MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CuriouslyC | 2025-06-17 10:28:55+00:00
Naw, the new future (technically the present for orgs that use AI intelligently) is:

The AI already generated comprehensive README.md files and detailed module/function/variable (as needed) doc comments, which you could read but end up mostly being consumed by another AI, so you can just tell it what you're trying to do and ask it how you might accomplish that in the codebase, first at a conceptual level, then in code once you feel comfortable enough with the system to be able to validate the work.

All the while you're sitting next to another coworker who's also doing the same thing, while you talk about high level architecture stuff, make jokes, and generally have a good time. Shit, I don't even mind open offices as much as I used to, because you don't need that intense focus to get into a groove to produce code quickly like you did when manually writing it, so you can actually have conversations with an entire table of coworkers and still be super productive.

No comment on the political/climate side of this timeline, but the AI part is pretty good when you master it.
by kypro | 2025-06-17 10:29:52+00:00
Kinda reminds me of something my old AI professor used to say, "every problem is a search problem".

Intelligence is really just a measure of ones's ability to accurately filter and iterate over the search space.

Evolution is one extreme where the heuristic is poor so it must do a huge amount of iteration over many bad solution to find reasonably good solutions. Then on the other hand you have expert systems which are great at refining the search space to always deliver quality answers, but filter too much and are therefore too narrow so lack the creativity and nuance of real intelligence.

LLMs provide good heuristics and agents with verifiable goals allow for iteration. This combination results in a system which demonstrates significantly more intelligent than either of its parts.
by csomar | 2025-06-17 10:31:04+00:00
> I find the use of the word intelligence to be a bit of a misnomer. Is something intelligent if all its doing is pattern matching? Is the evolution that led to owl butterflies appearing like an owl intelligent? Im not sure.

Is a random number generator intelligent? I don't think people perceive or understand intelligence equally. I don't think we have an answer to what exactly is intelligence or how to create it.

> LLMs are really dividing the community at the moment and its exhausting to keep up with what I (as a dev) should be doing to stay sharp

You could try at your comfortable pace. I only started using agents very recently. The dangerous thing is to go to extremes (all in on AI or completely refusing the tech)
by wvh | 2025-06-17 10:31:42+00:00
Isn't that the whole point though – nobody wants to or has to live in a void. Maybe children would prefer different parents, and maybe parents would want different children. That's not how that works. You keep them alive, love them, and give them enough tools and knowledge for them to have a fighting chance on their own.

I think the point of the OP was to say that you don't need to be the best thing since sliced bread to get some basic love and companionship, which is the message modern dating and social media are sending to a lot of us.

You are enough, even if somebody in all resentfulness wants to have you believe otherwise.
by LiKao | 2025-06-17 10:32:31+00:00
There is some research that goes in the opposite direction. I.e. that especially in german the lack gender in the word for girls ("das Mädchen") is actually quite problematic and can lead to girls not thinking they really have a gender before they grow up. At least up to a certain age, where children learn to separate between grammatical gender and social gender or biological sex.
by agile-gift0262 | 2025-06-17 10:32:33+00:00
I used to use many apps from Simple Mobile Tools and migrated to Fossify's forks when the whole acquisition thing happened. I just went back to check the Simple Mobile Tools to see the effect form ZipooApps' acquisition [1]. What a calamity. Most of them require way more permissions than they used to before the purchase, have trackers, ads and scam-feeling weekly subscriptions. Also probably in breach of the GPL licence they used to have, unless they have removed all the code contributed by third parties, as their GitHub [2] hasn't been updated, but the apps in the Play Store clearly have. And I seriously doubt they distribute the source code in any other way.

1: https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=821434617619498026...

2: https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools
by bonoboTP | 2025-06-17 10:33:04+00:00
In most of the world SMS ("texting") was (or still is) a paid service per message (~5/10/20 cents per message or so, I can't remember exactly and would have to factor in inflation). But it was costly enough that people flocked to WhatsApp to avoid texting costs. Paying 1 USD or 1 EUR per year was a great deal to send unlimited texts.
by echelon_musk | 2025-06-17 10:33:23+00:00
This is demonstrably false and dangerous to repeat.

Just because everyone in your sample size has been fine doesn't mean everyone will be or even that your group will continue to be. Contrary to simplistic thinking, the law does exist for a reason and these substances are also scheduled for reasons other than conspiracies around free thinking.

Please spend some time reading about drug induced psychosis and educate yourself of the risks.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-06-17 10:33:30+00:00
I have bad memory in general, but of this in particular, I'm very sure. Because I remember that some people actually switched to Telegram upon receiving the message saying they had to pay before some deadline or they would lose access to WhatsApp, and I thought "at least this is a silver lining, some people are switching to Telegram".

