MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by phillipcarter | 2025-05-13 13:42:44+00:00
Yeah, that's what I do now -- and some coworkers have noted that it can often help with biasing towards design system components if you prompt it to do that -- but similarly, but the challenge here is that the level of pushback I want from the AI depends on several factors that aren't encodable into rules. Sometimes the area of the code is exactly the way it should be, and sometimes I know exactly what to do! Or it's somewhere in between. And it's a lot of work to have a set of rules that plays well here.
by sgarland | 2025-05-13 13:43:18+00:00
IMO, the prime offender is simply not understanding fundamentals. From simple things like “a network call is orders of magnitude slower than a local disk, which is orders of magnitude slower than RAM…” (and moreover, not understanding that EBS et al. are networked disks, albeit highly specialized and optimized), or doing insertions to a DB by looping over a list and writing each row individually.

I have struggled against this long enough that I don’t think there is an easy fix. My current company is the first I’ve been at that is taking it seriously, and that’s only because we had a spate of SEV0s. It’s still not easy, because a. I and the other technically-minded people have to find the problems, then figure out how to explain them b. At its heart, it’s a culture war. Properly normalizing your data model is harder than chucking everything into JSON, even if the former will save you headaches months down the road. Learning how to profile code (and fix the problems) may not be exactly hard, but it’s certainly harder than just adding more pods to your deployment.
by monkeyelite | 2025-05-13 13:43:32+00:00
> If dynamic array bounds checking cost 5% (narrator: it is far less than that)

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.

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

The vast majority of cases it doesn’t matter at all - much less than 5%. I think safe/unsafe or general/performance scopes are a good way to handle this.
by dathinab | 2025-05-13 13:43:43+00:00
Are you sure? From the major EU cities I have visited at least 2 which have many "hills that are unmanageable on a town or cargo bike" (Zürich & Lisbon). And if we include smaller places its many many more places.

Now what "unmanageable" means can differ quite a lot by person. Like some people would call some of the streets in Lisbon "unmanageable" by walking ;)

But then in both cases it only affects part of the city and throw in a E-Bike and thinks are often quite fine.

Anyway the point is, the bike from the article seems quite far away from a general purpose cargo bike. But for places where it fit its niche it probably shines.
by lolinder | 2025-05-13 13:43:48+00:00
With GitLab specifically as an alternative: GitLab made it very clear a few years ago that they weren't particularly interested in hosting large-scale free projects when they introduced the Open Source Program as the only path to using GitLab for FOSS. I've heard over and over again that this process is painful and not worth the effort, and it has a bunch of extra requirements that would likely be dealbreakers for Mozilla [0]:

* "the Open Source Project does not, and does not seek to, generate profit from the sale or licensing of the Open Source Software to which the Open Source Project relates, or the sale of any services related to such Open Source Software;"

* "The Open Source Project agrees not to (nor to authorize any third party to): ... (b) modify or create any derivative works of the GitLab Software ... (d) copy ... the GitLab Software"

That last part is especially problematic for everyone: in order to use GitLab.com for a FOSS project you have to renounce your right to modify (or authorize others to modify) or to copy the FOSS version of GitLab. This might have just been lawyers adding boilerplate without thinking it through, but that in itself is evidence of a major problem at GitLab.

So, GitLab is out. Aside from GitLab Mozilla could have chosen maybe Codeberg, but with the entire point being to remove barriers to new contributors it makes sense to go with the option that almost all such possible contributors are already on.

[0] https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/legal/opensource-agreem...
by rylan-talerico | 2025-05-13 13:43:53+00:00
I'm building an AI product management co-pilot (https://magical.pm) that helps PMs write requirements faster.

Here is my approach:

1. Engineering-As-Marketing: Building features that have the potential to create word-of-mouth growth (e.g., the AI will write product requirements in Shakespearean sonnets: https://www.magical.pm/?goofballModal=true).

2. Programmatic SEO: Sitemap has over 1,000 keyword-rich pages (no AI). To accomplish this, I leverage my app's Templates feature and tools that pair well with my app (Jira, Linear, Asana, etc).

