MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pandaman | 2025-07-04 15:47:22+00:00
These do not explain how DXY[1] had been rallying up and started falling at the end of September 2022. At that time, if you don't recall, Trump was facing prison time and the US government was in the reliable hands of the most popular president ever with his cabinet of brilliant minds.

1. https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/TVC-DXY/?timeframe=60M
by wyager | 2025-07-04 15:48:30+00:00
> Large language models are impressive statistical text predictors — genuinely useful tools that excel at pattern matching and interpolation.

Slightly OT: It's interesting how many (smart!) people in tech like the author of this article still can't conceptualize the difference between training objective and learned capability. I wonder at this point if it's a sort of willful ignorance adopted as a psychological protection mechanism. I wonder if they're going to experience a moment of severe shock, just gradually forget that they held these opinions, or take on a sort of delusional belief that AI can't do XYZ despite all mounting evidence to the contrary.
by palata | 2025-07-04 15:48:37+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".

But it's not specifically about assembly, it's about software design. You can take a modern programming language (say Swift or Rust) and look at how software written with those languages is architected, and the points still stand: abstractions above abstractions above abstractions because people don't understand the lower levels.

People routinely write completely wrong CMakeLists and then complain about CMake being "sooo bad". But give them Meson and they will make a mess as well. People have no clue about packaging and distribution, so they will say "it sucks sooo badly" and will distribute their code as a docker container, embedded in a 6GB Ubuntu image. Most emails you receive just contain a couple lines of useful information, yet they are generated by higher-level systems, full of HTML and bullshit and it's impossible to read in a simple client. Etc.

Software quality is going down year after year, it is a fact. Probably because it is becoming more and more accessible, but the fact remains.
by freigeist79 | 2025-07-04 15:48:51+00:00
Now is a great time to study AI. LLMs are just big neural networks , understanding how they work is most relevant. Yesterday I trained a small regression model on text embeddings for LLM preprocessing, classic ML is still very much in use. So it’s not too late at all. The fundamentals matter more than ever if you want to go beyond just calling APIs.
by vaylian | 2025-07-04 15:48:54+00:00
> Ideally I'd like to be able to write types in typescript, and write python types, then verify that the types are compatible (not identical)

Have a look at https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/

FastAPI allows you to define your types in Python using Pydantic for stronger type guarantees. FastAPI also generates an OpenAPI.json file for your backend and then you can feed this OpenAPI.json document into https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator to generate a typescript library that contains all the types. Then you don't need to verify your types, because the typescript types will be directly generated from your Python types. The generated typescript library also contains methods for each of your REST endpoints, so that you don't have to think about network requests.
by tombert | 2025-07-04 15:48:56+00:00
There plenty of things that won’t make a noticeable difference in the output, especially in libraries.

Let’s suppose I make a slight more efficient implementation of green threads, for example. I do not see how that would affect the output in a way that would be obvious, even if the library is non-trivial. Even if I slapped it with a GPL, I don’t see how I would realistically be able to check if they broke the license without first auditing the code, which I couldn’t do without a discovery request, which I likely wouldn’t have grounds for even if I could afford the lawyers for a lawsuit.
by vidarh | 2025-07-04 15:49:00+00:00
For the vast majority of them, rented servers at a managed hosting provider would beat cloud in price hands down, but for some the difference might be small enough once they've actually optimised their cloud setup that it's a judgement call. I usually recommend clients plan for optimizing their cloud setup first, both to get a fair comparison and also because a lot of the assessments you need to do of your cloud environment to do that will also make it easier to figure out what you'd pay for a managed hosting setup as well (e.g. understanding base load vs. spikes, durability requirements for different subsets of storage etc.)

For some of them, a colo facility would be cheaper, but that's highly dependent on where you want to host it (e.g. I'm in London - putting things in a colo in London is really hard to make cost effective vs. renting servers somewhere with lower land costs; data centre operators are real-estate plays)

However, you can usually make managed hosting/colo even cheaper by sprinkling some cloud in. E.g. a "trick" that can work amazingly well is to set up the bare minimum to let you spin up what you need to handle traffic spikes in a cloud environment, and then set up monitoring for your load balancer so that you start scaling into the cloud environment once load hits a certain level, but use only the managed hosting below that level.

That way, you almost never end up actually spinning up cloud instances, but you gain the ability to run the managed hosting environment far closer to the wire than you could otherwise safely do, and drive your cost per request down accordingly.
by barrkel | 2025-07-04 15:49:42+00:00
It's not really true. There are many session-scoped flags you can set which influence planner behavior, and sometimes toggling them for a specific query is what gets you through. More often, judicious use of CTEs as an optimization barrier (materialized CTE in moderrn versions) is useful to force execution order.

