MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saghm | 2025-06-23 00:54:31+00:00
I don't think I agree with this take, at least not completely. I tend to commit quite frequently when working on a feature branch in ways that wouldn't be desirable to include in the history of the main development branch, and I take advantage of the fact that rebase lets me clean everything up beforehand into whatever commits I actually want afterwards (which I usually do two separate times, once before opening a review so I can ensure that the diffs help make things easier to read, e.g. if I need to include changes from another branch or make changes in the codebase that aren't directly related to what I'm working on but still are useful for my changes for some reason), and then again after the review is complete if I needed to make additional changes that don't belong in a separate commit (because I find that reviews are cleaner when rebases don't take place during them, and a review that requires more than one or two follow-up commits generally tends to be due to issues that need to be addressed with an offline discussion that I can come back afterwards with structural changes that make the existing diff less relevant). Having to preserve the exact history of commits during my development would be a bad thing in my opinion, since it would either require including lots of small unhelpful commits into the history of the main development branch or discourage committing as often, either of which I think would be a mistake.

Where I agree with your take partially is that the UX for all of this in git is not great, and that ends up meaning that most people don't actually use git in this way. If the process of manually structuring the commits to clean up history on a feature branch were more intuitive, then I'd predict the issues of history-destroying rebases to essentially be moot; everyone would just present the commits for review exactly as we'd want them before review, and then we'd fast-forward merge into the main development branch without any issue. The problem is that doing this sort of restructuring after the fact isn't actually easy to learn how to do because of the poor ergonomics of the git CLI, so it's both tedious and error-prone for almost everyone. My perspective is that most of the concern around messing with history in git comes from being burnt by changes that were not intended by the one making them, and that workflows that avoid it (like merge commits) are essentially a compromise to avoid that risk by accepting a certain amount of cruft in the history of the main development branch. I don't blame anyone for using them, since the problems that make the rebase workflow harder are very real, but I don't think that the fact that rebase changes history is the real issue as much as it provides a mechanism for the actual underlying issues to manifest.
by pxc | 2025-06-23 00:54:58+00:00
I've recently been writing some Nix modules for personal use (mostly flake-parts) and using o3 to help, since o3 is the first OpenAI model I've used that seems good enough for many tasks.

It's useful for answering some questions about Nixpkgs conventions, but it's not much faster than just looking in the manuals or reading the source.

But when it comes to looking at my actual code and answering questions about it, it's extremely hit and miss. It's good at constructing simple functions, but the module code it writes sometimes inappropriately imports idioms from other languages. It hallucinates often.

And it's absolutely worse than useless for debugging Nix module system issues. It gives nonsense answers to questions about infinite recursion issues which manage to be plausible enough to make me waste a lot of time thinking about them, before I learned more details of the module system.

After getting burned for following it down its rabbit holes, I unfortunately find myself ignoring most of its output related to this project, even as I continue to reflexively ask it things. I have often noticed in these cases that it turns out to have been right, but am left still with the empty feeling not that I shouldn't have bothered to figure out my own answer, but that I shouldn't have bothered to ask.

All of that is to say: I think working in a language/ecosystem LLMs are "bad at" is a useful sanity check. The ways that LLMs suck at languages they suck with are instructive because they reiterate the nature of the things. The failure modes are still what you'd expect from a stochastic parrot, even as the models get "smarter".

The massive training data pools for more popular programming ecosystems make it too easy to fool yourself into believing that these things can reason. The unevenness of their performance tells you what hasn't actually "generalized".
by zeroCalories | 2025-06-23 00:55:35+00:00
I have had a lot of success building small isolated features / projects, but have found Claude to be frustratingly inadequate for any non-trivial work. Ran it on an old and complex C++ codebase, and spent an hour unsuccessfully trying to coax it into fixing a bug. I even helped it by writing a failing test for it by hand. The tools need to improve a ton before software developers can forget how to code.
by riehwvfbk | 2025-06-23 00:55:45+00:00
Let's be clear: invalidating someone's life experience based on your misrepresentation of something they said is not cool.