3. Blog: Product management blog, designed to find traction in product management communities.

While my SEO grows, I'm improving the product's usefulness. Once it is ready, I will launch it via ProductHunt and begin a bigger marketing push (increased content marketing, community outreach, etc).
by n8henrie | 2025-05-13 13:44:27+00:00
Do you therefore agree that most physicians do not "deep fund of literature-backed knowledge to draw from regarding exercise"?

> Because there is so much variability in individual injuries and physiology it's extremely difficult to do rigorous studies comparing different treatments.

This is generally true of research in all areas of medicine; I don't see it as a fundamental reason why we wouldn't hope for equally powered and rigorous studies focusing on the issues that affect most of the population, even if there are not pharmaceutical or device companies that will profit from the recommended interventions.

I'm only a decade in, but my clinical experiences in my area of expertise vary widely from those of my colleagues, which vary from those of other colleagues, in spite of years of shared experience in a fairly homogenous demographic. Expert opinion is not a level of evidence that carries much weight in my mind.

It may be the best we have in many cases, I just wish we had something better.
by bayindirh | 2025-05-13 13:44:48+00:00
I don't think I'm a denier, or being behind [0]. I know about tools and agents.

For the third time [1] [2], I'll divide the line between core network and tools that core network uses. Agents are nothing new, and they expand capabilities of the LLMs, yes that's true. But they still can't answer the question "how did you generate this code and which source repositories you did use" when the LLM didn't use any tools.

The core network doesn't store citation/source information. It's not designed and trained in a way to do that.

geez.

[0]: https://notes.bayindirh.io/notes/Lists/Discussions+about+Art...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43972807

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43972892
by uberman | 2025-05-13 13:44:50+00:00
I hear you for sure. I personally have the luxury of working remotely on a semi-regular basis when I'm not on site at a client's location and I love it. I have worked remotely on and off for 20 years and it is not all gravy though. It does get kind of lonely sometimes. On the flip side, in my early career, I worked with a one way daily commute of 90 minutes or 3 hours a day! That was sure a kick in the crotch.
by yardie | 2025-05-13 13:44:58+00:00
If you let a car sit long enough, the rubber tires will develop a dimple. If you let it sit decades the tires will completely collapse. Now you are dragging a multi-ton steel sled with rubber nonskid pads instead of free rolling tires. Also, this is an underground garage. Not a ton of room to move around.

> isn’t it cheaper to call a friend

Its not moving a couple of boxes of furniture. I'd never seriously ask any friend to do this on a lark. Just pay the insured "expert" their fee so you don't have to assume any liabilities.
by gawa | 2025-05-13 13:45:00+00:00
With aider and Gemini Pro 2.5 at least I constantly have to fight against it to keep it focused on a small task. It keeps editing other parts of the file, doing small "improvements" and "optimizations" and commenting here and there. To the point where I'm considering switching to a graphical IDE where the interface would make it easier to accept or dismiss parts of changes (per lines/blocks, as opposed to a per file and per commit approach with aider).

Would you mind sharing more about your workflow with aider? Have you tried the `--watch-files` option? [0] What makes the architect mode [1] way better in your experience?

[0] https://aider.chat/docs/usage/watch.html

[1] https://aider.chat/docs/usage/modes.html#architect-mode-and-...
by api | 2025-05-13 13:45:03+00:00
They're comparing these applications to older applications that loaded instantly on much slower computers.

Both sides are right.

There is a ton of waste and bloat and inefficiency. But there's also a ton of stuff that genuinely does demand more memory and CPU. An incomplete list:

- Higher DPI displays use intrinsically more memory and CPU to paint and rasterize. My monitor's pixel array uses 4-6X more memory than my late 90s PC had in the entire machine.

- Better font rendering is the same.

- Today's UIs support Unicode, right to left text, accessibility features, different themes (dark/light at a minimum), dynamic scaling, animations, etc. A modern GUI engine is similar in difficulty to a modern game engine.

