MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gessha | 2025-07-19 16:16:23+00:00
A well-built laptop can last you just as long. I’ve been rocking a tricked out Dell XPS for 9 years now and it’s still going strong. It’s really hard to find something better on the market. If I could only change the motherboard with a slightly updated APU like the strix halo or current gen AMD solution, I couldn't be happier.
by nirvanatikku | 2025-07-19 16:16:43+00:00
This article is spot on.

I had stumbled upon Kidlin’s Law—“If you can write down the problem clearly, you’re halfway to solving it”.

This is a powerful guiding principle in today’s AI-driven world. As natural language becomes our primary interface with technology, clearly articulating challenges not only enhances our communication but also maximizes the potential of AI.

The async approach to coding has been most fascinating, too.

I will add, I've been using Repl.it *a lot*, and it takes everything to another level. Getting to focus on problem solving, and less futzing with hosting (granted it is easy in the early journey of a product) - is an absolute game changer. Sparking joy.

I personally use the analogy of mario kart mushroom or star; that's how I feel using these tools. It's funny though, because when it goes off the rails, it really goes off the rails lol. It's also sometimes necessary to intercept decisions it will take.. babysitting can take a toll (because of the speed of execution). Having to deal with 1 stack was something.. now we're dealing with potential infinite stacks.
by Sophia95 | 2025-07-19 16:16:46+00:00
Evolution is the only client on Linux (that I’m aware of) that fully supports Microsoft exchange and Google out of the box without any plugins. I used thunderbird for a long time, however I got frustrated so many times after things broke after every update because essential plugins stopped working. Yes, you may say Evolution UI is old, but the software is rock solid and softwares in general are more than their GUI. It’s good to bring awareness about the tracking but I’m not so bothered by it, as its hard to find software that doesn’t track you these days
by stevekemp | 2025-07-19 16:16:50+00:00
Some sites seem to really struggle with recommendations - after looking at 20+ washing machines, over a period of weeks, I bought one recently.

I'm a normal adult and now I will probably not even consider buying another washing machine for the next ten years, and yet my recommendations? More. Washing. Machines.

Many recommendation-sites are exactly like that - I read books 1-4 of a particular author, so of course I want the same genre, along with every other book by that same author.. Terrible.
by mike-cardwell | 2025-07-19 16:17:21+00:00
If only the developers of Evolution Mail made any effort to get the issue fixed in the 15 months they've known about it.

It's unacceptable to sit on a privacy affecting bug like this for 15 months.

This continously repeated bullshit that the source of the problem lies elsehwere is tiring. They're knowingly using a library with a security bug, and they're doing:

1. Nothing to get the devs of that library to fix it

2. Nothing to fix the library themselves

3. Nothing to warn their users

4. Nothing in their local application to protect their users.

This is not how secure development works.
by hinkley | 2025-07-19 16:18:23+00:00
No, this is a statistics trope. “Our revenue has grown 50x this year” always means “our revenue was <something laughable like $100> and now it’s <something still laughable like $5000>”

Because when your revenue goes from $10 million to half a billion, you just say that. Percentages are papering over bad initial or final conditions.
by mirdaki | 2025-07-19 16:18:29+00:00
With previous setups, I was certainly guilt of not upgrading and doing the maintenance needed. That's one reason why I like using NixOS and ZFS. Both provide really easy rollback options. So all I need to do is run an update and rebuild. If things work, no more for me to do. If things don't, I can try debugging or just revert back to the previous release till I have time to

But also I think using a cloud provider is fine if you're happy with the experience. It is a time sink to get things setup and it's not zero maintenance time. It's reasonable to weight those costs
by schneems | 2025-07-19 16:18:40+00:00
The input to output ratio is interesting. We are usually optimizing for volume of output, but now it’s inverted. I actually don’t want maximum output, I want the work split up into concrete, verifiable steps and that’s difficult to achieve consistently.

