MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DaiPlusPlus | 2025-05-01 03:36:18+00:00
> if you pretend to be worth 30% of revenue (an insane markup)

Back in 2008, if you were an indie dev then their 30% ask was more than reasonable because the cost-of-doing-business on other platforms (like Windows Mobile) was much higher due to the lack of any central App Store; for example, you'd often need to partner with a company like Digital River, and pay more for marketing/advertising and overcome the significant friction involved in convincing punters to register/buy from your website, download the app *.cab files to their PC, install the app onto your device, and hope no-one uploads a copy to a filesharing network because this was before the days when an OS itself would employ DRM to enforce a license for third-party software.

...then one day Apple comes along and says: "We can manage all of that for you, for far less than what you'd pay for e-commerce and digital distribution, and our customers have lots of disposable income".

Ostensibly, competition should have come from the Android and (lol) Windows App Stores: "surely if Android's Play Store offers devs better rates then devs will simply not target iOS anymore and Apple will reduce their % to stay competitive" - but Apple's secret-sauce of a markedly more affluent customer base with already saved credit-card details meant that Android apps leant more on ad-supported apps while more iOS apps could charge an up-front amount, not have ads, and result in iOS devs still making far more money on Apple's platform.

--------

There exists an argument that Apple should not be forced to open-up the iOS platform because Apple is selling a closed platform on the merits of it being a closed platform, and Apple's customers want a closed platform (even if they don't realize it) because having a closed platform looks like the only way to enforce a minimum standard of quality and to keep malware out precisely because normal-human-users (i.e. our collective mothers) will install malware because the installation instructions for "Facebook_Gold_App1_100%_Real_honest.app" tell them to disable system protections.
by mcswell | 2025-05-01 03:37:17+00:00
I assume everyone knows this, but the idea of generating answers and testing them, dates back decades, and has been widely used for problems where generating _the_ correct answer(s) is difficult, but where generating a bunch of potential answers--(at least) one of which is likely correct--is easier. Generate-and-test of course relies on having a test algorithm that is reliable, (relatively) fast, and memory efficient, and is most useful when an exact generate algorithm (one that generated only the correct answer(s)) is either slow or inefficient of memory use (or both).

In the case described, the generator is an LLM, and the tester (called a "verifier") is "the compiler, linter, SAT solver, ground truth dataset, etc."

And of course generate-and-test is related to trial-and-error, which has probably existed since the Paleolithic.
by bayesianbot | 2025-05-01 03:37:25+00:00
I basically did this with aider and Gemini 2.5 few days ago and was blown away. Basically talked about the project structure, let it write the final plan to file CONVENTIONS.md that gets automatically attached to the context, then kept asking "What should we do next" until tests were ready, and then I just ran a loop where it modifies the code and I press Return to run the tests and add the output to prompt and let it go again.

About 10 000 lines of code, and I only intervened a few times, to revert few commits and once to cut a big file to smaller ones so we could tackle the problems one by one.

I did not expect LLMs to be able to do this so soon. But I just commented to say about aider - the iteration loop really was mostly me pressing return. Especially in the navigator mode PR, as it automatically looked up the correct files to attach to the context
by Johanx64 | 2025-05-01 03:37:49+00:00
You are already living in this reality. And it has already been happening for quite a few years by now. People that are especially vocal and badly hit by tarrifs at the moment, are the people who have already been doing just that.

This transition happened so quickly that most people haven't fully cought up to the implications to the full extent. In my mind, China is already the center of gravity.
by boznz | 2025-05-01 03:37:53+00:00
It is all about accuracy for me, as a reader, reading a book needs you to be able to forget about everything and be immersed in the world and the characters you are reading about, a simple mistake like the wrong name being used, a date being slightly wrong, or a him/her mistake can yank you out of that and really annoy you. For serious readers it does have to be 100% accuracy, 99.99% is not good enough.