I also distinctly remember that I didn't pay by the deadline (although I planned to cave in later) but finally the threat didn't materialize and I didn't lose access (or maybe I did, but for a day or two). Some people did pay and didn't get any advantage over those of us who didn't.

This was in Spain, so maybe the issue is that the specifics vary per country. In particular, I think your point 1 wasn't really true here. WhatsApp monopolized messaging (including even elderly population) because it was free. You wouldn't convince most people here (and especially the elderly) to pay for an app, it would be dead on arrival. Perhaps the charge after the first year you mention was somewhere in the official small print, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure everyone was using it under the assumption that it was free. They only tried charging a fee that single time I'm mentioning, and they backtracked fast.
by luckystarr | 2025-06-17 10:34:34+00:00
I recently investigated some problematic behaviour of both Opus 4 and Sonnet 4. When tasked to develop something more complicated (broker fed task management system, staggered execution scheduler) they would inevitably produce thousands of lines of over engineered, unmaintainable garbage. When Opus was then tasked to simplify it it boiled it down to 300 lines in one shot. The result was brilliant. This happened twice.

Moral of the story: I found out that I didn't constrain them enough. I now insist that they keep the core logic to a certain size (e.g. 300 lines) and not produce code objects for each concept but rather "fold them into the code".

This improved the output tremendously.
by magicalhippo | 2025-06-17 10:34:38+00:00
These problems exist because Wayland’s design omits basic functionality that desktop applications for X11, Windows and macOS have relied on for decades—things like being able to position windows or warp the mouse cursor. This functionality was omitted by design, not oversight.

We do not investigate or support bug reports related to Wayland-specific issues.

For now, if you need to use KiCad on Linux, use X11.

Can totally understand their position. I've developed cross-platform applications and it was enough work without the extra headache they describe Wayland brings.

I've been thinking about ditching Windows as my primary OS for some years, but Wayland has been really detrimental to the Linux desktop. Over a decade later and it's still not production ready, at least in my tests. Yet X11 is dying it seems, with GNOME and KDE dropping support soon[1][2].

From where I stand, the intentional fragmentation of the ecosystem seems like an especially poor decision.

[1]: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/05/gnome-dropping-x11-suppo...

[2]: https://linuxiac.com/kde-x11-support-to-continue-until-plasm...
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-17 10:34:42+00:00
Precisely that. As you say, this complexity is both necessary and irrelevant to the actual problem.

Now, I claim that the main thing that's stopping advancement in our field is that we're making a choice up front on what is relevant and what's not.

The "actual problem" changes from programmer to programmer, and from hour to the next. In the morning, I might be tweaking the business logic; at noon, I might be debugging some bug across the abstraction layers; in the afternoon, I might be reworking the error handling across the module, and just as I leave for the day, I might need to spend 30 minutes discussing architecture issue with the team. All those things demand completely different perspectives; for each, different things are relevant and different are just noise. But right now, we're stuck looking at the same artifact (the plaintext code base), and trying to make every possible thing readable simultaneously to at least some degree.

I claim this is a wrong approach that's been keeping us stuck for too long now.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-17 10:35:10+00:00
Bad faith argument. Why are you moving the discussion to DOGE when that's not what I was talking about?

You know the word "governments" that I used, means a lot more than the current TRUMP administration, right? Broaden your mind and PoV.

And also, how can you say with a straight face there isn't ongoing and never has been waste and corruption in any government? Again, think for yourself, ignore $CURRENT_EVENTS.

Look at your nation's government contracts that funnel taxpayer money to private pockets, then look at the output. Has there been value delivered proportional to the money spent at reasonable market rates? If not, then money was definitely wasted via incompetence, pocketed via corruption, or both.

This is so prevalent and is has become the norm everywhere for so long, that people are not even giving it a second thought anymore when it comes to government corruption, but somehow people want to be spoon-fed sources as if it's an unbelievable conspiracy theory.
by gchamonlive | 2025-06-17 10:36:06+00:00
I've seen your post below about your bad trip. I fully respect your position, but that is not my experience. I realised I can't access things I find important through my reason. I'm just too dependent on my body for my mind to function, so I just followed what my body was telling me.

But I agree that you don't need to take drugs. That's why my advice wasn't a definitive one. It's an invitation for people to consider what they want in their lives.

Wish you all the best truthfully.
by mjburgess | 2025-06-17 10:36:24+00:00
I think there's an element to that -- I also said it's about trust and credibility. However in this case it was partly about helping the exec cognise the decision and be aware that he needs to make a decision, basically scaffolding the decision-making process for the exec.

It's kinda annoying for decision-makers to be presented with what sounds like venting. This is something I've done before, in much worse ways actually -- even venting on a first-introduction handshake meeting. But I've learned how to boil that down into decision-making.