Ive taken to co-writing a plan with requirements with cursor and it works really well at first. But as it makes mistakes and we use those mistakes to refine the document eventually we are ready to “go” and suddenly it’s generating a large volume of code that directly contradicts something in the plan. Small annoyances like its inability to add an empty line after markdown headings have to be explicitly re added and re-reminded.

I almost wish I had more control over how it was iterating. Especially when it comes to quality and consistency.

When I/we can write a test and it can grind on that is when AI is at its best. It’s a closed problem. I need the tools to help me, help it, turn the open problem I’m trying to solve into a set of discrete closed problems.
by yencabulator | 2025-07-19 16:18:53+00:00
Meanwhile reports from Russia's war on Ukraine say there's commercial US GPS devices taped to their fighter jet dashboards, and much of their manufacturing relies on breaking chip sale sanctions by hiding behind intermediaries.

https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-su34-jets-basic-gps-r...

https://www.globaldefensecorp.com/2022/06/21/exposed-capture...
by amluto | 2025-07-19 16:19:11+00:00
I’m not talking about data loss if the host crashes. I’m talking about a much broader sense of correctness.

Imagine an RPC server that uses persistent connections. If you reply using a buffered writer and forget to flush, then your tail latency blows up, possibly to infinity. It’s very easy to imagine situations involving multiple threads or processes that simply don’t work if buffers aren’t flushed on time.

Imagine a program that is intended to crash on error but writes a log message first. If it buffers and doesn’t flush, then the log message will almost always get lost, whereas if the writer is unbuffered or is flushed, then the message will usually not get lost.
by boldlybold | 2025-07-19 16:19:27+00:00
We need to change this perception. Setting up a hot wallet on a phone only takes a few minutes and is perfect for holding a small amount of crypto.

Projects like monero (https://www.getmonero.org/) ensure privacy and fungibility of the crypto you hold.

It should still be easier, but let's not pretend this is technology only available to those with deep tech experience.
by jdietrich | 2025-07-19 16:19:38+00:00
As a professional writer, the author of this post is likely a better writer than 99.99% of the population. A quick skim of his blog suggests that he's comfortably more intelligent than 99% of people. I think it's totally unsurprising that he isn't fully satisfied with the output of LLMs; what is remarkable is that someone in that position still finds plenty of reasons to use them.

Now consider someone further down the scale - someone at the 75th, 50th or 25th percentile. The output of an LLM very quickly goes from "much worse than what I could produce" to "as good as anything I could produce" to "immeasurably better than anything I could hope to ever produce".
by logicchains | 2025-07-19 16:20:12+00:00
It depends on how the AI is used; there's a huge difference in productivity between a structured workflow with repeated automated feedback to the AI, and just ad-hoc prompting. For instance, Gemini 2.5 coding up a spec-compliant HTTP2.0 server in two weeks: https://outervationai.substack.com/p/building-a-100-llm-writ... . 15k lines of code and 30k lines of tests; no human coder could produce something like that so fast.
by criley2 | 2025-07-19 16:20:50+00:00
It can still be faster to develop with AI watching it work. It can legitimately introduce an entire simple fullstack change across multiple projects in my monorepo including graphql queries/mutations, typeorm repository, a service layer, and a reactnative frontend using apollo client, etc. It can do that in about 10 minutes in my local. I can't. If I turned it into a speed run event and practiced, maybe I could get it done in 10 minutes but honestly, it's a machine and I'm John Henry. Since it's using my IDE, it's using my meticulously setup and maintained local and I'm able to quickly stop it and fix any mistake it makes. Level 2 driving assist.

I have enjoyed the github copilot agent style development where someone elses computer is running everything, and I can make a request and just come back half an hour later and check on it. But this level 5 driver gets the wrong destination basically every time, and then it's another 10, 20 or even 30 minutes for it to make a minor adjustment. It doesnt understand my `yarn` scripts, it runs my tests wrong, it can't do codegen, it doesn't format or lint files, etc. I asked copilot yesterday to lint and format a PR and it took 25 minutes of agentic work lol.
by 1over137 | 2025-07-19 16:21:01+00:00
>The source of the problem is with a dependency of the email clients, not the email clients themselves.

