MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by severak | 2025-07-24 17:17:04+00:00
Rendering of Vector Tiles is not that hard as all the geometry is already processed, polygons assembled and data sorted. If you have good source of vector tiles renderer itself can be relatively dumb.

I was able to implement relatively straightforward renderer in Nim language[0].

I have encountered only three hard parts:

- rendering map labels on paths (this is really hard!) - how to render labels not to be clipped by tile boundary (I had some ideas but did not implemented it yet) - collisions between labels and symbols

[0] - https://github.com/severak/lunarender3/
by munificent | 2025-07-24 17:17:13+00:00
> This is where the concept of “Correct by construction” comes in.

This is one of the basic features of object-oriented programming that a lot of people tend to overlook these days in their repetitive rants about how horrible OOP is.

One of the key things OO gives you is constructors. You can't get an instance of a class without having gone through a constructor that the class itself defines. That gives you a way to bundle up some data and wrap it in a layer of validation that can't be circumvented. If you have an instance of Foo, you have a firm guarantee that the author of Foo was able to ensure the Foo you have is a meaningful one.

Of course, writing good constructors is hard because data validation is hard. And there are plenty of classes out there with shitty constructors that let you get your hands on broken objects.

But the language itself gives you direct mechanism to do a good job here if you care to take advantage of it.

Functional languages can do this too, of course, using some combination of abstract types, the module system, and factory functions as convention. But it's a pattern in those languages where it's a language feature in OO languages. (And as any functional programmer will happily tell you, a design pattern is just a sign of a missing language feature.)
by ethagknight | 2025-07-24 17:18:01+00:00
This is the manufacturing cost, not the retail MSRP.

_Never_ make the mistake of assuming a market is perfectly efficient and any corporate savings along the way will be passed along to the consumer.

When Apple or Google comes along and buys out next year's total TMSC output, that 80% of people will just have to buy whatever is on the shelf at the time.
by asdev | 2025-07-24 17:18:06+00:00
I think AI greatly reduces the starting costs for mundane tasks/boilerplate, for a reduction in velocity in implementation. So possibly an illusion that programmers feel more productive. It could be that RPE(Rate of perceived exertion) is lower when using AI for tasks, but raw throughput may be higher if programmers just do the jobs themselves and get into productive/flow state.
by dathinab | 2025-07-24 17:18:14+00:00
they seem very cooked

I think they have a lot of potential in the dedicated GPU space, but that is a consumer market so profit margins are smaller and they have potential in the low-to-mid-end market so even less margin. It's really sad as the competition there would help consumers.

the sad thing is, it was predictable. Wintel and other monopoly-like deals/situations had removed the need to compete/stay on edge from Intel. They then noticed it too late and made mistakes when trying to course correct/having to much innovation dept to effectively course correct screwed them up big

At the same time AMD again and again re-invented and optimized their development flow and experimented with alternative approaches and did not shy away from cooperating with TSMC and implicitly through that Nivdea and other (sometimes also Intel). Intel on the other hand AFIK got stuck on a approach where they had a edge over AMD but which was seem to have turned out to be somewhat of a dead end.

what is interesting is how TSMC has so far avoided the same kind of trap

- by having competing customers and having deep research co-operations with all the customers they brought competition and innovation back into a monopoly in a round about way like position

- having limited capacity of the newest tech which their competing customers bit for bring in monetary insensitive to innovate

- and them being somewhat of a life line for their country put a lot of pressure onto them to not break their own innovation machine for greed (e.g. by intentionally not expanding the availability of the latest node even when they technically could)
by anonymars | 2025-07-24 17:18:24+00:00
I'm not the person you were replying to originally, I was providing context for who Daryl Davis is and what he has done

That doesn't mean everyone else has to do the same thing, anymore than save the whales or end world hunger. Only that people aren't immutable and irredeemable and it's not fair to dismiss the idea of connecting with them as inherently ridiculous
by troupo | 2025-07-24 17:18:37+00:00
> I'm happy to let people think that AI does not yield productivity gains.

vs.