Even if bullying remains a fixture in one's life, having something to look forward to after the hell they call school is much better than having nothing. And the "something" can be learning to program, tinkering with Linux, or talking to friends from around the world online. Having screen time vs having a social or intellectual life is a false dichotomy.
by tlogan | 2025-06-23 00:56:18+00:00
Do you have any background on this company that I might’ve missed? Have they been featured or ranked in any reports or articles suggesting they’re a strong EV play?

I’m asking because I’ve been following the EV space pretty closely. Mainly from a business perspective and I’m genuinely curious how this one flew under my radar.

Please don’t take this as dismissive of your opinion; I’m just trying to learn and would really appreciate any additional info you can share.
by NaOH | 2025-06-23 00:58:02+00:00
Previous discussions:

Radio Garden - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40887359 - July 2024 (64 comments)

Radio Garden - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30441847 - Feb 2022 (34 comments)

Listen to radio stations from around the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26138529 - Feb 2021 (32 comments)

Radio Garden – Explore live radio by rotating the globe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23477771 - June 2020 (123 comments)

Google Earth for live radios - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18427701 - Nov 2018 (98 comments)

Radio Garden – Listen to world radio by navigating an interactive globe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13164058 - Dec 2016 (114 comments)

Radio Garden - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13160450 - Dec 2016 (4 comments)
by ahazred8ta | 2025-06-23 00:58:29+00:00
The Aztecs had mandatory boarding schools which were basically military academies. Plenty of nonwestern societies had mandatory training for children who lived apart from the rest of the community.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calmecac

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C4%93lpochcalli

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_education#By_countr...
by rincebrain | 2025-06-23 00:59:35+00:00
I think part of the problem is also that how prevalent it is varies wildly by where you are, and therefore which Amazon distribution centers you're hitting.

To elaborate - in NYC, I usually avoid ordering from Amazon for anything where it's cheap or something health-related, but even when I've sometimes given up finding it easily elsewhere and bought it there, it's not been, as far as I could tell, a counterfeit item.

That's not to say I can easily prove that or that I'm encouraging people to order from there, but I personally haven't encountered boxes full of things other than the intended item, or the like, and I would suspect the problem's prevalence varies heavily with volume (and thus, turnover) and location.
by zem | 2025-06-23 00:59:42+00:00
> Why would you think that just because nobody negotiated, somehow everyone doing the same job will be making the same amount?

well, at least from personal experience, I'm talking about the kind of company that explicitly says "we want to make you an offer as a software engineer, at such and such level, and this is the fixed salary for that job+level". they could have been lying of course, but once you start going down that rabbit hole you might as well not take the offer.
by GuB-42 | 2025-06-23 00:59:46+00:00
Writing a malloc/free replacement was a 1 day project we did at school in the first couple of weeks of learning C/UNIX. Many students didn't even know how to code before that.

All that to say that writing an allocator is not hard. Writing a good allocator however is another story. Not because the algorithms are complicated, but because it is a very critical part of most systems and requires extensive knowledge of real life situations.
Optifye.ai (YC W25) is hiring a back end engineer
by Vivaan_Baid | 2025-06-23 01:00:00+00:00
Some context:

Optifye is an AI performance monitoring system for factory workers backed by Y Combinator. We put cameras in factories and use computer vision to find shop-floor inefficiencies in real-time.

Our clients are industry-leading manufacturers in the garments, automotive, medical, and FMCG industries across the world.

We are looking to hire founding team members as we enter a high-growth phase.

Must haves:

- Deep GPU, CPU, and memory optimization knowledge - Experience scaling an application in production - Architected containerized deployments on the cloud - Extremely quick learner

Compensation: Equity + industry-leading salary Location: On-site, Gurgaon (India)

It’s going to be brutal, you’re going to have a lot of work but once the dust settles - you will have higher returns than everyone around you.