For ends users, that's a distinction without a difference. Programmers are responsible for their choice of dependencies. If you've chosen to depend on it, it becomes your problem. Chromium is open source, no? So the email client programmer can fix that bug himself.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-07-19 16:22:26+00:00
Indeed, having done the whole developement/test/manufacturing workflow using hardware based secure boot , I realized likely very few people ever do it properly.

We had developer keys and production keys. Burning one-time fuses with the production key meant developer code would be rejected.

It took a high amount of discipline and a lot of work in the build process (separate developer/production builds of components and corresponding signing).

Very few people had access to the production signing mechanism and I avoided signing root enabled builds, even though such would be extremely convenient. Other teams… freely published production signed internal use developer firmware internally (to the whole company).

Sadly, nobody gets an award for doing it right, and rarely face consequences for doing it wrong.
by MikeCampo | 2025-07-19 16:22:53+00:00
He created Meow Hash somewhat recently and open sourced that. It's not a huge project but it's very useful. A lot of his time goes toward education, his personal projects and contract programming. Not every programmer is dedicated to releasing their own open source or commercial software. I'd bet most programmers don't. Using this as a metric to claim that he has a bad coding approach is ridiculous and laughable. Especially using Handmade Hero as an example... It really reveals your ignorance.

Also, since you care so much, let's see what you've released, smart guy. Preferably code so that we can see how talented you are.
by lordnacho | 2025-07-19 16:23:15+00:00
I'm loving the new programming. I don't know where it goes either, but I like it for now.

I'm actually producing code right this moment, where I would normally just relax and do something else. Instead, I'm relaxing and coding.

It's great for a senior guy who has been in the business for a long time. Most of my edits nowadays are tedious. If I look at the code and decide I used the wrong pattern originally, I have to change a bunch of things to test my new idea. I can skim my code and see a bunch of things that would normally take me ages to fiddle. The fiddling is frustrating, because I feel like I know what the end result should be, but there's some minor BS in the way, which takes a few minutes each time. It used to take a whole stackoverflow search + think, recently it became a copilot hint, and now... Claude simply does it.

For instance, I wrote a mock stock exchange. It's the kind of thing you always want to have, but because the pressure is on to connect to the actual exchange, it is often a leftover task that nobody has done. Now, Claude has done it while I've been reading HN.

Now that I have that, I can implement a strategy against it. This is super tedious. I know how it works, but when I implement it, it takes me a lot of time that isn't really fulfilling. Stuff like making a typo, or forgetting to add the dependency. Not big brain stuff, but it takes time.

Now I know what you're all thinking. How does it not end up with spaghetti all over the place? Well. I actually do critique the changes. I actually do have discussions with Claude about what to do. The benefit here is he's a dev who knows where all the relevant code is. If I ask him whether there's a lock in a bad place, he finds it super fast. I guess you need experience, but I can smell when he's gone off track.

So for me, career-wise, it has come at the exact right time. A few years after I reached a level where the little things were getting tedious, a time when all the architectural elements had come together and been investigated manually.

What junior devs will do, I'm not so sure. They somehow have to jump to the top of the mountain, but the stairs are gone.
by gimmeThaBeet | 2025-07-19 16:23:37+00:00
That's really at this point that's back to where I am with crypto. Through all the speculation and cruft, there is still a shot at owning our own payments, or rather no one owning them.

The payment networks have power, and if you can twist the arm of the gatekeepers, people subvert that power.

The only thing I don't know about these days is with the stablecoins, how do you avoid the government sinking their claws into you if you intrinsically (esp. if successful) have to hold that much in cash or short-term instruments? Or you have something like tether, which leaving aside anything else, you can definitely say is comically opaque for an entity that is nominally running $160B.
by majormajor | 2025-07-19 16:23:52+00:00
You don't need more advertising to get the revenue to keep rising.