--- start quote ---

In a randomised controlled trial – the first of its kind – experienced computer programmers could use AI tools to help them write code.

--- end quote ---

Your quote is very representative of the magical wishful thinking most people have about AI: https://dmitriid.com/everything-around-llms-is-still-magical...
by elicash | 2025-07-24 17:18:49+00:00
I'm building things at a level of complexity I wouldn't have even attempted without AI.

This piece, however, only focuses on time spent on a task that could be done both ways. Even there, it falls short. Let's assume this study is correct and a specific coding task does take me 19% more time with AI. I can still be more productive because the AI doing some of the work allows me to do other tasks during that time.

I do worry about atrophy of my mind outsourcing too many tasks, admittedly. But that's a different issue.
by zozbot234 | 2025-07-24 17:18:56+00:00
> Now a race condition between one thread writing and another thread reading or writing a variable is a memory safety issue.

No it isn't, because the torn write cannot have arbitrary effects that potentially break the program. It only becomes such if you rely on such a variable to establish an invariant about memory that's broken if a torn write occurs (such as by encoding a ptr+len in it), which is just silly. Don't do that!
by florianherrengt | 2025-07-24 17:19:00+00:00
My bet isn't against progress. It is against magical timelines peddled by those with VC incentives. I don't want to build a career on hype, sprinkled with "maybe", "could" or "soon" and ignores the very real diminishing returns and bottlenecks we face today.

E.g: They kept predicting widespread fully autonomous vehicles. Significant progress has been made but a vehicle taking you from A to B without human oversight remain elusive.

Demand for great software developers isn't fading. Let's lean in and master our craft, not limit our growth by over-relying on AI.

Admittedly, I could be wrong. Maybe next year AI will be able to fully build software on its own and software engineering is dead. If you think that's true, why aren't you planning your career change right now?

If we land somewhere in the middle, what skills can I develop to become a better vibe coder which aren't just becoming a better software engineer generally? When I know exactly what to do, AI is just a faster typist. But when I'm stuck, if I outsource the solution entirely to AI, how do I actually learn and grow?
Show HN: I built a free video auto-captions generator app with offline AI
by danilofiumi | 2025-07-24 17:19:02+00:00
A while back, I got stuck in subtitle hell. All I wanted was a simple way to auto-generate captions for my videos—no paywalls, no upload limits, no “surprise, now you need a subscription” popups.

As a broke small creator and podcaster, I wasn’t about to drop a pile of cash on tools that watermark my stuff and send my files who-knows-where.

So I built my own.

I made it free, offline-first and available for Mac (Apple Silicon). Just drag in your video, and it spits out clean, accurate subtitles using the local OpenAI’s Whisper model you choose.

What’s the deal? - Animated subtitles that don’t look like they’re from the 90s - Whisper does the heavy lifting (so the subtitles actually make sense) - Runs fully offline—your videos never leave your computer - Free forever—no subscriptions, no "pro" upsell, no watermarks - Fast, local processing (great for long videos or bad Wi-Fi)

I made this because I needed it, but I’m betting I’m not the only one tired of subtitle headaches. Hope this can help!

Danilo
X Ads blew past my $70 cap and spent $9.7k–budgeting nuance or bug?
by nischalb | 2025-07-24 17:19:11+00:00
Set up a tiny Sales campaign on X Ads to test out their new sales feature:

- Daily budget: SGD 7 - Total cap: SGD 70 - Campaign Budget Optimization: OFF - Weekly billing limits set

Actual result: - Spend: SGD 9,699 - Impressions: 36,886 - Clicks: 75 (≈ SGD 129/click) - CTR: 0.20%

All the spending happened on 1 single day: July 21st.

Before I blame a bug, I'd love to know: 1. Did I misunderstand how caps are enforced (Sales objective / CBO toggle / ad group overrides)? 2. Known UI vs billing mismatches on X Ads? 3. Debug checklist you'd run?

