MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scott_w | 2025-07-04 15:58:41+00:00
> I understand how it may sound like this, given that older people will talk about assembly and electronics which most young developers have absolutely no clue about today and are still considered "software developers".

As a software engineer in his mid-30s now, I can assure you many "older people" will have little-to-no memory of messing around with assembly and electronics. When I was getting started, my boss told me about an engineer who had a deep knowledge of how to lay out data to efficiently read and process it. My response? "I just stick it in Postgres and it does it all for me!" No shade to that engineer but I do believe he was in his 50s/60s at the time, so it's quite likely he's retired on a decent pension by now!
by softfalcon | 2025-07-04 15:59:13+00:00
This is exactly my take on folks bemoaning the evolution of complexity in software (and hardware) worldwide.

To lend some credence to other folks points of view, there are arguments I can agree with that are adjacent:

- "We don't need that complex framework for our needs, we stick to a simpler, older library."

- "We decided to not use <shiniest_new_toolkit> it had performance issues that the maintainers are still sorting out."

- "Working with the new framework showed a lot of promise, but there is still a lot of instability in the API since it's so new. We couldn't commit to using a toolkit that hasn't been nailed down yet."

These are actual concerns and shows caution towards adopting new things until they match your use-case, dev-timelines, and performance requirements.
by derefr | 2025-07-04 15:59:50+00:00
Would anyone here assert that there's any particular programming language that's better for writing emulators, virtual machines, bytecode interpreters, etc?

Where, when I say "better", I'm not so much talking about getting results that are particularly efficient/performant; nor in making fewer implementation errors... but more in terms of the experience of implementing an emulator in this particular language, being more rewarding, intuitive, and/or teaching you more about both emulators and the language.

I ask because I know that this sort of language exists in other domains. Erlang, for example, is particularly rewarding to implement a "soft-realtime nine-nines-of-uptime distributed system" in. The language, its execution semantics, its runtime, and its core libraries, were all co-designed to address this particular problem domain. Using Erlang "for what it's for" can thus teach you a lot about distributed systems (due to the language/runtime/etc guiding your hand toward its own idiomatic answers to distributed-systems problems — which usually are "best practice" solutions in theory as well); and can lead you to a much-deeper understanding of Erlang (exploring all its corners, discovering all the places where the language designers considered the problems you'd be having and set you up for success) than you'd get by trying to use it to solve problems in some other domain.

Is there a language like that... but where the "problem domain" that the language's designers were targeting, was "describing machines in code"?
by pxc | 2025-07-04 16:00:19+00:00
I've seen this kind of thing happen even with very small projects, where there's no marketing department or business goal attached. I've seen attempts to erase the history of forks, projects repurposed from others in order to retain GitHub stars unrelated to the repo's new purpose... not for a supply chain attack or something like that, but out of sheer vanity. Sometimes I see people talk about those projects on HN, and if you weren't there when it happened and very interested in some very niche software at the time, you'd never know.

It's a wild world.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-07-04 16:00:41+00:00
Did your friend leave IB after this diagnosis, or did he tough it out?

To me that's the real question. I think either option is defensible, depending on what one values in life. I've known certain people who pulled 80 hour work weeks for years only to give away double-digit percentages of their salaries to charity, because that was what was important to them, and I don't think they were wrong for doing that, just making choices at a margin I would find intolerable far earlier.
by indigoabstract | 2025-07-04 16:00:45+00:00
> In the future the structure of the LLM may be modified or it become one module out of multiple that is required for agi. > The real answer is nobody knows.

This is all just my opinion of course, but it's easy to expect that being an LLM that knows all there is to know about every subject written in books and the internet would be enough to do every office work that can be done with a computer. Yet strangely enough, it isn't.

At this point they still lack the necessary feedback mechanism (the senses) and ability to learn on the job so they can function on their own independently. And people have to trust them, that they don't fail in some horrible way and things like that. Without all these they can still be very helpful, but can't really "replace" a human in doing most activities. And also, some people seem to possess a sense of aesthetics and a wonderful creative imagination, things that LLMs don't really display at this time.