I do find it very annoying, still, how people are generally unwilling to help you explore your thinking out-loud with you, and want to close it down to "what's the impact?" "what's the decision?" -- so I sympathise a lot with people unable to do this well.

I often need to air unformulated concerns and it's a PITA to have people say, "well there's no impact to that" etc. : yeah, that isnt how experts think. Experts need to figure out even how to formulate mental models of all possible impacts, not just the ones you care about.

This is a common source of frustration between people who's job is to build (mental,technical...) models and people who's job is to manage social systems.
by wkat4242 | 2025-06-17 10:37:23+00:00
I don't use the others you mention. Only telegram because many communities are there (it's the only chat app with good group chat functionality)

But it's exactly because I already have to deal with too many of them that I don't want to add more.

Also I don't like moxie's attitude but that's more of a personal concern that won't apply to most. Like not allowing third party clients or federation and shooting many suggestions down on github. It's his right to do that but it's also mine to not want to use it. For a "just a little bit better" experience I'm not moving to that.

I use matrix a lot and I think this is by far the best and most open option but most people don't know it. I bridge all the other apps through it now. Also, arathorn is a much nicer person who responds much better to criticism.

> If there was a non-American alternative to Signal, surely I would go for it. But there isn't. In the meantime, Signal is by far the best alternative to WhatsApp in terms of privacy.

But I wouldn't be able to actually move. It would just be yet another one. Not even much better in any way than whatsapp.

> Not to mention that there is actually a valid reason to not allow third party apps (spoiler: security). Last time I heard a fork of Signal making the news, it was pretty bad.

I don't care so much about that (and I work in cybersec). What matters more to me is being in control of my data. Being able to export them wherever I want etc.

I had an issue recently with whatsapp where they locked my account because of "spam". I wasn't spamming but they probably thought my matrix bridge was suspicious. However because of that bridge I could still access my chat data. I couldn't in whatsapp itself. Signal could do the same to me. So I would only use it bridged to Matrix anyway, like I do whatsapp.

And in terms of security: I don't believe neither WhatsApp nor Signal is good enough to prevent a state actor from reading my messages. Even if they can't get in the app they can compromise an endpoint. And even a bad third-party app will be sufficient to prevent drive-by hackers with a pineapple from reading my messages. So I don't see much difference there.
by sturza | 2025-06-17 10:40:15+00:00
>I have realized that I love building software, and I suck at marketing.

-> it's not marketing you suck at, it's building for someone else that you do

>However, as a techy, I can't seem to build useful things, or things that generate money.

-> build something for someone else, don't think about revenue. Even if you build for 1 person, something will click when you see they're using what you build and only then you will figure it out.

Think of it like this:

-> do you have someone close that calls you when they have a problem where you're the expert in(something computer i'm guessing) - if yes, do the same thing, but build something after you understood their pain, iterate until they cannot live without your solution(big/small whatever it is) - don't let them design their solution - you're the solution designer, you need to understand their pain.
by adrian_b | 2025-06-17 10:40:21+00:00
SiFive has been founded by "academics", including some of those who have designed Chisel.

So it is no surprise that they have used their pet language.

Except for them, the professional use of Chisel is rare, and the future of SiFive is unclear.

Regardless how good it may be, it is difficult for any hardware-description language to replace the incumbents SystemVerilog and VHDL, because all designers are too dependent on whatever the foundries or the FPGA manufacturers support.

Choosing another language is pretty much impossible, unless you translate it to either SystemVerilog or VHDL. If you do that, then it is hard to justify using another language instead of writing directly in SystemVerilog or VHDL.
by viraptor | 2025-06-17 10:40:30+00:00
Keep in mind that as usual, mostly the extreme views are getting posted. The urge to both write and click on "sometimes I find LLMs useful for partial solutions in the right context" is low compared to "AI will replace all developers in 2 years". It may not be as dividing as we read here. It certainly isn't, when looking at what my co-workers do. You can chill and learn it like any other new tech. (Without following every detail day to day)
by pastage | 2025-06-17 10:41:39+00:00
Then again if you look at the continium as something multidimensional. It is easy to make everything either a very specific hetrogenity or a big homogenic pile. The greatest fallacy is the group think, you can always create groups of people and that was the point. Given a bit of encourgement the dividing lines will shift. I have personal experience from work about this and I think some of these meaningless work things we do are there for a reason.

Understanding that we are hetreogenic is hard.
by RLN | 2025-06-17 10:43:01+00:00
One problem I've encountered in Munich is they essentially have a single trunk that runs through the centre. In the case of problems on one line you can often find multiple other lines are also affected. London always seems to have a redundancy in the case of a line being unusable.

