MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nostrademons | 2025-05-13 19:30:04+00:00
That's sorta the premise of the tweet, though.

Right now, the market buys bug-filled, inefficient software because you can always count on being able to buy hardware that is good enough to run it. The software expands to fill the processing specs of the machine it is running on - "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away" [1]. So there is no economic incentive to produce leaner, higher-quality software that does only the core functionality and does it well.

But imagine a world where you suddenly cannot get top-of-the-line chips anymore. Maybe China invaded Taiwan and blockaded the whole island, or WW3 broke out and all the modern fabs were bombed, or the POTUS instituted 500% tariffs on all electronics. Regardless of cause, you're now reduced to salvaging microchips from key fobs and toaster ovens and pregnancy tests [2] to fulfill your computing needs. In this world, there is quite a lot of economic value to being able to write tight, resource-constrained software, because the bloated stuff simply won't run anymore.

Carmack is saying that in this scenario, we would be fine (after an initial period of adjustment), because there is enough headroom in optimizing our existing software that we can make things work on orders-of-magnitude less powerful chips.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

[2] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a33957256/this-prog...
by martinald | 2025-05-13 19:30:13+00:00
The reason it's a farce is because most banks are using some off the shelf system from one of the big vendors in the space OR legacy systems, or both. FIS is a good example.

They have basically no real motive to improve anything (the lock in is utterly extreme) and no doubt will charge through the eyeballs for any improvements - especially ones that are regulatory related.

You can see the difference between a legacy bank and some of the neobanks in the UK. It's absolutely night and day when they own their own modern tech stack.
by dfxm12 | 2025-05-13 19:30:25+00:00
I had someone ask for my name. I told them my first and last name. They said it wasn't correct. After a few minutes of discussion, it turns out the person wanted my name as it appeared on my card, which is first name, middle initial, last name and a suffix. I told the person as feedback that what they asked for and what they wanted were two different things. I'm not optimistic that anything will change.
by woodruffw | 2025-05-13 19:30:38+00:00
> From my understanding these organizations don’t yet do anything

A key thing they do is offer finer-grained roles[1] for project and team (i.e. subteams within an org) management.

You're right that they don't provide namespaces, yet. I believe there's ongoing discussion about how to enable that, including via PEP 752 and 755.

[1]: https://docs.pypi.org/organization-accounts/roles-entities/
by slowmovintarget | 2025-05-13 19:31:05+00:00
If our biggest issues are the state of education, the environment, the state of the economy, the security of the nation, the safety of our neighborhoods, and the civility of the society we live in, who has a bigger stake in all of these outcomes than parents?

So why not?

I mean, the argument against surely is not that having children is some existential horror or great evil, right? Civilization advances by our children doing better than we did, maybe materially, but morally, ethically, and hopefully in purpose.
New AI Chatbot Apps
by bennyv1211 | 2025-05-13 19:31:31+00:00
I recently launched two AI-powered Android apps — one is a voice-based emotional assistant, and the other is a GPT chatbot with image and voice input.

Evolve (Voice AI Companion): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.n3xg3nai.evolve

N3XG3N GPT Chatbot: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.n3xg3n.chatbot
Show HN: I built Locawise, a free AI tool to automate localization in projects
by aemresafak | 2025-05-13 19:32:03+00:00
Hi HN,

I've built Locawise, an open-source Python tool to automate the often tedious process of application localization. It uses AI (OpenAI or VertexAI models) to translate new or changed strings in your language files.

It consists of two main parts:

locawise: A Python CLI tool you run locally. It detects changes in your source language files (JSON, .properties), gets translations, and updates target files. It's context-aware – you can define project context, terminology (glossary), and tone via a YAML config (i18n.yaml) to improve translation quality. locawise-action: A GitHub Action that automates this process. It can run on pushes to your main branch and create a PR with the new translations. The goal is to offer a free, developer-controlled alternative to paid localization platforms. It's designed to be efficient (async, only translates changes) and cost-effective (you control LLM usage).