Happy to hear “this was your fault” if that’s the case—just want to learn. Thanks!
by kogus | 2025-07-24 17:19:13+00:00
I am not an expert on SQL/PSM, but I have worked in an Oracle shop before, and used PL/SQL extensively. In SQL Server, the equivalent is T-SQL. T-SQL procedures can do pretty much anything (assuming it is executed by a user with sufficient privileges), including creating and altering tables, creating and executing other procedures, running dynamic sql, as well as ordinary CRUD style operations. The "no side effect" limitation applies specifically to SQL functions.
by kindkang2024 | 2025-07-24 17:19:23+00:00
I've always found his Wille fascinating, ever since college. Perhaps his Wille has found a way into my mind, competing with all the others and survived. (Wille as Recycled Thoughts)

However, I diverge from his pessimistic view: that the Wille is a blind impulse condemning life to a tragedy. I believe all wills originate from love—whether for the ego or for the world (other egos). This doesn't create a cycle of suffering, but could be a drive towards peace and happiness. In that sense, I feel that Wille has mutated and evolved a bit.

P.S. If you're interested in Schopenhauer, check out this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-djIdl8WO4 SCHOPENHAUER Explained: The World as Will and Representation (ALL PARTS) by Weltgeist—he really did a great job of representing that Wille.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-24 17:19:39+00:00
> "Automate yourself out of a job” is a common sysadmin mantra after all

Not just sysadmin. I've been automating the hell out of tedious mundane tasks that are done by error prone humans, and only become more error prone as they get tired/bored of these mundane tasks. The automation essentially just becomes a new tool/app for the humans to use.

At this point of my experience doing this, employees scared of automation are probably employees that aren't very good at their job. Employees that embrace this type of automation are the ones that tend to be much better at their job.
by ike2792 | 2025-07-24 17:19:58+00:00
I think the first set of quotes are from people trying to sell something, while the second set are based on real data and people who have actually worked with AI. I'm a engineering manager over some infrastructure teams and we've tried to use it for network monitoring without any success. It seems like it would be handy; who doesn't want to query the state of your infra in natural language? The problem is it gives non-deterministic results and occasionally just makes things up. All the developers I know who use Github Copilot say it's very buggy and often makes coding take more time if they use it for any autogeneration.
by no_wizard | 2025-07-24 17:19:58+00:00
No idea. I do know they all have access to Cursor and tried different models, even the more expensive options.

What you're describing though, having to go through that elaborate detail really drives to my point though, and I think shows a weakness in these tools that is a hidden cost to scaling their productivity benefits.

What I can tell you though both from observation and experience, is that because the corpus for TypeScript / JavaScript is infinitely larger as it stands today, even Gemini 2.5 Pro will 'get to correct' faster even with middling prompt(s) vs for a language like Rust.
by quxbar | 2025-07-24 17:20:07+00:00
I now have the pleasure of giving exercises to candidates where they are explicitly allowed to use any AI or autocomplete that they want, but it's one of those tricky real-world problems where you'll only get yourself into trouble if you only follow the model's suggestions. It really separates the builders from the bureaucrats far more effectively than seeing who can whiteboard or leetcode.
by danking00 | 2025-07-24 17:20:17+00:00
Feather appears to just be block compressed Arrow IPC [1]. Lightweight compression techniques generally achieve two orders of magnitude faster random access compared to block compression. That’s one of the benefits of formats like FastLanes, Vortex, DuckDB native, etc. DuckDB has a good blog post about it here: https://duckdb.org/2022/10/28/lightweight-compression.html

[1]: https://arrow.apache.org/docs/python/feather.html
by floatrock | 2025-07-24 17:20:40+00:00
> Competition may avoid dark patterns.

Oh bless your heart.

You don't even need to bring up corporate collusion, countless price gouging schemes, or the entire enshittification movement to understand that competition discovers the dark patterns. Dark patterns aren't something to be avoided, they're the natural evolution of ever-tighter competition.