- Encryption everywhere means that protocols are no longer just opening a TCP connection but require negotiation of state and running ciphers.

- The Web is an incredibly rich presentation platform that comes with the overhead of an incredibly rich presentation platform. It's like PostScript meets a GUI library meets a small OS meets a document markup layer meets...

- The data sets we deal with today are often a lot larger.

- Some of what we've had to do to get 1000X performance itself demands more overhead: multiple cores, multiple threads, 64 bit addressing, sophisticated MMUs, multiple levels of cache, and memory layouts optimized for performance over compactness. Those older machines were single threaded machines with much more minimal OSes, memory managers, etc.

- More memory means more data structure overhead to manage that memory.

- Larger disks also demand larger structures to manage them, and modern filesystems have all kinds of useful features like journaling and snapshots that also add overhead.

... and so on.
by _fat_santa | 2025-05-13 13:45:13+00:00
I think there's something poetic about that fact that you can go on some AI prompt subreddits and have folks there make posts about turning ChatGPT into an "super business consultant" and then go over hear to read about how it's actually pretty bad at that.

But back on point, I found AI works best when given a full set of guardrails around what it should do. The other day I put it to work generating copy for my website. Typically it will go off the deep end if you try to make it generate entire paragraphs but for small pieces of text (id say up to 3 sentences) it does surprisingly well and because it's outputting such small amounts of text you can quickly make edits to remove places where it made a bad word choice or didn't describe something quite right.

But I would say I only got ChatGPT to do this after uploading 3-4 large documents that outline my product in excruciating detail.

As for coding tasks again it works great when given max guardrails. I had several pages that had strings from an object and I wanted those strings to be put back in the code and taken out of the object. This object has ~500 lines in it so it would have taken all day but I ended up doing it in about an hour by having AI do most of the work and just going in after the fact and verifying. This worked really well but I would caution folks that this was a very very specific use case. I've tried vibe coding once for shits and giggles and I got annoyed and stopped after about 10 minutes, IMHO if you're a developer at the "Senior" level, dealing with AI output is more crumbsome than just writing the damn code yourself.
by agentultra | 2025-05-13 13:45:36+00:00
I heartily agree. It would be nice if we could extend the lifetime of hardware 5, 10 years past its, "planned obsolescence." This would divert a lot of e-waste, leave a lot of rare earth minerals in the ground, and might even significantly lower GHG emissions.

The market forces for producing software however... are not paying for such externalities. It's much cheaper to ship it sooner, test, and iterate than it is to plan and design for performance. Some organizations in the games industry have figured out a formula for having good performance and moving units. It's not spread evenly though.

In enterprise and consumer software there's not a lot of motivation to consider performance criteria in requirements: we tend to design for what users will tolerate and give ourselves as much wiggle room as possible... because these systems tend to be complex and we want to ship changes/features continually. Every change is a liability that can affect performance and user satisfaction. So we make sure we have enough room in our budget for an error rate.

Much different compared to designing and developing software behind closed doors until it's, "ready."
by noobermin | 2025-05-13 13:46:05+00:00
My point doesn't really dispute that hg is dead "for most people" whatever that means, it's just that what the hg people could point to in the past was firefox, but now they've lost that example. Now, we can surely say it is dead.

To be frank, I know of no other major project that used hg. In fact, I think firefox was how I learned about it in the first place many years ago.
by izacus | 2025-05-13 13:46:39+00:00
The API that Nextcloud can use it readily available since Android 4.4 (2013).

They just didn't put in the work in 10 years despite repeated deprecation warnings.

This seems modus operandi from many OSS developers (syncthing is the other one that had the exact same issue) - ignore warnings, ignore migration guides, ignore API changes and then scream their heads off 6 YEARS later about how evil people are that they don't get unfettered access to users data anymore. And conveniently ignore that the migration path was available for longer than their product exists.
by mjburgess | 2025-05-13 13:47:17+00:00
Presumably they wanted the telemetry. It's not clear that this was a dev-initiated switch.