All you need is two things:

1) a zero-sum game where the amount spent by companies on advertising is less than their profit margin

2) advertising channels that perform in a way that can be correlated with short-term outcomes

"We can afford to up our ad spend by 0.5% to try to gain an edge."

You juice your market share or total sales numbers for a quarter, everyone is happy.

Then your competitor does the same.

Assuming your advertising is equally effective, you may have netted out to about where you started. But you've both ratcheted up your spend and likely won't reduce that short of a macro change or parent company health issues.

And if certain advertising performs better than others, one company can very well make long-term gains here, if they have writers and producers and talent who are making more compelling pitches.

But it still ramps up the total advertising industry spend even with a fixed supply of ad capacity, if it gets a bidding war going.

As long as you don't have 100% market share with 0 competitors, advertising will look like a very compelling short-term ROI option.

Even if time spent watching media drops it may not squeeze a lot of parts of the advertising sector so hard - it'll just push demand into smaller buckets which will increase the prices for those buckets. Look at the crazy revenue sports television broadcast advertising has been doing as other forms of TV go away with commercial skipping or lower-ad-load streaming.

Of course, at SOME point the increases can't be sustained. Even the most profitable products have a limit to how much money could be possibly directed towards advertising. But we don't appear to be particularly close to demand being satisfied.
by arkoinad | 2025-07-19 16:24:37+00:00
Ubuntu is great option if you dont like to fiddle but if you are feeling adventurous then arch is great. I think people have misconception anout arch and rolling distro to mean that the you will always have things breaking and you need to keep reinstalling or fiddling. I have been on arch for more than 10 years now and i have never had any issues. I would say i had a pretty rock solid os. Only times i had to reinstall was user issue when i did something stupid and wanted a fresh start. Void is also a great option if you are anti systemd :P
by strangeloops85 | 2025-07-19 16:24:44+00:00
It’s interesting how hard and widespread a push they’re making in advertising this - at this particular moment, when there are rumors of more high level recruitment attempts / successes by Zuck. OpenAI is certainly a master at trying to drive narratives. (Independent of the actual significance / advance here). Sorry, there are too many hundreds of billions of dollars involved to not be a bit cautious and wary of claims being pushed this hard.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-19 16:25:09+00:00
>but was rational back then.

Only if you're a corrupt German politician getting bribed by Russia to sell out long term national security for short term corporate profits.

It was also considered a stupid idea back then by NATO powers asking Germany WTF are you doing, tying your economy to the nation we're preparing to go to war with.

> The idea was to give russia leverage on europe besides war, so that they don't need war.

The present day proves it was a stupid idea.

"You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war." - Churchill
by 1718627440 | 2025-07-19 16:25:11+00:00
I see were you are coming from, but programs also depend on an SQL server, a python installation or a Java instance. You also don't complain about device drivers, support for filesystems, the network stack and hooks to Windows Explorer.

In the end it is just part of the OS and a bunch of extra userspace programs. I mean nobody complains about the Windows Subsystem for Win32.

But yeah, you can just use a non-MS GNU/Windows implementation instead, do you like that better?

Is it possible though? Is it possible to have isolated WSLs (per programm)?
by northhnbesthn | 2025-07-19 16:25:38+00:00
As a network programmer who has written a metric asston of concurrent parallel asynchronous whatever-the-hell code [0], this article is confusing. It seems like doing somersaults over a leaky abstraction. The tool for the job is wrong and its implementation is wrong if you can shit the bed this easily.

[0] debugging is fun precisely because it’s amusing to watch people be frightened of having to debug multi threaded hydras.
by joules77 | 2025-07-19 16:26:30+00:00
When you look at the $$$ on hourly basis rather than yearly it all drops to cents. Basically its become very cheap to flood everyone with ads. And since Attention is a scarce resource we get everyone who wants to capture attention trapped in an arms race for it.