I agree that nobody knows the answer. If and when they arrive at that point, by then the LLM part would probably be just a tiny fraction of their functioning. Maybe we can start worrying then. Or maybe we could just find something else to do. Because people aren't tools, even when economically worthless.
by harshitaneja | 2025-07-04 16:01:51+00:00
RPi is a good option if one has less RAM requirements especially if you take into account the quality of the drivers and software support in general.

RPi can be a compelling option if you need lower power draw. It does take some effort to squeeze out power efficiency but if the requirement can't be handled by a microcontroller then it is the most convenient of-the-shelf option.

For everything, RPi isn't a very compelling option. Even for GPIO, during RPi shortage I started experimenting with just using STM32 dev boards connected via USB to a NUC or an old PC and it worked well. But I just prefer to use ESP8266 or ESP32 for those tasks most of the time. Bandwidth and latency of USB communication/wifi to the main device has been low enough for it not to be a concern for me and I recon outside of very specific robotics cases it won't be for most.

CSI port is quite nice though and not many great alternatives.
by scott_w | 2025-07-04 16:02:09+00:00
From playing video games, I'm going to say that generally games are more reliable today than they were in 2005, and I recall a few absolute fucking howlers from the 90s and 2000s (looking at you, Digimon World!)

My comparison points: Fallout 3 being a shitshow of bugs on release vs Final Fantasy 7 Remake & Rebirth feeling practically bug-free on release. In fact, I don't think I hit any bugs in Final Fantasy 16 either.
by billbrown | 2025-07-04 16:03:15+00:00
The use case for LLM assistance that provides value for me is solving obscure lint or static analysis warnings and errors.

I take the message, provide the surrounding code, and it gives me a few approaches to solve them. More than half the time, the resolution is there and I can copy the relevant bit in the literal verbiage. (The other times it's garbage but at least I can see that this is going to require some AI—Actual Intelligence.)
by reactordev | 2025-07-04 16:03:46+00:00
Oh dear god no. Form Validation is what JavaScript was meant for. Do we really need to download >1MB wasm module so you can do a regex?

WASM should be left to things like IPC/Canvas/WebGPU stuff, not things easily done with document.querySelector

No offense, but this is using a bomb to kill a fly.

I know it says this is just a demo but people will find this and do this thinking it’s normal.
by inthreedee | 2025-07-04 16:03:47+00:00
You've got the core concept of the app down, yes. My friend definitely experiences all the things you mentioned, from PDA to not remembering to open a tool/app he's decided to try to use. To work with those issues, I designed the app to be fun so that, even just by opening it, he gets those dopamine hits that his brain needs. Your points count up when you open it, there are subtly pleasing bouncy animations as you interact with it, things are colorful with customizable themes and sounds, there are haptics at just the right moments, etc. The whole thing is designed to make his brain /want/ to open it rather than being a tool he has to /remember/ to open.

As for the habit and reward system, it's similarly designed to be something he wants to use vs has to use because his PDA will immediately kick in and rebel against any kind of forced system. Our built-in tutorial tries to provide enough guidance on this to help you understand what types of habits/rewards could be effective for you and your brain so it doesn't run up against the problems you mentioned. The app does a lot of work to reward you for using the app in support of the habits you want to form without triggering the stuff like PDA that you're trying to avoid triggering. If you end up trying it out and have feedback on ways we can improve this, please do share! We're definitely open to feedback and have already received some good ideas for improving the tutorial from others we've shared this with.
by greyface- | 2025-07-04 16:04:12+00:00
Today, when blocks are empty, you're paying 1 sat/vB. Back then, when blocks were empty, you paid zero. That's the difference between "all about blockspace" and "only about blockspace when you care about next-block latency".

Here's a 2010 Satoshi post in a thread about transaction fees stating "we should always allow at least some free transactions": https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/thre...

