligatory licensing rant: you have to pay extra to use parfor, as I found out one day when the license server at work told me I couldn’t run somebody else’s code because we were out of licenses for that iteration construct. This is just Mathworks taking advantage of ignorant people who don’t understand what Matlab is to inflict more misery with their insane licensing scheme. It’s not just that it’s expensive, it’s that it’s weirdly unpredictable. I mean, come on, the code was slow and chock full of errors as it was. To have it randomly fail because the license server was out of parallel toolbox licenses is just insulting.
by smileybarry | 2025-05-16 12:17:57+00:00
I suspect they just put their eggs in one basket and used the same package identifier for the DMA version of Fortnite and the App Store version, and the app’s state in review limbo messed with the iOS notarization process (which is a minimal review and not an automated CLI like macOS).

That’s something they could’ve avoided by using different IDs for different stores, like everyone else does on e.g. Amazon AppStore. (Maybe even Samsung and Play Store use different IDs)

But that’s assuming they’re not just refusing to release anywhere until Apple relents in the US.
by maxlin | 2025-05-16 12:18:34+00:00
We're at the point where I'm starting to hear this exact "backlash" sentiment from a lot of people. While I never went that far out of discomfort (I like understanding things) I do kind of respect the "effort" of willing to let go a bit. One reason probably also is that I tend up working in large Unity projects which are as incompatible for letting AI "take the wheel" as projects come.

That aside, I wonder if the OP would have had all the same issues with Grok? In several uses I've seen it surprisingly outperform the competition.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-05-16 12:19:28+00:00
> For comparison, companies in the EU have to abide by a time-tracking law that requires employers to have an objective, reliable, and accessible system in place for measuring employee working time. This is to prevent employees working excessive extra time without compensation.

Yeah, that's the theory. The practice (at least in my country):

- Jobs where they make you clock in X hours but actually work X+Y. This of course can be reported, but not many people do (lack of inspectors, fear of losing the job, slowness of the justice system...)

- Jobs where they make you track X hours but you get the job done in Z (Z<X) so people do all sorts of tricks like clocking out remotely, or having a workmate clock out for them (of course, just staying and reading a book or surfing the Internet is also a thing).

- Jobs where time tracking is pretty much impossible so it's all fake. For example, I'm a university professor, I sometimes meet at 11 PM with people from different timezones, or have to rerun an experiment at night, or rush on Sunday to meet a conference deadline and then rest on Monday morning (maybe). You can't track that, so all my time tracking is pretty much made up (and it gives me extra work because I have to make it up in such a way that it adds up and conforms to the theory).

I suppose the law can be helpful for some people, but it's just annoying for most people I know.
by philsnow | 2025-05-16 12:20:00+00:00
It’s less of

> my baby is going to die, woe is me

and more of

> have I failed my baby so much as a parent that he won’t even grow to adulthood (much less have a wonderful, happy life)

It’s not exactly a rational feeling; it’s not like this baby was going to die through lack of parental effort or care or anything else that the parents have any real control over, so it’s not like they could have done anything differently.

Nonetheless, it can make you feel like an utter failure of a parent. To some people (I admit, not everybody), that is absolutely crushing.
by Sxubas | 2025-05-16 12:20:16+00:00
IMO the mistake was not knowing what he was doing. He basically (at a macro scale) copy-pasted stack overflow code without understanding what it does... We've all been there.

I don't think LLMs are at blame here, it is a tool and it can be used poorly. However, I do wonder what's the long term effects on someone who uses them to work on things they are knowledgeable about. Unfortunately this is not explored in the article.
by andrewjuma | 2025-05-16 12:20:27+00:00
I created a simple, no-backend-required web app to help content creators, entrepreneurs, and marketers track the performance of AI-generated or custom prompts.

You can save prompts to a calendar, view and organize them by date, track likes/clicks/shares/comments for each, and save any prompt you find around the web. It works offline for guest users (via localStorage) and syncs seamlessly to Firebase Realtime Database when users sign in.