A few weeks ago as a test, I copied the whole of the last draft of my last novel into two AI's and asked them to find mistakes, unanswered questions, continuity errors, plot holes etc. They found no genuine ones and lots of false ones, even after some serious prompting. The two test readers I used found five between them which would have been very embarrassing if they got through to publication.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-01 03:38:40+00:00
The entire reddit archive was ~4TB sometime close to them removing the API. That's fully compressed, it used to be hosted on the-eye. There are stil arrrr places where you can torrent the files if you're inclined to do so. A lot of that is garbage, but the early years are probably worth a look at, especially before 2018-2019 when smarter bots came to be.
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-05-01 03:42:39+00:00
It's also insane how what was considered dystopia for desktop computing silently happened for mobile devices: a corporation controlling the software stack and using cryptography against the users to control precisely what software they are allowed to run on their "own" devices. Yes, in principle Android phones can be rooted, but in practice this breaks Play Integrity and you are now locked out from a huge range of apps.

Google and Apple have silently achieved Microsoft's wet dream from the "trusted platform" era of effectively making it impossible for free and open source operating systems to compete with their own.
by 43920 | 2025-05-01 03:43:00+00:00
My personal favorite UX-failure-of-the-moment in Teams: If I open the teams tab > Browse, it shows a big list of company-wide channels that I could join. There's a search box, but unlike any normal search box, it only does a prefix search, so if your channel is named "some test channel", and you search for "test", it doesn't find it! Several times I've given up at guessing the right channel name and had to ask coworkers to tell me the exact name in order to join.
by mulderc | 2025-05-01 03:44:33+00:00
Not so much a laundry listening more that it feels wrong as it is clearly an electron app and doesn’t feel like a native app and chooses to have its own conventions over embracing feeling like a native app.

I think that causes some of the issues you are mentioning.

Now I don’t personally see any communication app like slack that is any better than it. They all sort of suck but I feel like I had a better time with IRC apps back in the day than I do with modern communication apps.
by nine_k | 2025-05-01 03:44:39+00:00
> one user account always has the ability to log in no matter how long a system has been offline

To me, it's pretty clear.

Assume that every password has an expiration date. Having not logged in to the system long enough, you end up with a system where every password has expired. A relatively reasonable thing to do then is to accept some previously valid password, and direct the user to the password reset flow. Else you end up with a system that rejects every login.

A much more reasonable thing to do would be to accept rescue codes in this situation, of use 2FA so that passwords expiration is not needed. But I bet the security checklists used by some behemoth insurance companies predate these inventions, nobody wants to alter them, and companies who don't want to pay higher IT insurance premiums have to follow these outdated and inefficient practices.
by xracy | 2025-05-01 03:45:09+00:00
facility is intentionally broad. I think the point being that all of those things are being provided by the University to many researchers/students/professors.

The point is that separating out what gets allocated where, when there are so many things that might have multiple uses, is a pointless task if you're trying to reverse engineer how much money should be given to individual research teams to account for it. The University already has the systems in place to manage the overhead. There's no reason to do more work to try and get to the same result.
Just read today's story on FounderFiles – didn't expect that ending
by ashahrourr | 2025-05-01 03:48:24+00:00
He was only 21 when he and his friends launched Diaspora — a decentralized Facebook alternative.

They raised $200K on Kickstarter. Even Zuckerberg donated. A year later, Ilya died at 22.

The story honestly shook me. I had never heard it before. Worth a read: https://founderfiles.dev/story/11

Anyone remember this story when it happened?
by 3np | 2025-05-01 03:49:18+00:00
If what you are saying is true, you can not trust Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta (and especialluly including whichever service you say related accounts keep popping up at)... Avoid them. Avoid giving them any more of your personal information and metadata.

Anything beyond that is probably related to your IP address being tracked (so change internet provider to get a fresh start there and if you currently use a VPN: switch or stop).
by stephen_g | 2025-05-01 03:50:46+00:00
It turns itself back on for me so frequently that I'm sure they must be intentionally having the site reset that preference... I hate it with a passion.