When the eyeball is the product, you get more checks if you get more eyeballs. Dark patterns are how you chum the water to attract the most product.
by frakt0x90 | 2025-07-24 17:20:48+00:00
He wasn't exactly doing it out the goodness of his heart. From the same article:

"Ford was also motivated by a desire to squeeze out his minority shareholders, especially the Dodge brothers, whom he suspected (correctly) of using their Ford dividends to build a rival car company. By cutting off their dividends, Ford hoped to starve the Dodges of capital to fuel their growth."
by ryandrake | 2025-07-24 17:20:58+00:00
> First - Dubai is notable having grown from a fishing village to making money on oil to - wisely - finding a way to move beyond oil into something that's sustainable and beneficial. That's admirable even on its own.

I think one of the main points of the article is that what they are doing is only sustainable because it is sustained on the backs of exploited, disposable, imported labor. Just because it's slightly better than not being employed at all doesn't make it right.
by CharlesW | 2025-07-24 17:21:07+00:00
Except that the participants were thrown into tasks cold, seemingly without even the most basic prep one would/should do before throwing AI at a legacy codebase (sometimes called "LLM grounding" or "LLM context bootstrapping"). If the participants started without something like this, the study was either conducted incorrectly or was designed to support a certain conclusion.

LLMs.md ├── data_model.md ├── architecture.md ├── infrastructure.md ├── business_logic.md ├── known_issues.md └── conventions.md
by immibis | 2025-07-24 17:21:12+00:00
Same reason as any other LAN party though. Like, you (average HN user) probably would wonder what's in the treehouse. But show it to a 9 year old and they'll say: fuck yeah, awesome treehouse, I want one. Filling it with activities comes later.

DN42 (https://dn42.network/) is kind of like this but public, mostly used to play with networking technologies though you could also use it to make a virtual LAN party.

Note: If you do, you should probably check the paths your traffic takes and get consent of everyone on the path, since most people expect to mostly pass network-control traffic and some nodes have very limited bandwidth. Fortunately, AS-paths in DN42 are usually quite short. If all your LAN party traffic is confined to your own network then obviously it's not a problem.

If you built one of these you could also connect it to DN42 as-is, being aware more people will be able to access your network if not firewalled.
by kccqzy | 2025-07-24 17:21:24+00:00
Good story! I totally didn't know about the trick of changing what the JIT code produces bypassing JNI overhead.

> Never have I ever seen such a highly optimized Java codebase. Not before, not since.

This makes me wonder where it was. I know in the fintech world there's at least one hedge fund (not HFT, not market maker) where all their latency-sensitive trading code is written in Java, and when I asked them about GC pauses they said that their hot path produces no garbage so GC doesn't kick in.
by troupo | 2025-07-24 17:21:26+00:00
> My problem with it is that it encourages unsafe behavior.

Then why don't Linux distributions encourage safe behaviour? Why do you still need sudo permissions to install anything on most Linux systems?

> How many times will a novice user follow that pattern until some jerk on discord

I'm not a novice user and I will use this pattern because it's frankly easier and faster, especially when the current distro doesn't have some combination of things installed, or doesn't have certain packages, or...
by thewebguyd | 2025-07-24 17:21:58+00:00
> t could be that RPE(Rate of perceived exertion) is lower when using AI for tasks, but raw throughput may be higher if programmers just do the jobs themselves and get into productive/flow state.

I think you're onto something with this take, based on my own experience. I definitely agree that my RPE seems lower when I'm using AI for things, whether it actually is making me more productive or not over the long term remains to be seen but things do certainly "feel" easier/less cognitively demanding. Which, tbh, is still a benefit even if it doesn't result in large gains in output. Putting in less cognitive load at work just conserves my energy for things that matter - everything else outside of $dayjob.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-24 17:22:03+00:00
> But some of the people who were doing low skilled jobs will grow to compete with you.

Yes, and this is not shocking. This is how it is meant to work. You get a low level job because you're new and have a lot to learn. You learn more things as you work the low level job, and then you can get promoted or move to a new role that is not so low level. You keep growing until you eventually compete with the people that were senior level when you were working that low level job.
by miki123211 | 2025-07-24 17:22:09+00:00
Open AI is transforming those works, Deepseek is not.