If you had said "2 dollars" instead of "2 cents", we would be in complete agreement. All I'm saying is that mandatory transaction fees were not baked in at 2 cents.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-07-04 16:04:33+00:00
Milton Friedman put it best, in "I, Pencil". Everything around you is the result of hundreds to thousands of economic actors, loosely but robustly coordinated in a way to get you what you actually want at as low of a price as you can get away with. The complexity of the supply chain is the price of admission to the game.

https://youtu.be/67tHtpac5ws?si=eZk_5K32gL4PxDgv
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-04 16:04:44+00:00
Yeah, it's pretty common pattern. Especially if you're doing active frontend development as hot/auto-reloading of the page comes standard with all dev servers and it's generally what you want.

Serving your frontend through nginx for local development would work, but it's not very ergonomic. I know .NET has a built-in development server for frontend apps so you can use it in both prod and dev, but I think most frontend devs prefer the CDN option especially that it gives their delivery a performance boost and makes it completely independent of any backend.
by raincole | 2025-07-04 16:04:57+00:00
> They can deploy applications to Kubernetes clusters but couldn’t design a simple op-amp circuit

And the ones who can design a op-amp circuit can't manufacture the laminate their circuit is going to be printed on. And the ones who know how to manufacture the laminate probably doesn't know how to refine or synthesize the material from the minerals. And probably none of them knows how to grow and fertilize the crop to feed themselves.

No one knows everything. Collaboration has been how we manage complexity since we were biologically a different species than H. sapiens.
by glasscannon | 2025-07-04 16:05:34+00:00
> used me to change my routine and avoid certain activities which only exacerbated the issues, which led to more avoidance. Eventually I couldn’t walk.

Anecdotally, I had a phase where pretty much the same thing happened to me with the Achilles (+ calf/ankle) flare-ups I was having (during this part of my chronic journey). Eventually got through it by doing small walks around my home, then outside but keeping the frequency high each day (i.e. instead of 1 "long" walk, doing 3-4 short ones). I.e. Desensitisation / daily movement
by alganet | 2025-07-04 16:05:42+00:00
You're misdirecting.

He's criticizing the act of _not building_ on previous learnings. _It's in the damn title_.

Repeating mistakes from the past leads to a slow down in such advancements.

This has nothing to do with learning everything by yourself (which, by the way, is a worthy goal and every single person that tries knows by heart that it cannot be done, it's not about doing it).
by charcircuit | 2025-07-04 16:05:55+00:00
This article is against accessibility. It's not that people are forgetting. We just don't require them to know everything to build things.

>Edge computing? That’s just distributed processing with better marketing.

Edge computing is not "just" distributed processing. That fails to recognize the point of minimizing latency.

>Microservices? Welcome to the return of modular programming, now with 300% more YAML configuration files.

Not all modules are microservices. It's again term to a more specific practice.

>Serverless? Congratulations, you’ve rediscovered time-sharing, except now you pay by the millisecond.

Those are somewhat related concepts but they still don't have the same meaning.

>Compare that to today’s black-box system-on-chip designs, where a single failure means the entire device becomes e-waste

If you really wanted to, you could fix the system-on-chip.

>We’ve mistaken complexity for sophistication and abstraction for advancement.

People are not adding complexity and abstractions just for fun.

>We’ve created a tower of dependencies so precarious that updating a single package can break an entire application

This has always been the case. Bugs still existed in the 1900s.

>What started as a legitimate return to hands-on engineering has been co-opted by influencer culture, where the goal isn’t to build something useful but to generate content about building something photogenic.

Social media being dominated by people good at social media and not by the top makers will happen in every endeavor. Accessibility has allowed many more people to be able to create basic things.

>We’re creating a generation of developers and engineers who can use tools brilliantly but can't explain how those tools work

They don't need to. And this has always been the case. There is too much to know and having different people specialize in different things is effective. Additionally there is great value in making software accessible making people with less knowledge to be able to make things. It allows for more things to be created that deliver value to people.