Now when I go on mobile Safari and want to switch off 'video previews' (for the thousandth time), and I tap the switch, it stays switched on but the 'Settings saved' thing comes up on the bottom. You have to tap it again to actually switch it off. I wonder if that's a bug or intentional too now...
by Someone1234 | 2025-05-01 03:50:51+00:00
Two things can be true:

- This is not a bug; it is a design decision.

- Microsoft could still try.

This functionality is critical for offline access; in fact in some scenarios you may not be able to configure WiFi (or VPN) for Domain Access without first logging in. If the offline password didn't exist the machine would be inoperable.

Let's also acknowledge the fact that even if they try to address this, unplugging the network cable or otherwise interfering with connectivity would always fall back to offline credentials. You cannot simply invalidate them for reasons previously stated.

So now we're at the point where the fix is at best unreliable, and NOT even a hard security boundary. Yet they could still try. For example either phoning the mothership (e.g. AD, Microsoft Login, et al) on a regular schedule for a logged-in user and verifying offline credentials OR phoning the mothership during successful cached login (with aggressive timeouts).

There is actually precedent for this: UAC. UAC is also not a real security boundary, and is also unreliable. It is a "best effort" improvement. This would be of that nature, engineering effort to kinda-sorta make it better than nothing but trivial for a trained attacker to bypass.

But ultimately, this isn't a bug, and any improvements Microsoft makes will be similarly criticized (due to the trivially of bypassing them).
by levihanlen | 2025-05-01 03:54:16+00:00
I definitely agree.

Luckily, some things are easier for the AI to remember. I've never once come across the AI making mistakes with things like wrong character name/pronouns/etc.

The main consistency issues I've seen come from remembering the past plot, and worldbuilding.

The past plot issues come from having to store past scenes concisely. Right now, this means I can't include more than 40 of the past scene summaries. But I'm actively thinking of ways to improve this. (Note: I've found that after the input prompt surpasses a certain length, the output quality starts to degrade).

The worldbuilding issues stem from a couple things. I currently don't have any worldbuilding tracking implemented. I did in the past, but it wasn't as intuitive as storing something like character data. If I included data for locations, for example, it seemed to either not follow it at all, or it would be arbitrarily limited by it. I'll get to fixing this once I improve a few other features. In my experience, the lack of worldbuilding hasn't necessarily hindered the stories too much. Brandon Sanderson once said that out of plot, character, and setting, setting was by far the least important. I definitely agree. Though having good worldbuilding will improve the story.
by FilosofumRex | 2025-05-01 03:54:58+00:00
The two options are equivalent, since the final (equilibrium) temp of an adiabatic system (coffee + Milk + room) must be the same - ie it's the total amount of heat transferred that matters, and not the rates of heat transfer.

If the system is not adiabatic, ie the room is not big enough to remain constant temp, or equilibrium is not achieved in 2 mins of cooling, then the puzzle statement must be specify all three initial temps to be well poised.
by nebula8804 | 2025-05-01 03:55:00+00:00
I fell for this fallacy during the early days of the Tesla Skeptics wave. I thought no way this nonsense management style will keep them going once the competitors catch up. OEMs know how to make good reliable cars. Tesla is a shitshow.

Turns out the incumbents repeated many of the EV specific mistakes Tesla did early on, and Tesla continued to innovate in what they thought matters (electric powertrain, software, infrastructure etc.)

Even today if you watch some of Tesla's old battery day presentations, I am amazed at the level of care they put into their operations. The systems integration goes down to even the little things: https://youtu.be/Hl1zEzVUV7w?t=3761

People really see this with how far ahead SpaceX and Starlink are.

How does Musk keep getting the top people from the best schools to want to come to his companies when it is well known that prior groups get ground down to nothing and then tossed aside?

I tried to figure this out by confronting Starlink employees directly at DEFCON conference a few years back.