GitHub (CLI tool): https://github.com/aemresafak/locawise GitHub (Action): https://github.com/aemresafak/locawise-action Quick Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_Dz68115lg

I'd love to get your feedback and answer any questions.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-13 19:32:13+00:00
> It doesn’t work like that. If an image processing algorithm takes 2 instructions per pixel, adding a check to every access could 3-4x the cost.

Your understanding of how bounds checking works in modern languages and compilers is not up to date. You're not going to find a situation where bounds checking causes an algorithm to take 3-4X longer.

A lot of people are surprised when the bounds checking in Rust is basically negligible, maybe 5% at most. In many cases if you use iterators you might not see a hit at all.

Then again, if you have an image processing algorithm that is literally reading every single pixel one-by-one to perform a 2-instruction operation and calculating bounds check on every access in the year 2025, you're doing a lot of things very wrong.

> This is why if you dictate bounds checking then the language becomes uncompetitive for certain tasks.

Do you have any examples at all? Or is this just speculation?
by bouncing | 2025-05-13 19:32:28+00:00
The problem with the suggestions here is that it puts all your eggs in the same basket. 1Password TOTP? If both your password and the TOTP are in your password manager, you arguably really just have a single factor, delegated to a third party (your password manager). PassKeys? Same problem. Storing your recovery keys in your password manager? You again just have 1 factor.

SMS is bad and should go away, but it isn't so clear what the replacement needs to be for most people.
by aemresafak | 2025-05-13 19:32:46+00:00
Hi everyone, author here!

Thanks for checking out Locawise. I started building this because I was looking for a more streamlined and cost-effective way to handle localization for my own projects. I wanted something that could leverage the power of modern LLMs for good quality translations but also give me control over context and specific terminology without being locked into an expensive subscription.

The core idea was to make localization an almost invisible part of the development workflow, especially with the GitHub Action – push your code in the source language, and let the translations follow automatically.

This is still evolving, and I'm keen to build it out based on what developers actually need. Looking forward to your thoughts and any suggestions you might have!
by Pikamander2 | 2025-05-13 19:32:48+00:00
My dad recently got a letter telling him that his bank account would be closed in 30 days if he didn't call the phone number listed on the letter.

Upon calling the number, you get an automated system that immediately asks for your social security number and won't let you proceed until you do.

The phone number was nowhere to be found on the bank's website nor did it appear in a single Google result.

Sounds like an obvious scam, right? Nope. It was genuinely one of the bank's official phone numbers, and I had to nag them through three separate channels to get them to add it to their website, which they did a week later.
by taurath | 2025-05-13 19:32:57+00:00
Agree - initiative is not innate, it is trained and built with experience (of rewards for taking initiative), just as waiting for direction is trained and built with experience (of micromanagement and threats to safety).

The worst of the worst in my experience is the person who ignores the existance of 1, 2, and 3, assumes their coworkers who have been conditioned to not stick their neck out are incompetent and are trying to "get one over" on everyone else, and uses that as moral justification to backstab people who would be happy to work with them. The sad part is that the result will only reinforce their belief system.

You will always be surrounded by people, and how you regard them will inform your experience of them. If you allow yourself to force a false dichotomy on others, it will eventually be forced back on you.
by jll29 | 2025-05-13 19:33:03+00:00
Virality can be the key to growth, and it can be engineered.

I almost didn't buy the great book The One Billion Dollar App because of hits clickbait title, but it actually well-elaborates the mechanics (and the mathematics) of viral spread of apps, which not by coincident corresponds to the familiar formulas that people will have seen during the CoViD19 pandemic ("r-coefficient", r or R0 [1]).