I suppose this is more a problem of sharing track than through running, but I just found it funny to see Munich public transport described so positively.
by skydhash | 2025-06-17 10:44:06+00:00
> What is the auth strategy, what endpoints do you need, do you need to integrate with a library or API, are there any security issues, how easy is the code to extend, how do you get it to follow existing patterns?

That is software engineering realm, not using LLMs realm. You have to answer all of these questions even with traditional coding. Because they’re not coding questions, they’re software design questions. And before that, there were software analysis questions preceded by requirements gathering questions.

A lot of replies around the thread is conflating coding activities with the parent set of software engineering activities.
by agoose77 | 2025-06-17 10:44:13+00:00
MyST Markdown (the MD flavour, not the same-named Document Engine) was inspired by ReST. It was created to address the main pain-point of ReST for incoming users (it's not Markdown!).

As a project, the tooling to parse MyST Markdown was built on top of Sphinx, which primarily expects ReST as input. Now, I would not be surprised if most _new_ Sphinx users are using MyST Markdown (but I have no data there!)

Subsequently, the Jupyter Book project that built those tools has pivoted to building a new document engine that's better focused on the use-cases of our audience and leaning into modern tooling.
by mrweasel | 2025-06-17 10:44:35+00:00
It's obviously very area specific. The only difference in the subscriptions I have available is the amount of data included. They all have unlimited SMS and calls, it's been that way for years.

I do get that I'm probably in one of the few areas outside the US where iMessage is pretty big, but even then SMS (probably RCS now) is how you communicate with Android users.

It also doesn't chance the fact that it make no sense for me to pay for e.g. WhatsApp, when I have the SMS available at no additional cost.
by anelson | 2025-06-17 10:45:47+00:00
I’ve experienced this as well. If management is not competent they can’t tell (or don’t want to hear) when a “star” performer is actually a very expensive wrapper around a $20/mo cursor subscription.

Unlike the author of the article I do get a ton of value from coding agents, but as with all tools they are less than useless when wielded incompetently. This becomes more damaging in an org that already has perverse incentives which reward performative slop over diligent and thoughtful engineering.
by stereolambda | 2025-06-17 10:46:02+00:00
In the articles and talks from that time people often take the perspective of what the whole society (with its organizations) wants from the "automatic computers" and programmers as a profession. Compare also something like the 1982 Grace Hopper's talk on YT. Now I think it's mostly the perspective of companies, teams, the industry. This shift happened in the 1990s? I'm guessing here.

I guess there is still something left here from there from the concept of programming language as a tool for top-down shaping and guiding the thinking of its users. Pascal being the classic example. Golang tries to be like that. I get how annoying it can be. I don't know how JS/TypeScript constructs evolve, but I suspect this is more Fortran-style committee planning than trying to "enlighten" people into doing the "right" things. Happy to be corrected on this.

Maybe the hardest to interpret in hindsight is the point that in the sixties programming has been an overpaid profession, the hardware costs will be dropping and software costs cannot stay the same (You cannot expect society to accept this, and therefore we must learn to program an order of magnitude more effectively). Yeah, in some sense, what paying for software even is anymore.

But interestingly, the situation now is kind of similar to the very old days: bunch of mainframe ("cloud") owners paying programmers to program and manage their machines. And maybe the effectiveness really has gone up dramatically. There's relatively little software running in comparison to the crazy volume of metal machines, even though the programmers for that scale are still paid a lot. It's not like you get a team of 10 guys for programming each individual server.
by mmarian | 2025-06-17 10:46:08+00:00
> I can't really find co-founders because the people around me aren't invested as I am

To solve that, put yourself in the shoes of your potential cofounders. If a stranger came to you talking about their startup the same way you talk about yours, would you ditch your current startup?

> Really trying to understand how do people figure out distribution.

Same as before, put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers and see what would make them use your product.

> I'm in a third world country, not sure if that makes it even worse.

People don't care that much about who the founder is. The question is, does your product actually solve a big enough problem, given all the alternatives that are already out there.
Show HN: SnapSys – A lightweight CLI tool to capture system hardware snapshots
by MarcusMJV | 2025-06-17 10:47:23+00:00
I'm trying to get more involved in open source and would greatly appreciate feedback, bug reports, or ideas for what features you'd like in future releases (e.g., network stats, uptime, sub-second snapshotting, CSV support, pushing snapshots to APIs, etc.).

Even if just one person finds it useful, that would mean a lot!

GitHub: https://github.com/MarcusMJV/snapsys

Thanks for reading!
by ozim | 2025-06-17 10:48:22+00:00
I think this staying sharp is FOMO instilled by influencers and people selling guides/courses. Most of the stuff will be implemented by Anthropic, OpenAI etc.

You can run local models but it is like playing matchbox cars in your backyard and imagining you will be F1 driver some day.

Big guys have APIs you pay for to do serious work that’s all you need to know.