I like that Postgres has a lot of tools at its disposal for executing queries. But you can't rely on it for data even with modest scale. It's rare that it does a good job with interesting queries.
by AndyKelley | 2025-07-04 15:50:36+00:00
Hi Isaac, good to (virtually) see you.

As you're aware, that feature of the language ("stackless coroutines", "generators", "rewriting function logic into a state machine") was regressed. At first, this new IO interface won't have that capability.

However, as a followup issue, I'd like to reintroduce it, potentially in more low-level manner, for use inside IO implementations. Combined with restricted function pointers, this will allow functions that can suspend to pass through runtime-known function pointer boundaries - something that was terribly clunky before to the point that it compromised the entire design. This means that, again, the same IO interface usage code will be able to be reused, including when the implementation uses suspend points, and the automatic calling convention rewriting will be able to propagate through the interface into the usage code.

The issue to track is: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/23446

I'll add that I'm still keen on the previous suspend/resume keywords and semantics as a solution to this issue.
by bell-cot | 2025-07-04 15:52:11+00:00
> Within a month of his arrival at Downing Street, anonymous sources described Larry as having "a distinct lack of killer instinct."[11] Later that year, it was revealed that Larry spent more time sleeping than hunting for mice, and shared the company of a female cat, Maisie.[12] At one point in 2011, mice were so endemic in Downing Street that the Prime Minister, David Cameron, resorted to throwing a fork at one during a Cabinet dinner.[12]

Not to speak well of Britain's current leadership, nor ill of the theory behind it - but they need to split the Chief Mouser office into a symbolic head of state, and an actual working leader. Perhaps "His Meowjesty", and a "Prime Mouser"?

For extra fun - pay for their upkeep via "gifts" from members of the press, who hope to receive juicy leaks and preferential access (both only relating to the cats) in return.
by globnomulous | 2025-07-04 15:52:16+00:00
Music is actually a terrific counterexample to your point. It perfectly demonstrates the culturally and artistically destructive power of the steady march of progress in computer technology -- which really has led to fewer drummers.

Far fewer people make their living as musicians than did even thirty years ago, and being a musician is no longer a viable middle-class career. Jaron Lanier, who has written on this, has argued that it's the direct result of the advent of the internet, music piracy, and streaming -- two of which originally were expected or promised to provide more opportunities for artists, not take them away.

So there really are far fewer drummers, and fewer, worse opportunities for those who remain, than there were within the living memory of even most HN users, not because some specific musical technology advanced but because technological advancement provided an easier, cheaper alternative to human labor.

Sound familiar yet?
by thisisit | 2025-07-04 15:52:20+00:00
I honestly don't get this take. It treats US as special outlier. Right wing populists have won elections in many countries. While in other places RW populism is finding some foothold.

Truth is people all over the world are frustrated by how their lives are turning out.

On one hand they see politicians who want to keep the status quo and make promises which wouldn't change their lives. That is the Democrats in US. Too comfortable with their power.

On the other hand Right Wing populist promise simple answers to complex questions. Many of these populist leaders are seen as "outsider". Many places are seeing rise in anti-immigrant and anti-poor sentiments. Because that is the simplest answer - outsiders/freeloaders are to blame for all the issues.

By the time people realize that they have been fooled by the RW simplistic answer it is already too late. Either there is catastrophic damage (ex.. Brexit) or dictatorship (ex. Hungary).

Nearly every country thinks it is unique and can come out of this unscathed. But no one can escape the damage. Some people still think that Trump as a dictator is long shot. But that is what is happening. And people cheering him on have something to gain or they have fallen for the simple answer - "outsiders are to blame".
by lgas | 2025-07-04 15:52:22+00:00
> notable because many other common agent definitions have the tools as required, not optional.

This feels weird to me. I would think of an agent with no tools as the trivial case of a "null agent" or "empty agent".

It would be like saying you can't have a list with no elements because that's not a list at all... but an empty list is actually quite useful in many contexts. Which is why almost all implementations in all languages allow empty lists and add something distinct like a NonEmptyList to handle that specific case.
by Venn1 | 2025-07-04 15:53:11+00:00
Low cost x86_64 solutions beat the pants off ARM in the PPPITA (performance per pain in the arse) department. The Raspberry Pi software ecosystem advantage nopes the moment x86 shows up to the party. Granted, it does suck the fun out of spending a weekend trying to get an application to compile.

Whether it's Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, Banana Pi, or anything similar, by the time you buy the SBC and accessories, you're looking at around $100. The N100 or N150 are obvious choices if you're looking for a small, low power block of silicon to get something done.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-07-04 15:53:20+00:00
Glad this was the top comment. It is extremely easy to "leave tech" (or, as you point out, leave "big tech") - you just have to accept that you will most likely make substantially less money and that your "standard of living" will have to adjust accordingly.