Essentially they are so driven they just want to work with A players. They dont tolerate B players or they will leave. Musk is sometimes wrong to the detriment of the team but sometimes he is really right and he pushes the team to perform their best and to think outside the box(or first principles as he would say).
by musicale | 2025-05-01 03:56:52+00:00
I imagine Searle feels vindicated since LLMs are good at translating Chinese.

On the other hand I am reminded of Nilsson's rebuttal:

> For all I know, Searle may only be behaving as if he were thinking deeply about these matters. But, even though I disagree with him, his simulation is pretty good, so I’m willing to credit him with real thought.
by somenameforme | 2025-05-01 03:57:20+00:00
Well, that's one thing you're right on! I was naive enough to still be reading legacy media on occasion back during COVID, and it was universally, and [in hindsight] typically disingenuously, implied that it was the Supreme Court acting to end the moratorium and not simply upholding lower courts already existing judgements and termination of such. [1] So, thanks for that!

However, that naivete ended not too long thereafter. And indeed Chevron was ended by the Supreme Court on constitutional grounds. The opinion for it is here. [2]

---

Under the Chevron doctrine, courts have sometimes been required to defer to “permissible” agency interpretations of the statutes those agencies administer—even when a reviewing court reads the statute differently

The Administrative Procedure Act requires courts to exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, and courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous; Chevron is overruled.

Article III of the Constitution assigns to the Federal Judiciary the responsibility and power to adjudicate “Cases” and “Controversies”—concrete disputes with consequences for the parties involved. ... As Chief Justice Marshall declared in the foundational decision of Marbury v. Madison, “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”

---

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/aug/27/us-supreme-court...

[2] - https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-451_7m58.pdf
by greenbhj | 2025-05-01 03:58:08+00:00
Hi HN,

I've put together this guide on 'Agentic Coding' based on my experiences trying to use AI coding agents (like Copilot, ChatGPT, Cursor) effectively for more than just simple code generation.

While AI can generate code quickly, I found it challenging to consistently get reliable, production-quality results in a responsible way. It felt like there was a need for clearer principles and practices beyond just basic prompting techniques. Inspired partly by discussions like Ethan Mollick's 'Speaking things into existence', I tried to structure an approach.

This guide outlines 6 core principles (covering Developer Accountability, Verification, Security, Quality, Human-led Design, and Adaptation) and 28 specific, actionable practices across the development workflow – from preparation and strategic usage to interaction, review, quality assurance, and mindset.

The goal is to provide a framework for developers to leverage the power of AI collaborators effectively while maintaining control, ensuring code quality, and managing risks such as technical debt and security vulnerabilities.

It's hosted on GitHub Pages, the source is written in Markdown, and it's shared under a CC BY 4.0 license, available for anyone to use, adapt, or contribute to.

I'm sharing this here primarily to get feedback from the thoughtful HN community. * Do these principles and practices resonate with your own experiences using AI for coding? * Are there crucial aspects or best practices I might have missed? * Any suggestions for improvement or alternative perspectives?

All feedback is welcome! Thanks for checking it out.
by mindslight | 2025-05-01 03:58:42+00:00
We've still got local US distributors though, regardless of everything being made in China. Like if you decide you need something tomorrow, you can go on Amazon and get most things pretty quick (despite overpaying 1.5-2x compared to Aliexpress). And there's a whole cottage industry of 3d printing shops selling canned solutions to people who don't want to hunt Aliexpress themselves.

It's been well over a decade since I was doing embedded design professionally, so my perspective is coming more from a hobby/3d printing/"maker" place. But it feels like one of the main results of these tariffs is that the bottom is going to drop out on Chinese and Chinese-adjacent sellers preloading so much stuff into US warehouses ahead of sale, and instead just shipping orders direct from China. Using a US warehouse means the seller has to front the money for the tariffs as well and takes a risk of them being lowered depending on Krasnov's whims. Whereas shipping direct from China, even if the seller is handling the tariffs (eg Aliexpress Choice), they've already got the cash in hand from a confirmed purchase.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-05-01 03:59:14+00:00
> poses a serious danger to all living things near the line

That is always the case for the various failure modes of any high voltage line (and all the related equipment).