Perhaps we can blame the 'statistical monetization' policies of adtech and then AI for all this -- i'm not entirely sold on developers.

What, after all, is the difference between an `/etc/hosts` set of loop'd records vs. an ISP's dns -- as far as the software goes?
by daveguy | 2025-05-13 13:47:31+00:00
> 100) Those who bill by the hour work not for you but for the hour.

This is just not true. Some bill by the hour to be certain that full and focused work is applied for you and your project. In other words, if someone is following even a fraction of these 101 rules, then they are working for you. Maybe I am misunderstanding what this rule is trying to say. But, it seems like the mode of payment is completely orthogonal to the motive and priority of the person working.
by lillecarl | 2025-05-13 13:47:37+00:00
Quite naive take, you don't have to use any of your examples to deploy to Android, Windows, Linux or MacOS. It would be more like Microsoft charging a per-install fee on using the Win32 APIs which sounds outrageous.

Apple is using all power-plays to keep their market controlled firmly by them, and EU doesn't like it.

Having to pay 99$ per year to develop apps for your own devices that you've already purchased is also outrageous.

I get that Apple is doing a good job keeping app-store safe for it's users, but it doesn't make up being so actively hostile to user freedom.
by xutopia | 2025-05-13 13:47:50+00:00
Rails/Ruby is still top 10 on Github landscape in Pull Requests. Though it's lived through a relative decline people talk about it less because a lot of other frameworks and languages have improved in light of what the ecosystem had.

That said I feel like Elixir/Phoenix is doing a lot of things right today and if I were invested in one or the other I'd stick with that one. But I'm more of a bootstrapper than someone who looks for a job. Ruby is #8 in Pull Requests and Elixir #24 on Github. Source: https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2024/1

If I were just looking to be marketable I'd consider Python, Java or Go... but I don't love working in those languages as much as I do Ruby (or Elixir for that matter).
by pfdietz | 2025-05-13 13:48:08+00:00
This is simply wrong. They have a very clever combination of ideas that is truly new, so new that people are having a hard time understanding just how clever it is.

The IM video you posted, btw, is not to be taken seriously. It appears to be based solely on the Real Engineering video, not on Helion itself.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/10g95m9/the_problem...
by api | 2025-05-13 13:48:43+00:00
That's why I said the analogy doesn't map perfectly.

Still I do think there's some validity to the comparison. Fiat currencies are not backed by "nothing." They are backed by a state. Some percentage of the cost of operating a state is therefore "work" done to back the currency's value.

The question is: if we had a cryptocurrency backed by digital PoW that scaled to the level of fiat currencies (millions of transactions per second) and had some of their other desirable characteristics, would the state be able to proportionally shrink? That's what I'm not convinced of, but it'd be an interest experiment if we could spin up another universe and try it.
by lreeves | 2025-05-13 13:48:58+00:00
Aider has a configuration for each supported LLM to define the best diff format for each; so for certain ones they're best at diff format, Gemini is best at a fenced-diff format, Qwen3 is best at whole file editing, etc. Aider itself examines the diff and re-runs the request when the request when the response doesn't adhere to the corresponding diff format.

Edit: Also the Aider leaderboards show the success rate for diff adherence separately, it's quite useful [1]

1 - https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/
by ImJamal | 2025-05-13 13:49:18+00:00
> Yet nobody touches that 1% at the top, so real effective changes are really never seen, and haven't been seen since FDR

There could be some movement on this. Trump has suggested a 2.6% increase on the top 0.2%

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathangoldman/2025/05/09/3-key-...
by lolinder | 2025-05-13 13:49:28+00:00
This part was particularly interesting to me:

> The Open Source Project agrees not to (nor to authorize any third party to): (a) use the GitLab Software and GitLab for Open Source Program materials except for the purpose expressly provided in Section 2.1; (b) modify or create any derivative works of the GitLab Software and the GitLab for Open Source Program materials; (c) take any action that would subject the GitLab Software and the GitLab for Open Source Program materials to any third party terms; (d) copy, distribute, sell, sublicense, rent or lease the GitLab Software and GitLab for Open Source Program materials, including any access key provided by GitLab, or use such items for hosting, service provider, or similar purposes;