The whole thing runs on vanilla HTML/JS and Firebase Auth, and requires no monthly hosting. You can test it instantly as a guest, then sign in to sync your data. Feedback welcome — I’d love to know if this solves a real problem for you or how it could improve.
by HDThoreaun | 2025-05-16 12:20:46+00:00
> But a simple solution to address your fears: simply don't use threads. You'll be fine.

Im not worried about new code. Im worried about stuff written 15 years ago by a monkey who had no idea how threads work and just read something on stack overflow that said to use threading. This code will likely break when run post-GIL. I suspect there is actually quite a bit of it.
by plam503711 | 2025-05-16 12:20:57+00:00
You're absolutely right that businesses act within whatever constraints exist — and yes, we were a bit naive. We assumed that if someone had a fully functional, free, open source version available (well-documented and easy to install), nobody sane would go out of their way to abuse the trial system instead.

To be clear, it’s not just trial abuse — it’s actively ignoring the better, freer option in favor of repeatedly faking evaluations just to get the “easy mode.”

We’ll definitely tighten things up going forward. But in nearly a decade of doing this, they're the only ones to push it to this scale. So yeah, they've earned a spot in our open source hall of shame
by shadowfiend | 2025-05-16 12:21:20+00:00
Epic didn't publicly criticize Apple or testify against them in court to get into this situation, they willfully and deliberately broke the legal developer agreement that they signed to get press coverage (they could have filed suit on the anti-steering rules regardless).

Not only did they do this, they then filed suit to say that Apple shouldn't have been allowed to suspend their account—and lost (though arguably won the broader war since anti-steering is currently dead).

There are a ton of things Apple is doing wrong around developer stuff and anti-steering rules and all of it, but I dunno, I feel pretty good about them saying to a specific developer, “actually, you've shown yourself to be willing to ignore the legal agreements you sign, so we're not going to be doing business with you any longer“. Epic's stunt should cost them, if they then want to talk about how they've martyred themselves for developers everywhere. Good work, but a martyr who comes back to life isn't really a martyr, right?
by florbnit | 2025-05-16 12:21:34+00:00
> We’re not going to waste days chasing them. But at some point, this goes beyond saving a few bucks: it becomes performance art.

Oh for the love of tech, do chase them. This absolutely has to be in void of the terms of your trial take them to court. If not, then at the very least name and shame the company, so some dumb manager orchestrating this silly theft will get fired and someone more mature can be rotated in.
by isleyaardvark | 2025-05-16 12:22:19+00:00
It's the same reason it has been since the judgement, Epic violated the TOS so Apple removed Fortnite. The court found for Apple on that count, and has never ordered Fortnite's reinstatement.

Tim Sweeney is using language in a way to make it appear as though the recent ruling ordered Fortnite's reinstatement, and a lot of people are falling for it.
by nickfromseattle | 2025-05-16 12:22:43+00:00
Rocket Lab did ~$123m/quarter in Q1 and ~$400m in 2024 [0], while this article claims, "Around $130 million in annual revenue."

I don't think it's Rocket Lab.

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/RKLB/rocket-lab-us...
by kova12 | 2025-05-16 12:23:00+00:00
I used to work in IT in a large corporation back in the days. Amount of work necessary to procure software was so staggering, that any alternative "creative solution" would be much more preferable. And the worst thing is that the cheap software was the one that suffered most. The gazillion-dollar CISCO upgrade was no problem, it's already gazillion dollars. But to get $10 email shareware license one would spend many work-hours of many people, so who's gonna do it.
by albedoa | 2025-05-16 12:23:05+00:00
> Who would be qualified enough to talk with you about new design trends then?

The person you are asking did not say anything about new design trends.

But anyway, if one is calling this page a monstrosity, then it seems in bad faith for you to ask that question on the same line where you call its designers "qualified enough".