The big threat to the whole system is when the amount of time per day people spend consuming media starts to drop thanks to fatigue and finding better things to do.
by tavavex | 2025-07-19 16:26:48+00:00
The fix is legislation that ensures that payment processors aren't allowed to extra-legally moderate transactions based on "I don't like it". They need to be forced to process all legal transactions. Because these entities are nearly irreplaceable and are the cornerstone of many consumer industries, it seems like a reasonable compromise to me.

Just pushing back is neither guaranteed to succeed nor last for any serious amount of time. The ideological crazies can throw their entire existence at ensuring the fact that the "impure, corrupting filth" is squashed. People who oppose it might like the things that get censored, but none are religiously attached to the cause, not to an extent that would lead to a serious amount of organizing, anyway.
by vladms | 2025-07-19 16:27:07+00:00
Not sure if "mainly" means in terms of total value, number of transactions or people using it. If I would be to guess it would be total value.

Now, these guys might be biased, but to quote: "The EUR 500 note alone accounts for over 30% of the value of all banknotes in circulation (1)." (https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/cash...).

That would suggest to me that at least 30% of the value of cash is used for "shady" stuff (I mean I don't know anybody that would use 500 eur bills).

The fact that cash would be used mostly for illegal activities by value (I don't know if it is really the case), does not imply that "people that use cash use if for illegal activities".
by dbg31415 | 2025-07-19 16:27:21+00:00
Where should "Jarvis" live -- in the OS, not the browser? I guess that makes sense.

I just want to get to the point where I can say: "Siri, draft an email response to my boss..." or "Siri, monitor all my Slack and Teams channels and text me if anything important comes up... and go ahead and auto-respond with RTFM links if the answer is already in the docs or a past part of the channel thread..." or "Siri, go do the grindy parts of the video game so I can log in and just do the fun parts this weekend..." or even, "Siri, take my stupid defensive driving course I got slapped with for going 5 miles over the speed limit."

That’s when AI will be fun. Right now, it still feels like I’m doing way more work than I want to. I want to be able to start handing it tasks I can hand interns now. (Ha, and yes, I have made interns do the boring grindy parts of video games for me, and take my defensive driving tests.)
by PorterBHall | 2025-07-19 16:27:48+00:00
Currently, due to the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare, health insurance companies are prohibited from setting rates based on individual risk (except they can charge higher premiums to tobacco users). Before the law, ensures would typically put applicants through a health screening that would determine their rate. People with pre-existing medical conditions could be denied coverage or charged higher rates. Women routinely paid higher premiums than men.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-07-19 16:28:52+00:00
Yep.

Frankly there is a whole subsection of our profession which is composed of engineers who have differentiated themselves on their elite skills with difficult low-level languages, and if you pry that cultural marker away from them, they get defensive.

I see this in C/C++ forums all the time: "Rust doesn't solve a problem I have". Actually, yes it does. They might not think it, but I've been in enough codebases over the years by some very skilled C & C++ programmers to know better. The mistakes are preventable by a decent modern language that doesn't let you just null and leak all over the place in entirely preventable ways.

Rust has all sorts of problems, it's definitely not perfect. It is not the final form for systems programming languages.

But it's getting tiresome to see people who won't admit that the C legacy is a real problem at this point. And it's not like it (lack of safety, rigour, etc.) wasn't known along the way (or Ada would never have been a thing, etc.) -- it just wasn't considered important.

Well it should be now. Hell, in the kernel in privileged execution space more than anywhere else it is most important.
by saghm | 2025-07-19 16:29:03+00:00
Re-quoting the section the parent comment included from this agreement:

> > GPAI model providers need to establish reasonable copyright measures to mitigate the risk that a downstream system or application into which a model is integrated generates copyright-infringing outputs, including through avoiding overfitting of their GPAI model. Where a GPAI model is provided to another entity, providers are encouraged to make the conclusion or validity of the contractual provision of the model dependent upon a promise of that entity to take appropriate measures to avoid the repeated generation of output that is identical or recognisably similar to protected works.

It sounds to me like an LLM you describe would be covered if they people distributing it put in a clause in the license saying that people can't do that.