>The best engineering solutions are often elegantly simple. They work reliably, fail predictably, and can be understood by the people who use them. They don't require constant updates or cloud connectivity or subscription services.

Sure, but many people want a solution that can be delivered now and for cheap.
by Buttons840 | 2025-07-04 16:06:03+00:00
That is the same problem I had in my most stressful position.

I was working for a consulting company:

The first project I worked on was great, some of the most enjoyable work I've done at a company.

Then the second project came (same company, same client). Things weren't going so well, so I started talking about the problems that everyone was having, and started talking about how we could fix the problems...

... and that's when the real problem revealed itself. The project manager on the client-side was secretly trying to replace my consulting company with another consulting company (where he had friends). However, my consulting company had ties with higher management at the client company, and my consulting company didn't want to abandon the work, because they wanted the money, of course.

In the end, it was revealed that our team of programmers was surrounded on all sides by people that didn't care about solving the same problem, they only cared about the political games.

It was extremely stressful. I got shingles, and was diagnosed with celiac disease in the same week. It's hard to say for sure, but I think the celiac disease was activated by the stress--I still have it to this day obviously.

My advice to others:

(1) Identify the problem (2) Communicate with the people that are needed to fix the problem (3) Work towards fixing the problem

If at any point communication breaks down, or you realize management is not trying to solve the same problems you are trying to solve, then you need to GTFO.
Show HN: Barre Scales – Interactive Progression Visualizer for Guitar
by qn9n | 2025-07-04 16:06:03+00:00
Barre Scales is a lightweight, browser-based tool for visualizing musical scales and chord progressions on guitar Built with speed and simplicity in mind, it supports viewing common chord progressions, selection of scale degrees and a variety of chord shapes, and dark mode. No logins, no fluff—just pure utility for musicians and learners. Feedback welcome!
by RestartKernel | 2025-07-04 16:06:23+00:00
> But even a five year old can understand “use this charger/connect and it charges fast, that other one is very slow, and this one doesn’t work.”

It's funny to consider the layers upon layers of abstraction modern children are taught as common sense. Putting water in a container is one thing, but charging a battery must be downright metaphysical at that age.
by danparsonson | 2025-07-04 16:06:38+00:00
"Most of the United States"? You're covering an awfully big area there - how much of it have you actually seen for yourself vs learned about second hand through news and social media?

As for the skills bar, if you're intent on being hired by the likes of OpenAI then sure, you'll need to aim high, but for the majority of jobs, being reasonably good, friendly, and reliable will definitely be sufficient; the challenge is then mainly about seeming slightly more appealing than the other candidates for a position.
Row based "crypto" coin with zero gas fees
by arephan | 2025-07-04 16:06:59+00:00
Web 3 is great, but wow is it complicated for normal person to create a coin. Why should it be so hard? Why can we all just create coins in couple seconds? If it takes off, great, if it doesn't great. Well here's db row based coins with zero gas fees

instacoin.app wallet.instacoin.app
by AndyKelley | 2025-07-04 16:07:04+00:00
Actually, nobody.

Here is the commit where Reader/Writer was introduced: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/commit/5e212db29cf9e2c06aba36...

This is a few months after `git init`. You can see I was really just working on the parser, with a toy example to get things started.

Over time, I merged contributions that made minor changes and shuffled things around, and these APIs evolved to kind of work okay. But nobody really considered "the Zig IO stack" as a whole and put in design effort. That is happening for the first time right now.

This is how programming languages are constructed. Things evolve slowly over time, and periodically you have to reevaluate things and do major reworkings.
by mmastrac | 2025-07-04 16:07:05+00:00
I have a reasonably good solution for this project of mine you might find useful:

https://grack.com/demos/adventure/

The trick for me was just using a hidden input and updating the state of an in game input box. The code is ancient by today's standards but uses a reasonably simple technique to get the selection bounds of the text.