I put "standard of living" in scare quotes because I strongly believe that, after a certain point in the US, people are conditioned by society and marketing to spend gobs of money on shit that doesn't make them happier and often actively makes them feel worse. I'm going through the process of moving and downsizing, and I can't even begin to go through the gobs of crap in my house that I'm throwing or giving away. Even home ownership itself is something that I feel is a bad lie - you're signing up to spend huge amounts of money to live in a box where you'll also need to spend huge amounts of money to slow its inevitable decay.

But I digress. The main point is that leaving (or changing) tech is easy, but you just have to have an honest conversation with yourself about how much you, your family and your self image requires a lot of money.
by palata | 2025-07-04 15:53:21+00:00
If you look e.g. at websites, I think we can measure that the average website today is slower to load than 15 years ago, even though hardware is orders of magnitude faster.

Another thing is that today, you receive updates. So bugs get fixed, new bugs get introduced, it makes it harder to track other than "well, there are always bugs". Back then, a bug was there for life, burnt on your CD-ROM. I'm pretty sure software shipped on CD-ROM was a lot more tested than what we deploy now. You probably wouldn't burn thousands of CD-ROM with a "beta" version. Now the norm is to ship beta stuff and use 0-based versioning [1] because we can't make anything stable.

Lastly, hardware today is a lot cheaper than 25 years ago. So now you buy a smartphone, it breaks after a year, you complain for 5min and you buy a new one. Those devices are almost disposable. 25 years ago you had to spend a lot of money on a PC, so it had to last for a while and be repairable.

[1]: https://0ver.org/
by nativeit | 2025-07-04 15:53:59+00:00
What about my initial comment is incorrect?

Edit: Fun fact, I cannot edit my original comment. But over-zealous flaggers seem to have taken care of it on my behalf. Unclear as to what about that comment deserved flagging, I guess raising concerns for the OPs admittedly problematic project is broadly the same behavior as the racist troll account who was previously active in this thread. Well done moralizing my original moralizing. The irony is…well pretty mundane in this case, really.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-04 15:54:21+00:00
>calling him a systems thinker is a hard sell

You have a man who was not part of the elite establishment and yet has managed to get wealthy by breaking the law and avoid getting caught, then managed to become president against all odds, twice.

Sure, he came from wealth, but plenty of other people came from even more wealth and had way more political connections and failed to become presidents.

Hate him all you want, but if achieving all that is not a form of intelligence and system knowledge, I don't know what is.
by theshackleford | 2025-07-04 15:55:00+00:00
> I mean, that's a different issue. When you asked them, they were happy, they gave good feedback.

The point remains that you don't need to "buy" reviews. You don't need to give out coupons, or gift cards, or rewards or in fact anything. Hence why I said "it's not that complicated" as per:

> You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review.

Why pay for what you can get for free?
by sureglymop | 2025-07-04 15:55:17+00:00
Thanks for all the details. I cloned the repo now to take a look.

If I see it correctly here, it's a full sveltekit backend that does ssr, and not just used for serving static files. The +page.ts file has a universal load function so during ssr, the sveltekit backend loads data from the rust backend and later during hydration the client also loads data directly from the rust backend without the requests being proxied through the sveltekit backend.

I'm guessing in production one would proxy all requests through the sveltekit backend (or another proxy) as you mentioned.

Also, if we would run them both in the same location or in a container, wouldn't it be much better to use unix domain sockets for the IPC?
by leonardopiumi | 2025-07-04 15:55:28+00:00
I’ll be the first to admit it — my company is, in many ways, a wrapper. But here’s the thing: I didn’t build it to chase hype. I built it because I’ve been in those endless pre-production loops as a creative — spending days (and budgets) working with storyboard artists just to get a rough visual sense of a script. It was slow, expensive, and inaccessible to a lot of people with great ideas.

So I built Shai with one focus: help filmmakers and creatives go from script to visual faster — while keeping things consistent and usable in real workflows. Not just cool prompts. Not just AI for AI’s sake.

And despite all the new flashy tools dropping every week, Shai keeps growing. Tens of thousands of users now. People use it because it solves a real need — not because it’s the most advanced tech on the block.

Sometimes I feel like I’m just quietly building while the hype cycles spin around me. But honestly? I’m okay with that. Let the hype run its course. I’ll keep solving real problems.
by gametorch | 2025-07-04 15:55:48+00:00
I guess sometimes I have to do some minor debugging myself. But I really haven't encountered what you're experiencing.