Good Luck!
by ryao | 2025-06-23 01:01:21+00:00
I had no idea that literary fiction was a genre rather than a generic term for fictional literature until I read this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_fiction

There is a very simple explanation for the decline. The books are garbage that only masochists enjoy and that sadists force children to read in school. The description “Literary fiction may involve a concern with social commentary, political criticism, or reflection on the human condition” is full of antipatterns that are largely the mark of bad literature, since they miss the core purpose of fictional literature, which is to entertain. This is why “light novels” out of Japan and adaptations of them are popular while literary fiction is not.
by arjunchint | 2025-06-23 01:02:17+00:00
We directly leverage the user's own browser so no cloud browser hosting or proxying costs! We averaged only $0.1/task.

The whole idea of cloud browser agents is a stupid paradigm. The agents are not only 7x slower but have the cost of hosting and proxying for that extra time!

Our own biggest cost is just LLM inference, thus we can just let our users bring their own API Key and use our service for free!
by Normal_gaussian | 2025-06-23 01:02:36+00:00
Thats a fair point

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/izabera/bitwise-challenge-2048/413abf35be0f47c4947a5ebd6d581355383041e1/2048.bash -o "$HOME/bin/2048" && chmod +x "$HOME/bin/2048" && 2048
by proc0 | 2025-06-23 01:02:54+00:00
> We’ve hit the point where asking “Which programming language should I learn?” is almost irrelevant. The real skill now is system design, architecture, DevOps, cloud — the stuff that separated juniors from seniors. That’s what’ll matter.

Those skills require knowing how code works. You can't leapfrog into a senior dev., at least not in most cases. Languages have drastically different features plus the AI agents will not be perfect and you'll need to review code and probably modify some of it. The more you know how to code the easier this will be.
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-23 01:02:57+00:00
It wouldn't be that much more expensive to have at least some basic animal welfare standards during raise and slaughter. But hey, those 13.56% yield [1], they don't come from nothing, and the stonk markets want their profit, animal welfare be damned.

[1] https://www.nasdaq.com/de/market-activity/stocks/calm/divide...
by mdaniel | 2025-06-23 01:03:02+00:00
You seem to have stepped on the same landmine that Ansible did, by defaulting to the jinja2 [aka text/template silliness in golang] of using double mustaches in YAML. I hope you enjoy quoting things because you're going to be quoting everything for all time because "{" is a meaningful character in YAML. Contrast

parameters: status: "{{ var('order_status') }}"

with

parameters: # made famous by GitHub Actions status: ${{ var('order_status') }} # or the ASP.Net flavor: status2: <%= var('order_status2') %> # or the PHP flavor: status3: <?= var('order_status3') ?>

and, just like Ansible, it's going to get insaneo when your inner expression has a quote character, too, since you'll need to escape it from the YAML parser leading to leaning toothpick syndrome e.g.

parameters: status: "{{ eval('echo \"hello\"') }}"

---

If you find my "but what about the DX?" compelling, also gravely consider why in the world `data_expression:` seems to get a pass, in that it is implicitly wrapped in the mustaches

---

edit: ah, that's why https://github.com/paloaltodatabases/sequor/blob/v1.2.0/src/... but https://github.com/paloaltodatabases/sequor/blob/v1.2.0/src/... is what I would suggest changing before you get a bunch of tech debt and have to introduce a breaking change. From

str_rendered = Template(template_str, undefined=StrictUndefined).render(jinja_context)

to

str_rendered = Template(template_str, undefined=StrictUndefined, variable_start_string="${{", variable_end_string="}}" ).render(jinja_context) # et al, if you want to fix the {# and {%, too

per https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/stable/api/#jinja2.Temp...
by zeroCalories | 2025-06-23 01:03:39+00:00
Claude Code has been out for a decent amount of time. How long until we have a completely vibe-coded web browser? Linux replacement? New programming language that solves all our previous problems? Serenity was able to make a decent amount of progress with a small team in a few years, so with a 10x productivity improvement surely we'll see fully polished and complete products in the next year. Surely we'll see FAANG become more productive. Surely we'll see new unicorns come to unseat stagnating giants.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-23 01:04:29+00:00
> They have fallen to ebay levels of trust at this point. You’re likely to be shipped a box of rocks rather than what you wanted at this point.