If I'm reading this right, in order to participate in the GitLab for Open Source Program (which is the only way to get a decent-sized project for free on GitLab.com any more) you have to renounce your right to several key freedoms with regard to the FOSS version of GitLab.
by anshumankmr | 2025-05-13 13:49:35+00:00
Here's some food for thought: there are perhaps some things that would be perhaps out of reach for all living beings for the conceivable future and beyond.

We are barely able to handle technological progress that would seem like stone age or even worse to a potential species that may exist at that time (ie those that may have such technology to stop the death of the very universe they are living)

They might just be indistinguishable from a god if there is one. And if they have enough power to perhaps prevent the death of the universe, they might have enough technology to just recreate another one. Or open a wormhole and transport to a new one or travel the multiverse or something.

Basically I feel if such kind of technology can be created to bend the universe to your will, it would be misused so badly, it might be catastrophic for the existence of such a species.
by curiousigor | 2025-05-13 13:49:46+00:00
Built a free product (https://heymeta.com) to solve my own problem and posted it here on HN and Reddit as well as Product Hunt (that was in 2018 when it was still relevant).

Currently getting 15k/unique/month (it has dropped a bit less, but steadily getting up after the rewrite and bigfixes).

When the website doesn't have sponsors, I promote my other free macOS tool (https://dockey.publicspace.co) (with a donation option) that get quite a nice flow of visitors from it.

I'd call this a success, although it's not enough to pay the bills or anything :)
by palmotea | 2025-05-13 13:50:15+00:00
> but democrats don’t govern as if it’s true and those aren’t positions espoused by the vast majority of the party, including all the ones with notable power.

Even if that's true, those kind of positions are a notable and visible part of progressive/Democratic culture.

For instance, the famous "in this house we believe" yard sign (https://www.amazon.com/Debbies-Designs-18x24-inch-Weatherpro...). "No human is illegal" can be reasonably interpreted to imply "denying the basic right for country to have an immigration policy."

It was also pretty well documented in the 2024 postmortems that people and groups who espoused those extreme positions were very constraining on "democrats...with notable power."
by rtkwe | 2025-05-13 13:50:22+00:00
The general lack of front line radios makes me think he wouldn't generally have been talking directly to the troops on the ground but the entire field of air combat much less close air support was in it's infancy so a lot of the doctrine was being made up on the fly. By the end of the war they had made a lot of improvements including bringing control of CAS closer to the frontline units that would be calling it in.

More about the US side of the conflict:

https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/jfrpiu/how_did_...

Not Europe (assuming from your grandfather flying Typhoons) but here's a paper about how the Marines in the Pacific were developing the idea of close air support in the Pacific: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA369287.pdf

A random book I found that might have more specifics about the RAF and British use of CAS: https://crecy.co.uk/product/close-call-raf-close-air-support...

Close air support is the phrase you're looking for for your own searches though if he was bombing tanks in the field.
by anthk | 2025-05-13 13:50:44+00:00
Then:

Unix: Small, light, mediocre OS for underpowered microcomputers. Either crash silently, or cut down the bloat.

MIT/GNU: Correct systems first. Plenty or resources. Lisp. Detect the errors, fix and step over them, continue the process.

Now:

GNU=Ugly bloated umUnix like, mega light Elisp editor but s l o w and prone to lock. Good FS' on Linux. FDo it's mainly Red Hat bloatware. Screen does too much.

OpenBSD=Correctness, ISC licensed mainly. Unix bound, small tools, but so-so FFSv2. Sndio works. Audio, video and so on perms work, no DBUS needed. CWM it's really fast and much easier than I3. Dumb config, fvwm looks like rocket science. Tmux, no screen(1) except for ports. Snappy, easy to config and script. Use damn cu(1) for serial, thanks.