For example, if you have a mobile app that gives you something free for each friend you invite to it, it may encourage some folks to share with r friends...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number
by xienze | 2025-05-13 19:33:10+00:00
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the act of adding the secret to the authenticator app in the first place. There needs to be documentation to the effect of "open Google Authenticator, and if you don't have it, download it on the App Store or Google Play store. Open the app and choose 'new secret', ...". Probably also put in a QR code and link for good measure. Rinse and repeat for all the major authenticator apps. THEN you can have them verify.

It adds up to a decent amount of supporting documentation that the bank is responsible for providing.
by em-bee | 2025-05-13 19:34:11+00:00
while i am not a fan of the AI craze, and regardless of what i think of the practices of certain insurers, my first thought was that the current state of AI naturally lends itself for insurance. there is a chance that AI gives you a right or wrong answer. and a lesser chance that a wrong answer will lead to damages. but risk averse users will want to protect themselves. so as long as the income insurers make is higher than the payouts, it's a sound business model.
by anarticle | 2025-05-13 19:34:25+00:00
It's a good time to be small, never been a better time to do your own thing. After 15y~ of doing megacorps, I was terrified to be on my own, but I got out there and talked to friends about what they were doing and how I can help.

I'm wielding two contracts and two retainers all while building software I sell for myself. It feels absolutely crazy to send someone an invoice and they send me money, as if I've unlocked some secret ability. This month is the first month I'm making more than I was as a corper.

Don't let the game tell you how to play anymore. The tools are out there and are better than ever.
by conductr | 2025-05-13 19:34:29+00:00
PHP is a fine language for a lot of cases. It's been a long time since it made sense to pay someone $150K to use it. Anonymous Indians is the AI he's been up against for a long time. Not to be racist of course, just pointing out there's massive labor arbitrage opportunities especially once you allow Remote work. You could hire an entire team of people for the same cost. He's making himself compete with the world with no significant advantage and he's expecting top dollar. American salaries only make sense when they require onsite work or are specialized/cutting-edge in some way, PHP is the most commoditized skill set there is.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-13 19:34:32+00:00
I worked there too and you're talking about performance in terms of optimal usage of CPU on a per-project basis.

Google DID put a ton of effort into two other aspects of performance: latency, and overall machine utilization. Both of these were top-down directives that absorbed a lot of time and attention from thousands of engineers. The salary costs were huge. But, if you're machine constrained you really don't want a lot of cores idling for no reason even if they're individually cheap (because the opportunity cost of waiting on new DC builds is high). And if your usage is very sensitive to latency then it makes sense to shave milliseconds off because of business metrics, not hardware $ savings.
by xienze | 2025-05-13 19:34:33+00:00
> “Hey this is (Bank). Are you trying to log in right now from Moscow on a Windows 10 PC using Firefox? If so, please call the number on the back of your card, hit 9, put in your SSN, then we’ll turn off 2FA for one login and let you add a new one. Btw if it is not you, your password is definitely compromised.”

Stop, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Having someone call and ask for your SSN is a non-starter.

And in what world is SMS not available but being able to call that same phone is?
by drannex | 2025-05-13 19:34:45+00:00
You technically _can_ do conditional imports by mis(?)using the #load('') usage, its not perfect and might not work for all cases, but it can be done since #load() loads a file/entity in at compile time. It's a 'hack' but it can be used that way.

Edit: This thread is useful: https://forum.odin-lang.org/t/conditional-imports/497/2
by shadowgovt | 2025-05-13 19:35:05+00:00
Broadly speaking: because they don't have to get it right.

Banks are generally protected from fraud not by up-front security, but by auditing. If someone mis-applies funds, they have a chain of transactions they can back out. And, if someone does it maliciously, they have a disproportionate support of the force of law to discourage such behavior.

Contrast most software companies, where theft of data is not a reversible issue, so they are heavily incentivized to make it technically infeasible.
by ActorNightly | 2025-05-13 19:35:07+00:00
With sufficient context, I find pretty much any of the modern ones to be sufficient. If you spend the time to write the prompt, they work pretty well. I use Claude at work to automate some of my more common tasks. But I find that using a basic model to help me develop python code that does the same thing is actually faster.

