MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by varjag | 2025-06-09 18:52:08+00:00
I had some success doing two front-end projects. One in 2023 using Mixtral 7b local model and one just this month with Codex. I am an experienced programmer (35 years coding, 28 professionally). I hate Web design and I never cared to learn JavaScript.

The first project was a simple touch based control panel that communicates via REST/Websocket and runs a background visual effect to prevent the screen burn-in. It took a couple of days to complete. There were often simple coding errors but trivial enough to fix.

The second is a 3D wireframe editor for distributed industrial equipment site installations. I started by just chatting with o3 and got the proverbial 80% within a day. It includes orbital controls, manipulation and highlighting of selected elements, property dialogs. Very soon it became too unwieldy for the laggard OpenAI chat UI so I switched to Codex to complete most of the remaining features.

My way with it is mostly:

- ask no fancy frameworks: my projects are plain JavaScript that I don't really know, makes no sense to pile on React and TypeScript atop of it that I am even less familiar with

- explain what I want by defining data structures I believe are the best fit for internal representation

- change and test one thing at a time, implement a test for it

- split modules/refactor when a subsystem gets over a few hundred LOC, so that the reasoning can remain largely localized and hierarchical

- make o3 write an llm-friendly general design document and description of each module. Codex uses it to check the assumptions.

As mentioned elsewhere the code is mediocre at best and it feels a bit like when I've seen a C compiler output vs my manually written assembly back in the day. It works tho, and it doesn't look to be terribly inefficient.
by odo1242 | 2025-06-09 18:52:12+00:00
People think R&D expenditure shouldn't be amoritized because it hurts startups.

For example, if you're a first-year startup and you make a software product with $1 million in revenue but pay $900,000 in software dev salaries, and the tax rate is 25%, without amoritization you pay (1,000,000-900,000)*0.25 = $25,000 in tax and make a profit, but with 5-year amoritization you pay (1,000,000-900,000/5)*0.25 = $205,000 in tax and take a loss.

But since established companies aren't affected as much, they are advantaged by the amoritization rule.
by socalgal2 | 2025-06-09 18:52:19+00:00
As someone who's getting old and whose eyesight is getting worse, this makes things strictly harder to read with lower contrast.

The 4th image on the page showing "All Of Me, Nao" is really hard for my eyes to read. I can't read "Nao" at all if I view that page on my iPhone. I can only read it on my Macbook Pro on a large external monitor.

I suppose there will be an accessibility setting to turn it off
by irskep | 2025-06-09 18:52:36+00:00
Electron apps are already out of place. In the space of Mac-apps-for-SaaS-products such as Linear, Slack, Notion, Asana, Figma, GitHub, and Spotify, they inflict the company's own design system on Apple's OS rather than try to ship Apple's design system applied to their product. Even the most popular IDE, VSCode, is just a wrapper around a web page.

And they're rational to do it this way. These companies shipping apps to millions of people all came to the conclusion that investing in native Mac software is not worthwhile to their business. Users don't avoid Electron-based products, and building native Mac apps slows you down. It's easier both technologically and organizationally to ship your web site as an Electron app. It costs less and you don't lose any users.

So I would be surprised to see _any_ popular Electron app get design updates to accommodate these changes.

As a user it makes me sad, but I find myself blaming Apple for losing this fight, not the hundreds of successful companies that all somehow make the same choice. If building native were an advantage, people would take it.
by dylan604 | 2025-06-09 18:52:44+00:00
> They claim not to have any names at all?

Talking about little bobby drop tables. name = NULL would at least be disaster safe.

> They retain claim on any rights of being a Musk family member?

I don't know. It sounds like Musk would love to not claim rights as family members to avoid having to provide support. He's not as rich of a man as he was last week. poor guy
by Loudergood | 2025-06-09 18:52:56+00:00
Makes me curious to what the upper limit is.

Could they just do the entire island?

What keeps them from going around the entire planet?

Following that you could go beyond that and the loop would get shorter and cover more of the planet.