OpenAI takes in code, books and articles and produces a model. This model can be used for novel tasks, like paraphrasing your own writing, translating your text to a different language, writing code according to a provided specification etc, even if there was nothing in the original corpus that exactly solved your problem.

To produce this model, you need four ingredients. The data, the compute, research effort and a lot of tedious RLHF work. While OpenAI uses the first one without providing author compensation (and it has no other option here), the latter three it provides entirely on its own.

People distilling from OpenAI do not create transformative works. They take Open AI's model and make a model of their own. Both models can do very similar things and are suitable for very similar purposes.

Distillation is just a particularly easy way of making an inexact copy of the model weights. The values of those weights will be very different, just as the values of each pixel in an illicit camera recording of a movie at a cinema are very different from those in the original version, but the net result is the same.
by benlivengood | 2025-07-24 17:22:22+00:00
If you're like me, though, your day-to-day has probably shifted a lot.

My day used to be making sure desktops worked and we had a repeatable process to make new good desktops out of all the complex client software they needed.

Then I made sure servers got upgraded and patched and taken care of on a day-to-day level, although it was still someone else's job to keep desktops running. At home I compiled my own kernels and used tarballs to install and update packages. Desktop hardware support was iffy in Linux.

Then I jumped to borg and tupperware and kubernetes where hardware never mattered and it almost didn't matter what clients had because the browser they used auto-updated. At home I switched to distros where package management was automatic and rarely, if ever, broke.

I don't even know the hostnames or the network addresses of the hardware that runs my services, and AWS or GCP SREs probably rarely need to know either. Now I care about an abstract thing called a service that is instrumented with logs, metrics, and traces that would put the best local development tools of 20 years ago to shame. CI/CD and infrastructure as code pipelines actually did automate away many of the checklist-style sysadmin work of the past. At home I could run Talos and Ceph and Crossplane if I wanted to but so far I've dragged the old days of individual hosts along mostly for nostalgia.

I expect to eventually end up caring about systems at an even more abstract level once something like Crossplane becomes as universal as Terraform and GitHub actions. They'll probably run on something like web assembly on bare metal because no one actually cares what's underneath their containers if they keep working.

The stack of technology gets taller and more abstract and as it does so the job of caring about the lower layers gets automated and the lower layers get, if not simplified, standardized to the point that automation is more reliable than human intervention.

Humans will only get squeezed out of the loop when superhuman artificial intelligence arrives and our abstract design and management of systems becomes less reliable than the automation. Then hopefully we get a nice friendly button to push for more automatically-human-aligned utility.

EDIT: That's not to say that the lower levels can be automatically designed; not yet at least. Eventually once AI is good enough at formal design then quite likely. We still need low-level software engineering to keep building the stack but it is vastly more commoditized (the one open source developer in the xkcd cartoon keeping 99% of the world's infrastructure running on a 20-year old tool/utility)
by simonw | 2025-07-24 17:22:30+00:00
That METR paper - discussed here two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44522772 - has so much sticking power.

It's not a bad paper, but it's also turning into a fantastic illustration of how much thirst there is out there for anything that shows that AI productivity doesn't work.

I just learned there was a 4 minute TV news segment about it on CNBC! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP4Ird7jZoA
by ohdeargodno | 2025-07-24 17:23:12+00:00
Language.Builder().getOh().getYes().getJava().getIsSoNice().setFor(() -> { return "DSLs";});

No trailing lambdas, no infix operators, no @DslMarkers, no top level functions, and an infinite list of examples of Java verbosity making even the smallest thing look like an ancient greek epic. Java is utterly terrible for DSLs.
by refulgentis | 2025-07-24 17:23:24+00:00
(not op)

Gosh, I was conflicted, then you pulled out that sentence and I was convinced. :)

Alternatively: When faced with a contradiction, first, check your premises.

I don't want to belabor the point too much, there's little common ground if we're at all or nothing thinking - "the study proved AI is net-negative because of this pull quote" isn't discussion.