It works with auto complete on phones and has been stable for a decade.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-07-04 16:07:11+00:00
You don't need the "buy the house" part, which is actually bad advice now - renting is now half the cost of home ownership in many areas of the US.

But I strongly believe you're making this out to be much more difficult than it is if you are making decent (not "FAANG level") tech-type salaries. Where I live tech jobs generally pay at about double the amount of people in trades, for example. E.g. a mid-level software engineer is making at least 160-180k, while a trades person (plumber, etc.) with similar experience is making 80-90k.

So obviously if you can live at the level of these trades people, you can save up enough to be able to live without a salary for some time.

The problem is that most people just get used to their standard of living and find it hard to downsize. That's fine, but it's still very much a choice.
by bob1029 | 2025-07-04 16:07:31+00:00
> These days, we have servers with 384 CPU threads. Even a small VM can have 16 CPUs. The CPUs and memory are much faster as well.

With this hardware, if you reach for Kestrel you can easily do a few trillion requests per day. The development experience would be nearly identical - You can leverage the string interpolation operator for a PHP-like experience. LINQ and String.Join() open the door to some very terse HTML template syntax for tables and other nested elements.

The hard part is knowing how to avoid certain landmines in the ecosystem (MVC/Blazor/EF/etc.). The whole thing can live in one top-level program file that is ran on the CLI, but you need to know the magic keywords - "Minimal APIs" - or you will find yourself in the middle of the wrong documentation.
by kgwxd | 2025-07-04 16:07:35+00:00
Exciting and new doesn't necessarily mean novel. I get quite excited when I build a new bit of code that solves a frequent pain point for someone. It's likely built on a boring framework, in a boring language, wouldn't work at scale, and solves a boring problem only a few people have, but the drug makes for a nice little high, and the small business world has a huge supply.
by photochemsyn | 2025-07-04 16:07:55+00:00
Obviously a lot of design and engineering tasks these days don't have the goal of producing robust, repairable, long-lived hardware and software - where's the profit in that? If iphones lasted twice as long as they now do, wouldn't sales drop by 50% unless consumers decided they preferred the longer-lived phones? This would create pressure on all manufacturers to produce long-lived phones with easily replaceable batteries and publicly available repair kits. And what happens then? The entire market shrinks for all phone manufacturers, and the shareholders throw tantrums over lost profits.

In the late 19th and early 20th Gilded Age era, every industry was dominated by trusts, collusions of manufacturers who set up anti-compete systems to ensure such disruption of their industry by independent innovation wouldn't succeed. This is now being replayed in the tech industry for similar reasons.

There are two solutions to this problem that go together: anti-trust law and open-source hardware and software models - but for that to work, you need an educated population with and understanding of legal and scientific concepts, which is why the education system in the USA has been so deliberately degraded over the past few decades.

That's what happens when you let investment capitalists control everything, isn't it?
by WalterBright | 2025-07-04 16:08:35+00:00
What's interesting is that other languages have since adopted CTFE, but they missed the point and did it wrong. The usual mistake is to add a keyword necessary to trigger it. D triggers it when an expression appears where a "const-expression" appears in the grammar. I.e:

int x = f(); // f() is run at run time enum y = f(); // f() is run at compile time
by toast0 | 2025-07-04 16:09:09+00:00
> But to me, the interesting question is how the orcas worked out how the great whites had livers in the first place, and why they are the best bits (big bits) to eat?

The liver is like right there inside the shark. Open it up and have a look, and take a small bite of all the bits and figure out which tastes best. Might need to cooperate with a friend.
by alganet | 2025-07-04 16:10:30+00:00
I'm fairily confident that someone like Ben from Applied Science can both laminate circuits and write modern code.

https://www.youtube.com/@AppliedScience

https://github.com/benkrasnow

If he can, what's stopping you?

There are extraordinary people doing extraordinary things all around you. Aiming for these things is important, and we need those kinds of people with ambitious learning goals.