Theoretically you could then securely store it inside a safe and cover 99.9999* of the Earth.
by whatever1 | 2025-06-09 18:53:00+00:00
It’s also a much deeper and broader ui. In the past 20 years of using windows I don’t recall one time that I needed to bring up the command line to do something. Linux on the other hand is a constant battle with random commands with close to zero discoverability. macOS sits somewhere in between, but definitely a way more ui friendly system compared to the various Linux desktop distros
by _wire_ | 2025-06-09 18:53:16+00:00
Any involvement in reporting / fixing bugs is development. Why do app developers think their customers need to be or want to be developers?

What other industry relies on its customers as implicit developers?

Making bug reporting easier means an intentional push to foist more of Development's work upon customers and a bias towards more bugs.

BUG OR FEATURE?

If you can't tell, then we can understand why Knuth call it "the art" of computer programming, as in the artist's uncertainty of creation as compared to the engineer's confidence.

The fact that half the SW industry prefers to avoid a distinction between bugs and features— as in bugs that don't get reported are regarded as features— shows the profligate laziness and opportunism of so called Software Engineering.

AI is a stunning example of a global industry built by computer technologists who don't care about understanding their own work, and lack the creative and social spark to conduct themselves as artists.

Just listen G. Hinton babble philosophically for 10 minutes and you will grasp the magnitude of incompetence at work.
by microtonal | 2025-06-09 18:53:30+00:00
Every Electron app is going to feel incredibly out of place.

It's not going to matter, most Electron apps look out of place on the Mac already. The developers are not going to care and probably most users are not going to care either (I used to be staunchly against Electron for this reason, but gave up, and now I choose just enjoy apps looking the same between platforms).

Apple neglected the desktop from ~2016-2020 and made two frameworks that are unpopular among developers (Catalyst and SwiftUI) after that. Outside some indie devs, the native Mac app ship has sailed. Even developers that had their roots in macOS (e.g. AgileBits) have given up and switched to Electron.
by kmeisthax | 2025-06-09 18:53:44+00:00
Nothing Apple can do to iPadOS is going to fix the fundamental problem that:

1. iPadOS has a lot of software either built for the "three share sheets to the wind" era of iPadOS, or lazily upscaled from an iPhone app, and

2. iPadOS does not allow users to tamper with the OS or third-party software, so you can't fix any of this broken mess.

Video editing and 3D would be possible on iPadOS, but for #1. Programming is genuinely impossible because of #2. All the APIs that let Swift Playgrounds do on-device development are private APIs and entitlements that third-parties are unlikely to ever get a provisioning profile for. Same for emulation and virtualization. Apple begrudgingly allows it, but we're never going to get JIT or hypervisor support[0] that would make those things not immediately chew through your battery.

[0] To be clear, M1 iPads supported hypervisor; if you were jailbroken on iPadOS 14.5 and copied some files over from macOS you could even get full-fat UTM to work. It's just a software lockout.
by mritchie712 | 2025-06-09 18:53:46+00:00
We (https://www.definite.app/) have a use case I'd imagine is common for people building agents.

When a user works with our agent, they may end up with a large conversation thread (e.g. 200k+ tokens) with many SQL snippets, query results and database metadata (e.g. table and column info).

For example, if they ask "show me any companies that were heavily engaged at one point, but I haven't talked to in the last 90 days". This will pull in their schema (e.g. Hubspot), run a bunch of SQL, show them results, etc.

I want to allow the agent to search previous threads for answers so they don't need to have the conversation again, but chunking up the existing thread is non-trivial (e.g. you don't want to separate the question and answer, you may want to remove errors while retaining the correction, etc.).

Do you have any plans to support "auto chunking" for AI message[0] threads?

0 - e.g. https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/messages/crea...
by InTheArena | 2025-06-09 18:53:56+00:00
I don't think I agree with the Go is good in LLMs.

But outside of that - ML in go is basically impossible. Trying to integrate with the outside ecosystem of go is really difficult - and my experience has been that Claude Code is far less effective with Go then it is with Python, or even Swift.