Between eBay and Amazon over the years I’ve done thousands of transactions, including probably 100 as a seller on eBay. The way people on HN talk about these companies, you’d think I would have been victim to endless amounts of fraud. In reality, both companies have handled the rare issues that came up just fine for me and the vast majority of transactions were perfectly fine.

The HN comment section version of Amazon is pure hyperbole at this point.

I’m aware that there are problems and some people haven’t been as lucky, but do you honestly believe you’re more likely to get a box of rocks than the product you ordered? Or that people will pay large fees to have average products verified before shipping when Amazon takes returns all the time? This is just silly.
by danpalmer | 2025-06-23 01:04:36+00:00
> I've long joked that modules should be made easy to swap with a forklift. Trains are usually full of small defects that aren't serious enough to take them out of service.

I assume the implication here is that with more granular swap-outs, you might get more regular maintenance of those minor issues?

While I agree it's a problem and could be improved, I don't find train maintenance any worse than hotel maintenance in general – most hotel rooms aren't in perfect condition and they arguably don't have the same restrictions.
by sieve | 2025-06-23 01:05:21+00:00
I like LLMs. I really do. But my experience with them is very different from the Chicken Little folks.

Let's park coding to the side for a bit.

Case 1:

I am collaborating with a friend to build a graded Sanskrit reader for beginners using the Aesop's fables.

As a precursor, I asked Gemini 2.5 Pro if it had access to all the stories. Yes, it said. The three popular PD ones? Yes.

I asked it to print all three versions of a particular one, and it did. One of them was not the version it confidently claimed it was. We argued about it for a while. It shut up when I provided actual evidence.

I then decided to upload the three Gutenberg text files and asked it to use them as the source of truth to give me a list of unique stories putting variant plots, variant titles etc under the main heading. I gave it certain formatting requirements so that I could later verify if all 600-odd tales across the three books were properly accounted for.

Gemini tied itself into knots trying to do this. It could not guarantee that all the tales were present in the list it generated. It didn't know how to accomplish the task. Finally, I gave it a series of steps, an algorithm based on an n-branched tree. Only then did it manage to generate the list for me.

This took me four hours of wrangling across three different sessions.

Case 2:

I have been buying TASCHEN editions of impressionists and other classical artists. I wanted Gemini to compare various editions, give me the pros and cons so that I could pick a good edition to buy. By the time we came to Michelangelo it went nuts, hallucinating editions, ISBN numbers, page counts, authoritative urls, worldcat searches ...

This took about two hours.

There are more such amusing anecdotes. Some from DeepSeek as well.

I have tried LLMs with python, and typst and a few other things. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. They definitely do not write code the way I want them to. They will use OOP even if I specifically warn them not to.

LLMs are VERY good at translation and languages. I will give them that. But reasoning? I am not convinced. I will believe that LLMs are good enough to replace programmers when the Amodei siblings can operate their company only using LLM developers.
by gamblor956 | 2025-06-23 01:05:33+00:00
This bridge is not low tech. It utilizes a number of construction techniques and materials that weren't avaliable in 2002. It also spans a major freeway. It was never going to be cheap.

in Texas they build entire highway intersection in a year

California can and has rebuilt bridges in a weekend. And based on the TX Dept of Transportation website, construction on the Dallas High Five took 4 years from start to finish, after a decade of planning. And cost more than this bridge despite requiring less infrastructure to be constructed.
Handling safety/compliance in edtech apps?
by connortbot | 2025-06-23 01:05:36+00:00
I've been working on an edtech project that uses LLMs, curious how others are approaching compliance w/ FERPA, COPPA, etc. I've been using Lakera but as I get closer to some sales meetings I wanted to know if anyone has run into challenges with audit logs, consent tracking, or explaining AI behaviour to school districts/legal teams.