In the cases where I actually rely on something to solve a niche problem, all of them suck.
by harmmonica | 2025-05-13 19:35:08+00:00
Pure speculation, but I wonder if it's not so much AI as tech companies realizing they actually can do more with less. And, again, I have no evidence to back this up other than "feels," but I swear when Elon bought Twitter and cut so much of the workforce that's when sentiment seemed to shift materially. I wonder if that wasn't a bit of an "aha" moment for mega tech and tech in general. It's like all the major companies said maybe we don't need as many people as we have. Of course people are going to debate whether the changes at Twitter had a monumentally-negative impact (they may very well have in terms of revenue, but I'm not so sure in terms of absolute or even relative profit).

Of course, as a sibling comment, I think, said it could be the end of ZIRP. But maybe the truth is it's end of ZIRP, seeing a "peer" shed employees en masse and not fail outright, and AI.

Twitter deal in 2022. Headcount by year for a few (not suggesting this data supports my theory; just sharing to reality check)...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/number-... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num...

Edit: grammar
by Muromec | 2025-05-13 19:35:13+00:00
I think all the banks that I used for the last five years (from three different European countries) use the mobile app itself as a generator of security credentials. The app itself is pin protected.

Recovery paths vary -- from sms and hardware code generator (funny terminal to slot bank card into) to government-managed PKI or id carda.

I think only one of them is still using sms as a fallback for normal transaction confirmations.
by hbn | 2025-05-13 19:35:14+00:00
It's not like Apple hasn't had the ability to release a folding phone since the display technology has existed for years. The tricky part of releasing a folding phone is figuring out how you're going to handle the incredibly high warranty claim rate when screens spontaneously fail.

Apple in particular will get to deal with all the negative PR when people buy their $2000 iPhone Fold and online reports come flooding in for all of the week 1 display failures.
by hinkley | 2025-05-13 19:35:22+00:00
If you’re trying to sell a product to the masses, you either need to make it cheap or a fad.

You cannot make a cheap product with high margins and get away with it. Motorola tried with the RAZR. They had about five or six good quarters from it and then within three years of initial launch were hemorrhaging over a billion dollars a year.

You have to make premium products if you want high margins. And premium means you’re going for 10% market share, not dominant market share. And if you guess wrong and a recession happens, you might be fucked.
by caseyy | 2025-05-13 19:35:30+00:00
> I don’t think this leads to market collapse

You must have read that the Market for Lemons is a type of market failure or collapse. Market failure (in macroeconomics) does not yet mean collapse. It describes a failure to allocate resources in the market such that the overall welfare of the market participants decreases. With this decrease may come a reduction in trade volume. When the trade volume decreases significantly, we call it a market collapse. Usually, some segment of the market that existed ceases to exist (example in a moment).

There is a demand for inferior goods and services, and a demand for superior goods. The demand for superior goods generally increases as the buyer becomes wealthier, and the demand for inferior goods generally increases as the buyer becomes less wealthy.

In this case, wealthier buyers cannot buy the superior relevant software previously available, even if they create demand for it. Therefore, we would say a market fault has developed as the market could not organize resources to meet this demand. Then, the volume of high-quality software sales drops dramatically. That market segment collapses, so you are describing a market collapse.

> There’s probably another name for this

You might be thinking about "regression to normal profits" or a "race to the bottom." The Market for Lemons is an adjacent scenario to both, where a collapse develops due to asymmetric information in the seller's favor. One note about macroecon — there's never just one market force or phenomenon affecting any real situation. It's always a mix of some established and obscure theories.
by dejobaan | 2025-05-13 19:35:35+00:00
Fantastic. While it's not quite at the level of Bök's work, an inevitable comparison is all of Tom7's projects (and in particular http://tom7.org/harder). I always love when this kind of stuff pops up onto HN. I feel that we're all interesting and experimental, and sometimes need a nudge to remember that people can do weird, neat stuff.
by monkeyelite | 2025-05-13 19:36:12+00:00
> Your understanding of how bounds checking works in modern languages and compilers is not up to date.