I ditched a project I was writing in Go and replaced it with Swift (this was mostly prompt based anyways). It was remarkably how much better the first pass of the code generation was.
by dlivingston | 2025-06-09 18:54:30+00:00
No, not quite. "Content previews", not "ads". A distinction with a difference.

When you 'hover' over an app on an Apple's tvOS, the app populates that preview section with whatever content it wants. In the linked article's screenshot, the Apple TV app is being hovered over, so the 'preview' section is populated with content from Apple TV.

If the user swiped right, to hover over the Arcade app, that preview would change to show some Arcade game. Hover over Netflix, Max, Hulu, Spotify apps, and you'll get content previews from them.

So yes, they are "ads", in a hyper-literal sense, but not strictly, not facilitated by the operating system, and not in any way that matters.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-06-09 18:54:34+00:00
People greatly overestimate the amount of material cheating that happens, especially among large companies and the wealthy. I used to work for a Federal audit organization and almost all of the recoveries had a root cause in sloppy compliance and record-keeping practices rather than intentional malfeasance. It is broadly recognized as optimal that the recovered money should be several-fold the direct costs spent to recover it because this activity incurs a lot of non-obvious indirect costs. It is a variation on the principle that the optimum amount of fraud is non-zero.

Most of the blatant tax fraud is much lower down the economic ladder because below a certain threshold recovery doesn’t justify the cost and people know this. The amount you can get away with is far below the threshold where it would be worth the risk for wealthy parties. The best ROI for auditors in many of these cases is to make regular object lessons at random to discourage it rather than systematically prosecute it.

AFAIK, the increased spending at the IRS did not lead to concomitant offsetting recoveries. This is a predictable outcome, the amount of enforcement activity has been pretty finely tuned for decades to optimize ROI. Most of the recoveries come from changing focuses on compliance to areas that haven’t seen much enforcement activity in many years. Fighting entropy basically.

If you assume that most large recoveries are from sloppiness rather than systematic tax fraud, it changes what is going to be an effective strategy.
by max51 | 2025-06-09 18:54:41+00:00
> It tried to handle everything from smartphones to tablets to non-touch PCs with 27” monitors with the same UI

That was a big part of the problem, but the issues with the UI/UX went far beyond that.

For exemple, if you used the search bar in the "start menu" to get something from the control pannel, it would ONLY show the new W8 Metro dialog box that barelly has 1/5th the features and would refuse to show you the real one. It also took multiple years before the metro apps inlcuded in the OS (eg. pdf viewer) could be used in windowed mode (they were fullscreen mode like a video game, without taskbar), even the ipad at the time had better multitasking than the W8 Metro apps.
by const_cast | 2025-06-09 18:55:30+00:00
I've said this before but I'll bring it up again - people get tripped up about Covid because they don't understand it was truly novel. We have never, ever had a situation like Covid and honestly we probably won't in our lifetimes.

Our common knowledge about how things should go or what recommendations are correct just does not apply. Nobody knew anything about anything. We had to figure everything out on the fly.

The result is that yes, we were often wrong and our guidelines were a moving target. This isn't like Polio or Measles - public health threats we understand. But, just because we changed our minds or were wrong doesn't mean anybody was lying. It means that we made mistakes.

And, doing super low-risk things like masking, even if we're not 100% sure it works, makes a lot of sense. Nobody dies from wearing a mask. So even if we think there's a chance it could save some lives, it makes absolute sense to recommend it. I mean, it's not surgery or medication.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-06-09 18:55:30+00:00
I've been publishing videos for a few years and made nearly 300. Best advice I can give you is:

1) Get a decent microphone

2) Check out freesound and the YT music library

3) Just start publishing. Make a video. Upload it.

Don't do too much research. Just talk about what you know. As you go on, do a little research here and there, but the #1 rule is just publish. Upload, upload, upload.
by foresto | 2025-06-09 18:55:41+00:00
Do developers actually need anything more than assembly?