That said, you have it exactly backwards. Above ground lines are much easier to inadvertently come into contact with. Once faulted the breaker trips within a matter of milliseconds. It's the initial contact that's deadly.
by gpm | 2025-05-01 03:59:53+00:00
Walls to keep apps out should be fine, but they should have to have gates to let the consumers out - i.e. a method to install other apps (not through the app store) that have every bit the same level of access as the device manufacturer's apps.

There should be two levers used to achieve this. One is anti-trust style legislation. The other is patent misuse legislation. If you try and prevent consumers from running software on hardware they bought from you to make a profit, you shouldn't be allowed to prevent consumers from buying the same hardware from someone else - that's what patents do - they create government enforced monopolies on the hardware. You should be required to invalidate (donate to the public domain) every patent on the hardware if you want to sell hardware where you get to profit off your monopoly on letting developers write software for the hardware.

These Epic rulings are better than nothing, but I can't help but feel that their solution of "make Apple distribute software they don't like in their app store" is the wrong one.
by curiousgal | 2025-05-01 04:00:03+00:00
> "My favorite interview question, because we've interviewed quite a few of these folks, is something to the effect of 'How fat is Kim Jong Un?' They terminate the call instantly, because it's not worth it to say something negative about that,"

They likely terminate the call because you come across as so naive and simplistic that you're unlikely to be in possession of any good IP worth stealing.

Edit: I am confused, on one hand these are sophisticated state sponsored actors, on the other, they can't respond "I don't know?". Which one is it? I think this whole "North Koreans are afraid of offending Kim Jong Un" is an overplayed trope.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-05-01 04:00:13+00:00
A fine isn't even necessary: Apple's App Store business just ended. Between app sales and IAP it has a 30% tax. If an app developer swaps out for a Stripe portal they're paying 3% and probably at least doubling their own profit margin.

Only an idiot would still be selling apps through Apple's payments next week. The only way Apple will make any money at all on apps is if it drops it's fees to 10% or below.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-05-01 04:01:12+00:00
It does deserve a fine and/or criminal forfeiture of the revenue they made from the app store monopoly. If Apple had to repay let's say the difference between what they charged and what a reasonable fee would be (let's say 10%), for the entire time they've been doing it, that would put "a bit" of a dent into their pocketbook and serve as an effective deterrent.
by devsda | 2025-05-01 04:01:39+00:00
Does anybody have guesses on what percentage of browser development is for

1. New web standards related changes

2. shiny new service integration(like AI, vpn etc)

3. UI & UX enhancements

4. Bug fixes

5. Security fixes

I believe changes related to 1 and 2 (to an extent) are primarily driven by Google.So, if Chrome changes hands and development slows down I think it would give alternative browsers time to focus on 3 & 4 instead of playing catchup. It might turnout good for the overall browser ecosystem in the long run.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-01 04:02:11+00:00
Is cost really the main differentiator here, tho? "Solving" coding seems like the holy grail atm (and I agree, it can enable a bunch of things once that's done) and "traditional, organic, human fed code" is pretty expensive atm, so does cost really matter now?

Put another way, how much would company x be willing to spend on "here's a repo, here are the tests, here is the speed now, make this faster while still passing all the tests". If it "solves" something in cudnn that makes it 10% faster, how much would nvidia pay for this? 1m$? 10m$?
by TruffleLabs | 2025-05-01 04:03:38+00:00
Building Scheme in Scheme is what I did in a class in 1982 with Prof. Dan Friedman, one of the Little Lisper authors.

This was during a period of language research where Scheme in Scheme in Scheme was being used to look in to how to reflection (look into programs and how they behave).

The Little Lisper was a starting point for students to learn lisp (or Scheme) and get used to tail recursion and short focused functions.