Early on, I realized that you have to start a new "chat" after so many messages or the LLM will become incoherent. I've found that gpt-4.1 has a much lower threshold for this than o3. Maybe that's affecting your workflow and you're not realizing it?
by skydhash | 2025-07-04 15:56:21+00:00
> And that's before we get into how all these systems and agents are completely non-deterministic,

And that is the main issue. For some the value is reproducible results, for others, as long as they got a good result, it's fine.

It's like coin tossing. You may want tail all the time, because that's your chosen bet. You may prefer tail, but don't mind losing money if it's head. You may not interested in either, but you're doing the tossing and wants to know the techniques that works best for getting tail. Or you're just trying and if it's tail, your reaction is only "That's interesting".

The coin itself does not matter and the tossing is just an action. The output is what get judged. And the judgment will vary based on the person doing it.

So software engineering used to be the pursuit of tail of the time (by putting the coin on the ground, not tossing it). Then LLMs users say it's fine to toss the coin, because you'll get tail eventually. And companies are now pursuing the best coin tossing techniques to get tail. And for some, when the coin tossing gives tail, they only say "that's a nice toss".
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-07-04 15:56:24+00:00
>That TI-99/4A still boots because it was designed by people who understood every component, every circuit, every line of code. It works because it was built to work, not to generate quarterly revenue or collect user data or enable some elaborate software-as-a-service business model.

The methods and algorithms powering advances in modern science, medicine, communications, entertainment, etc. would be impossible to develop, much less run, on something so rudimentary as a TI-99/4A. The applications we harness our technology for have become much more sophisticated, and so too must the technology stacks underpinning them, to the point that no single individual can understand everything. Take something as simple as real time video communication, something we take for granted today. There is no single person in the world who deeply understands every single aspect, from the semiconductor engineering involved in the manufacture of display and image sensors, to the electronics engineering behind the communication to/from the display/sensor, to the signal processing and compression algorithms used to encode the video, to the network protocols used to actually transmit the video, to the operating system kernel's scheduler capable of performing at sufficiently low-latency to run the videochat app.

By analogy, one can understand and construct every component of a mud hut or log cabin, but no single person is capable of understanding, much less constructing, every single component of a modern skyscraper.
by IgorPartola | 2025-07-04 15:56:34+00:00
One of the best things you can do is generate a key per device, not per person. That way if you lose your phone you just revoke that key and not the one that you use on your tablet, work laptop, home desktop, etc.

Bonus points: monkeysphere and certificate based auth are two other great solutions for making sure the ssh server you log into is not doing a MITM on initial connection (you know, the part where it asks you to manually verify the fingerprint of the server key and you likely just hit y instead).

Forwarding your ssh agent to a host that you don’t know for certain is not doing a MITM attack on you can be devastating, as is entering a password into same.
by alganet | 2025-07-04 15:56:55+00:00
If I break some source code by messing with it, I know what happened. I might even learn from it.

Now if npm breaks it, or Claude breaks it, a developer might not even know what was broken.

He's talking about that kind of thing, not the resilience of code to take random character deletions.

IT is very much non-specialized compared to older disciplines. It's so young. Every single one of us is still a jack of all trades in some degree.

You're relying on the "don't roll your own crypto" popular quote to drop the mic. That's misguided. This advice comes from an argument of strength by numbers, not anything related to abstractions. It tells me you don't understand it.
by benreesman | 2025-07-04 15:57:35+00:00
I don't really disagree with anything you've said, other than a vague sort of discomfort around practicality. I dislike market failures very much, I war-crime dislike engineered market failures (the two co-occur with alarming frequency).

But markets are effectively part of the natural world: if you engineer the most oppressive, regimented, panopticon nightmare prison available to human deviousness you will succeed in creating a black market, not in eliminating markets.

So any solution has to be about preventing market failures, not eliminating markets. If North Korea can't effectively inhibit markets from forming, it's a pretty convincing demonstration that no acceptable amount of anti-market intervention is going to be okay.
by thomassmith65 | 2025-07-04 15:58:03+00:00
I'm not sure, in 2025, if there is a model of car that the public universally considers the world's ugliest.

In the 1980s there was such a car: it was a 1970s Pinto with wood panelling.

https://barnfinds.com/woodie-wagon-1975-ford-pinto-squire/
by fragmede | 2025-07-04 15:58:26+00:00
CSS is the devil and I fully admit to burning many hours of dev time, mine without an LLM, an LLM by itself, and a combination of the two together to iron out similar layout nonsense for a game I was helping a friend with. In the end, what solved it was breaking things into hierarchical react components and adding divs by hand and using the chrome dev tools inspector, and good old fashioned human brain power to solve it. The other one was translating a python script to rust. I let the LLM run me around in circles, but what finally did it was using Google to find a different library to use, and then to tell the LLM to use that library instead.