When choosing a new language (and ecosystem) in which to invest my time, I'm more likely to pick one that's versatile than one that struggles outside of a niche. Even with a background in processes, threads, manual event loops and callbacks, I find that higher level concurrency features make my life easier in enough different situations that first-class support for them is now fairly high on my shopping list.

Do I actually need a language with something resembling coroutines? No; I got by for decades with C and C++. But I want it. It makes me more productive and helps me to keep my code simpler, both of which are valuable to me. These days, I have found myself walking away from languages for being weak in this area.
by losvedir | 2025-06-09 18:56:14+00:00
I don't use an iPad much, but it's been interesting to watch from afar how it's been changing over these years.

They could have gone the direction of just running MacOS on it, but clearly they don't want to. I have a feeling that the only reason MacOS is the way it is, is because of history. If they were building a laptop from scratch, they would want it more in their walled garden.

I'm curious to see what a "power user" desktop with windowing and files, and all that stuff that iPad is starting to get, ultimately looks like down this alternative evolutionary branch.
by crooked-v | 2025-06-09 18:56:16+00:00
Thanks, I hate it.

Floating menu bars over the content at the bottom is a great way to make it impossible to actually use the bottom of web pages.

The "liquid glass" stuff, even in their handpicked promo screenshots, has functionally unreadable text and illegible controls.

The vanishing buttons are going to make app UIs even more obtuse and undiscoverable.
by prmph | 2025-06-09 18:56:21+00:00
I finally tried Claude Code for most of last week on a toy Typescript project of moderate complexity. It's supposedly the pinnacle of agentic coding assistants, and I tend to agree, finding it far ahead of Copilot et al. Seeing it working was like a bit of magic, and it was very addictive. It successfully distracted me from my main projects that I code mostly by hand.

That said, and it's kind of hard to express this well, not only is the actual productivity still far from what the hype suggests, but I regard agentic coding to be like a bad addictive drug right now. The promise of magic from the agent is always just seems around the corner: just one more prompt to finally fix the rough edges of what it has spat out, just one more helpful hint to put it on the right path/approach, just one more reminder for it to actually apply everything in CLAUDE.md each time...

Believe it or not, I spent several days with it, crafting very clear and specific prompts, prodding with all kinds of hints, even supplying it with legacy code that mostly works (although written in CSharp), and at the end it had written a lot of that almost works, except a lot of simple things just wouldn't work, not matter how much time I spent with it.

In the end, after a couple of hours of writing the code myself, I had a high a quality type design and basic logic, and a clear path to implementing the all the basic features.

So, I don't know, for now even Claude seems mostly useful only as a sporadic helper within small contexts (drafting specific functions, code review of moderate amounts of code, relatively simple refactoring, etc). I believe knowing when AI would help vs slow you down is becoming key.

For this tech to improve, maybe a genetic/evolutionary approach would be needed. Given a task, the agent should launch several models to work on the problem, with each model also launching several randomized approaches to working on the problem. Then the agent should evaluate all the responses and pick the "best" one to return.
by timr | 2025-06-09 18:56:31+00:00
Hah, well, to each their own. That's exactly the kind of thing that makes me want to go outside and take a walk.

Regardless of what your definition of horrible and boring happens to be, just being able to tell the bot to do a horrible boring thing and having it done with like a junior level intelligence is so experience enhancing that it makes coding more fun.
by siliconc0w | 2025-06-09 18:56:31+00:00
Read the latest notice https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-23-63.pdf

You can deduct internal tools, training, maintenance, data conversion activities, installation, distribution, marketing, promotion, etc.

So it's definitely worth it to use an issue tracker to tie your engineer's commits to bugs and categorize their bugs as either feature development or one of these activities.