Would you consider an answer that excludes anyone who thinks that these designers are qualified? Would you consider any answer that disagrees with your assessment, or have you already made up your mind?
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-16 12:23:12+00:00
> But at some point, this goes beyond saving a few bucks: it becomes performance art.

Love it. I appreciate the humor and good example behind that.

It's entirely likely the company is spending more money on staff time, than on the product.

I also cannot even imagine running mission-critical stuff on free trials (I have heard of it, before. I think Adobe was successfully sued, once, because someone created an image in their free trial, and then, couldn't open it, after the trial expired).

If I were one of that company's customers, I'd be fairly concerned.
by spjt | 2025-05-16 12:23:19+00:00
I'm not very sympathetic to moderators. Their job is to make some forum contain only what they want to hear from the (unpaid) people providing the content. If that's what you want, start a blog.

In any sort of IRL community, if some person decided they had the authority to prevent people from answering others' questions, unilaterally decide people aren't welcome, etc. everyone would think they had gone insane.

However there is the problem where any unmoderated public forum will eventually contain only scam artists and Nazis. Moderators address the Nazi spam problem, but now you have the moderator problem. It's been a mental side project of mine lately to find ways to solve the moderator problem, which I can't talk too much about as there is money to be made by doing so.

What happens when the forum gets overrun by Nazi spam? We'll install a set of moderators who remove it. But what happens when the moderators start removing useful information? We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the moderators. But aren't the snakes even worse? Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat. Then we're stuck with gorillas! No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
by fluffycritter | 2025-05-16 12:23:39+00:00
It’s the fear of a vestibular attack that gives me anxiety which causes a vestibular attack. These attacks last like two seconds. Having a thing that keeps me lane centered has stopped the vestibular attacks. If I have another big one I will definitely pull over.

I am disabled, unemployed, and live alone and have no other reliable access to transportation. What else am I supposed to do? Simply stop existing?

I am well aware that I am taking a huge risk. It is harm reduction. And as the main underlying issue is anxiety, simply having a safety net (or even the perception of a safety net) has significantly cut down on the anxiety.
by rocketvole | 2025-05-16 12:24:02+00:00
it's practically trivial to bypass this if you really want to. CapitalOne in the US allows you to have virtual cards that can be verified but you can delete and block at any time for free if you have a credit card from them. I'm sure the practice discourages casuals from gaming trials, but it just feels like it's making life miserable for paying customers but doing almost nothing to stop bad actors
by SkiFire13 | 2025-05-16 12:24:16+00:00
To be fair Lua also made some bad decisions, though maybe not as bad as javascript:

- tables being used for both objects and arrays can create a lot of confusion, especially when you have some integer keys, but not all, and especially when they are not consecutive or one of them is 0 - indexes start at 1 - assigning nil deinitializes variables/entries instead of assigning the value `nil` (this becomes especially bad if you mistakingly try to use nil as a value in an array/table) - nil and false are falsy, but not 0, which instead is truthy
by mockerell | 2025-05-16 12:24:24+00:00
I think the comment referred to the phrase „a graph needs X (colors or whatever)“. For me, this can be read two ways: 1. „a graph always needs at least X colors“ or 2. „a graph always needs at most X colors“.

Personally, I would interpret this as option 1 (and so did the comment above I assume). In that case, the statement is wrong. But I’d prefer to specify „at most/ at least“ anyways.

Or even better, use actual vocabulary. „For every graph there exists a coloring with X colors.“ or „any graph can be coloured using X colors“.

PS: I also agree with the sentiment about quanta magazine. It’s hard to get some actual information from their articles if you know the topic.
by sundarurfriend | 2025-05-16 12:24:40+00:00
Unpaywalled archive: https://archive.is/20250509020949/https://www.nzherald.co.nz...

And yeah:

> The company that developed and launched rockets in New Zealand and the United States, as well as spacecraft and software systems, made US$123 million revenue in the three months to the end of March.