Did you need to build anything custom? Any compliance docs? Curious whats overkill and whats needed.
by alephnerd | 2025-06-23 01:05:55+00:00
> As an elder millennial I can remember everyone being absolutely glued to MSN Messenger in secondary school. This was back in the dialup days so it was stopping your parents making phone calls!

Computers were nowhere near as accessible (physically or UX wise) in the 1990s or 2000s compared to smartphones today.

A $70 Android smartphone today would have been the equivalent of buying a top-of-the-line workstation in the 2000s for $40, so it is much easier to access a computer device at a much earlier age.

On top of that, UX research has enhanced massively since the 2000s with an enhanced understanding into user reward mechanisms and psychology, and this kind of reward mechanism is being added in every kind of application (from enterprise B2B to social media)

We shouldn't be Luddites, but limiting access to high sensitivity media (be it TV or smartphones) for those who are pre-adolescence should be an important part of parenting.
by nextos | 2025-06-23 01:06:00+00:00
It will tweak spacing, kerning, margin protrusion, and font size to improve readability avoid big word gaps and excessive end-of-line hyphenation.

It is what sets professional typography apart. Only Adobe InDesign provides a comparable implementation, tweaking all those details.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hz-program for a better explanation and an example.

IMHO, the difference is obvious and not minor. Without microtypography texts look ugly: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Hz_Progr...
by parhamn | 2025-06-23 01:07:50+00:00
Pro tip for macos/ios folks:

- Macos: Install https://selfcontrolapp.com/, add every website and their alternatives you know, set it to 24 hours. Really hard to bypass this even if you know networking stuff

- iOS: Enable downtime 24/7 ask someone else to set the password.

I'm down to about 35 minutes a day of mobile usage, and laptop usage is only work related things. You really need two or three days to clear your head of news feeds. After a few days you really just crave working.

(I'm in between a 24 hour session right now)
by metadat | 2025-06-23 01:08:01+00:00
Normally you are correct, though for the current series of eruptions this year they can often be predicted within a a day or two of accuracy by looking at the micro radians pressure. Once it gets past 12.5, Madame Pēlē is going to start the fountain in short order.

We kept the Kilauea YT stream going 24/7 and just waited till it started and then drove over.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=iws3rh5vLAQ
by bigyabai | 2025-06-23 01:08:18+00:00
There's no game theory to question. Israel has second-strike capabilities, and even if they get completely glassed America would retaliate by cratering Tehran. Iran needs a nuclear weapon for the precisely same reason Israel's state demands them; it's a credible last-ditch deterrent against invading forces. A strategic weapon when the chessboard is scrambled.

Whether or not any of that is justified is another question, arguably long since expired. Strategic arms reduction is a two-way road, it requires transparency and genuine humility from both parties at the table. It's why Reagan could never secure his deal from Gorbachev, and it's why Trump won't reach a deal playing "mad gunman" with the B-2.
by tatersolid | 2025-06-23 01:08:27+00:00
Wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards and ice storms, earthquakes… many regional disasters are temporary but it can take very long to bring everything back online. AWS can also always lose a whole region for an extended period due to software and control plane bugs.

Even if all your apps and data stores are active-active multi-region you can be in a world of risk with no DR for a long time if your DR region fails. If your data size is small that vulnerability window might be small but if you’ve got petabytes you’ll be without lifeboat for a days or weeks until you can take another “full” DR copy.
by slt2021 | 2025-06-23 01:09:13+00:00
be ready to walk away from their offer. Thats the only secret for negotiations, there is no other secret sauce.

>Them: The offer is for $X.

You: Thank you, but I will continue my final interview process with [CompetitorA] and [CompetitorB]

>Them: How much more money do you want to accept our offer and terminate interview process with our main competitors?

You: Add Y% and I will sign the job offer right now.

This approach doesn't require you to lie, or photoshop fake offer letter (like some bad people advice on places like Blind), and doesn't require you to arrange a direct bidding war - all are huge red flags for any employer.

Again: Be honest and upfront, full integrity, never lie, dont make it about money, but rather about the mission of the job