Depending how aggressive you want to get, if a LLM builds a feature that you beta launch and the engineer fixes the LLM's mistakes to get it working you can probably argue that is correcting errors or defects in software that isn't adding new functionality and thus deductible.
by socalgal2 | 2025-06-09 18:57:05+00:00
I think I know what you meant. You mean you don't want code that runs generative AI in your computer? But, what you wrote could also mean you don't want any code running that was generated by AI. Even with open source, your computer will be running code generated by AI as most open source projects are using it. I suspect it will be nearly impossible to avoid. Most open source projects will accept AI generated code as long as it's been reviewed.
by adrian_b | 2025-06-09 18:57:06+00:00
How to machine titanium is well known now, but it requires more time and more energy than machining the same object from any other cheap metal.

This is caused by fundamental properties of the metal, so it will not change in the future. Therefore machining titanium will always be more expensive than for steel or aluminum alloys or copper alloys.

Making titanium objects by casting is seldom a possible choice, because that is also much more expensive than for any other cheap metal, due to high melting temperature and the requirement to use an inert atmosphere.

Making titanium objects by plastic deformation is also expensive, because none of the titanium alloys has good ductility. The metals that are cheap to process by plastic deformation are those with a fcc crystal structure, like aluminum, copper and austenitic steel at room temperature, or like most steels at high temperature. The titanium alloys do not have such a crystal structure, so they cannot be deformed a lot without breaking.

One of the few processing methods where the titanium alloys do not have properties that increase the processing cost in comparison with other metals in 3D printing. However 3D printing is a relatively expensive processing method for any metal.
by out-of-ideas | 2025-06-09 18:57:26+00:00
> It’s terrible and an unsolvable “problem” that many have tried before and there’s no way of getting this right.

except apple dictates to its fans whats right. i feel apple has already begun a slow process of making them similar;

what im more curious about is how they will improve the settings app (it seems the desktop settings is the worst its been design and flow wise - ive never liked the ios settings design - i do hope they change both of these for the better)

edit: more newlines
by api | 2025-06-09 18:57:37+00:00
The right way to tame complexity is not that much of a hassle. This is why virtualization and containers have been so successful. Make the OS immutable by converting into a nested Russian doll of OSes with specific instances being mutable but also disposable.

It’s ugly in its own way but it has the virtue of not exchanging one ugly complexity tax (OS rot and manual admin) with another (a complicated “manager” that wants to get in the way).
by ricokatayama | 2025-06-09 18:57:41+00:00
When Apple introduced the whole skeuomorphic analogy, they did it because they needed to make a new way of interacting with touch-based apps feel tangible. That seemed totally fair.

When Apple brought a spatial analogy to the Vision Pro, it also felt fair they were thinking in terms of volume and dimensions, after all, they were teaching people how to interact with a new reality.

I can even understand Apple wanting to unify their design approaches, but bringing the “liquid glass” look to everything feels like a massive step backward. The interface looks messy, clunky.

It feels like Apple is entering a design hell, and I don’t know how they’ll get out of it.
by yesfitz | 2025-06-09 18:57:42+00:00
Do you use an ad-blocker on desktop and mobile?

With my ad-blocker enabled, I was able to replicate your results for the "expedited passport renewal" search. (state.gov right under the AI Overview)

Then I disabled my ad-blocker, and the sponsored results and AI Overview pushed the first actual result (still state.gov) below the fold.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-06-09 18:58:57+00:00
Actually, most "AI" cults blindly worship at their own ignorance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV7C6Ezl35A

The ML hype-cycle has happened before... but this time everyone is adding more complexity to obfuscate the BS. There is also a funny callback to YC in the Lisp story, and why your karma still gets incinerated if one points out its obvious limitations in a thread.

Have a wonderful day, =3
by abelanger | 2025-06-09 18:59:45+00:00
I think there's a gap between people familiar with durable execution and those who use it in practice; it comes with a lot of overhead.

Adding a durable boundary (via a task queue) in between steps is typically the first step, because you at least get persistence and retries, and for a lot of apps that's enough. It's usually where we recommend people start with Hatchet, since it's just a matter of adding a simple wrapper or declaration on top of the existing code.

Durable execution is often the third evolution of your system (after the first pass with no durability, then adding a durable boundary).