One I am familiar with is Swift - which does exactly this because it’s a library feature of Array.

Which languages will always be able to determine through function calls, indirect addressing, etc whether it needs to bounds check or not?

And how will I know if it succeeded or whether something silently failed?

> if you have an image processing algorithm that is literally reading every single pixel one-by-one to perform a 2-instruction operation and calculating bounds check on every access in the year 2025, you're doing a lot of things very wrong

I agree. And note this is an example of a scenario you can encounter in other forms.

> Do you have any examples at all? Or is this just speculation?

Yes. Java and python are not competitive for graphics and audio processing.
by gsaines | 2025-05-13 19:36:21+00:00
It's more than just building something people want.

I want a lot of things and would be willing to pay for some of them, but unless there is a way to reach me, it doesn't matter.

There is this cultural meme that if an amazing product simply exists, then people will tell other people and it'll grow organically. The reality is that amazing, ahead-of-their time products and services are constantly being created and dying. Not because they don't solve a need, but because they weren't able to reach customers economically with the right message.

That ability to reach customers and contextualize the solution in language that matches their expectation is actually a lot rarer than building a good product.
by mantas | 2025-05-13 19:36:57+00:00
Eh... ChatGPT is probably the worst of both worlds. Even if we skip hallucinations. First, it's not hard for fake content (e.g. russian propaganda) make into it. Second, ChatGPT censors wrongthink itself. E.g. at least older versions simply refused to tell jokes about women while happily telling jokes about men. I'm pretty sure that's not only one wrongthink that is „adjusted“.
by dhorthy | 2025-05-13 19:37:17+00:00
I had kinda wondered about this for a while - I called it "MWP - model workload protocol" - a client-agnostic (sms, whatsapp, in-app, react components) way to display what an agent is doing

- working - thinking - calling tools - hit an error - needs human input - needs human approval

etc etc etc
by vannevar | 2025-05-13 19:37:25+00:00
>A 400 mile range Hummer that has 150-200 miles range while towing a trailer would be a game changer.

It already exists, it's called the Chevy Silverado EV:

https://insideevs.com/news/688681/chevrolet-silverado-ev-vs-...

Judging from the comments in this thread, GM is doing a terrible job marketing this truck.
by rini17 | 2025-05-13 19:37:26+00:00
286 far pointers were used sparingly, to save precious memory. Now we don't have any such problem and there are still unused bits in pointers even on largest 64 bit systems that might be repurposed perhaps. With virtual memory, there are all kinds of hardware supported address mappings and translations and IOMMU already so adding more transistors isn't an issue. The issue is purely cultural as you have just shown, people can't imagine it.
by dang | 2025-05-13 19:37:48+00:00
That's a great change which totally solves the problem. I've merged it in your comment above. Thanks!

Edit: I of course believe you that you didn't mean it as a swipe. The trouble is that these things can all too easily land that way anyhow, since intent isn't directly readable. Past posts about this in case of interest: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
by NBJack | 2025-05-13 19:37:59+00:00
If you haven't tried it, especially if your workplace allows your phone to have access to some corporate data, DeX + a good pair of AR or just integrated display glasses feels like the future.

I run my S23 Ultra with a pair of XReal One's, and a folding Bluetooth keyboard (DeX let's you use your phone as a touchpad). It is really amazing in widescreen mode sitting in a coffee shop, reading through technical documents and answering work email. When I'm done, it can all fold up and fit in a (spacious) pair of cargo shorts.

I think Samsung has played the long game on DeX, with an eye towards their collaborative XR glasses with Google next year. As great as XReal has been, I am eager to see a "first-party" solution.