MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LeftHandPath | 2025-07-31 19:38:41+00:00
I was worried about that a couple of years ago, when there was a lot of hope that deeper reasoning skills and hallucination avoidance would simply arrive as emergent properties of a large enough model.

More recently, it seems like that's not the case. Larger models sometimes even hallucinate more [0]. I think the entire sector is suffering from a Dunning Kruger effect -- making an LLM is difficult, and they managed to get something incredible working in a much shorter timeframe than anyone really expected back in the early 2010s. But that led to overconfidence and hype, and I think there will be a much longer tail in terms of future improvements than the industry would like to admit.

Even the more advanced reasoning models will struggle to play a valid game of chess, much less win one, despite having plenty of chess games in their training data [1]. I think that, combined with the trouble of hallucinations, hints at where the limitations of the technology really are.

Hopefully LLMs will scare society into planning how to handle mass automation of thinking and logic, before a more powerful technology that can really do it arrives.

[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/18/openais-new-reasoning-ai-m...

[1]: https://dev.to/maximsaplin/can-llms-play-chess-ive-tested-13...
by byebyetech | 2025-07-31 19:38:51+00:00
I don't know how they are measuring productivity. For me it is insane productivity boost.

Here is how I use it:

1. Investigate issue in the codebase

2. Write unit tests.

3. Quick experiments.

4. Help with terminal commands and one off scripts.

5. Boilerplate code.

6. Work at higher level than language syntax.

7. Avoid wasting time looking for solution on the internet.
by aaronbrethorst | 2025-07-31 19:38:59+00:00
The 2nd Ave Subway in Manhattan, with preparatory construction beginning in 1942. First phase opened in 2017.

Although the outcome should be celebrated, the slowness and the added costs that brings certainly should not be.

While every project is unique, it is not immediately clear why digging a subway on the Upper East Side is twenty times more expensive than in Seoul or ten times more expensive than in Paris.

https://marroninstitute.nyu.edu/blog/costly-lessons-from-the...

here's a even more damning look: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/why-it-costs-4-billion...

edit: I've been on a tirade about this subject this week. https://www.brethorsting.com/blog/2025/07/state-capacity-and...
by stouset | 2025-07-31 19:39:21+00:00
Yep. I feel like this every time a coworker pushes back on a code review “I’m just trying to get this to work”.

Okay but this is the ninth time in a row, and now you’re building on top of all the other half-baked bits, and the confusion from every one of these layering on top of one another is forcing you to do more hacks on hacks on hacks. And then when you finally “get it to work” there will be no way to disentangle this whole mess.
by IIAOPSW | 2025-07-31 19:39:59+00:00
The 3 minute minimum is based on the premise that there needs to be enough space for the front of the train behind to stop before reaching the rear of the train ahead. But if the stations are split into two boarding areas like I've proposed then the front of the train behind was already scheduled to come to a stop before reaching the rear of the train ahead of it. Thus there's no need to create even more separation than they already have by spacing out the schedule.

Put another way, the 3 min normally starts ticking from the moment the train ahead completely clears the station (as in the rear of it passes the end of the platform), but in the dual-boarding setup the 3 min starts ticking from the moment the train ahead comes to a halt (as the rear of it has already passed the end of the first boarding area).
by lurking_swe | 2025-07-31 19:40:03+00:00
The new macbooks can be purchased with an anti reflective coating, works extremely well.

The screen clarity, speakers, and microphone are all better on a mac. That counts as “quality” i think? These are things many users would use daily in zoom meetings for example.

And good luck if you are a heavy trackpad user. The thinkpad trackpad is usable but basically junk as a daily driver. Like most laptops unfortunately.

If I had to buy a non-apple laptop, i’d probably buy a Thinkpad. They’re great machines overall, but i’m picky and they don’t meet my needs in some important areas.
by alkonaut | 2025-07-31 19:40:27+00:00
> You were probably really good at your job. Now your job is to make sure other people can be good at theirs.

Anyone else see the exact opposite, that out of N people that _could_ become managers, it’s the worst individual contributors that do? Mostly because they want it most. People who love being individual contributors are going to become good at it, and they’ll resist management tasks.

I think this is great and very natural. But there’s a kind of zombie myth that engineering managers are the best former engineers that refuses to die. It’s decent engineers with some aptitude and/or desire to manage.
by saberience | 2025-07-31 19:40:29+00:00
Huge variety of problems with this for mid-market or enterprise use. This is basically a toy right now and can’t be used for solving repeatable, valuable problems for actual businesses, ie: stuff that matters.

One: dependence on langchain.

Two: Security? Observability?

Three: You have never asked yourself, why would someone want to connect an LLM to infinite random mcp servers. The vast majority (of mcp tools and servers) are insecure, vibe coded, basically terrible.

Four: There needs to be way more focus on quality versus quantity. It’s easy to connect LLMs to MCP servers, it’s not a problem companies are willing to spend much money on, the issue is ensuring LLMs call the right tools 98%+ of the time with the right parameters.

Five: There are tons and tons of existing projects for connecting LLMs to 1000s of MCP servers, it’s not a novel project, has no technical moat, and importantly, doesn’t solve a super valuable problem.

The better question to ask or problem to solve is this, given a high value problem, how do you get high values of accurate tool use, first time, while providing security and protection against side effects, jail breaking, random issues etc.

Most companies using “mcp” have a model which is using one or two tools (max) at a time and struggling making it work consistently. Giving them a meta tool to connect to 1000s of (mostly useless) tools isn’t helpful and won’t be taken seriously.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-07-31 19:41:07+00:00
The greatest use of LLMs is the ability to get accurate answers to queries in a normalized format without having to wade through UI distraction like ads and social media.

It's the opposite of finding an answer on reddit, insta, tvtropes.

I can't wait for the first distraction free OS that is a thinking and imagination helper and not a consumption device where I have to block urls on my router so my kids don't get sucked into a skinners box.

I love being able to get answers from documentation and work questions without having to wade through some arbitrary UI bs a designer has implemented in adhoc fashion.
by DontchaKnowit | 2025-07-31 19:41:22+00:00
1) I LOVED computer science school

2) I really love certain aspects of being a software engineer.

3) I have definutely said Ill kill myself if I have to sit in front of a computer for my entire life

4) this job will afford me a future where I can retire at a reasonable age. Whereas a non-computer oriented alternative (the other career available to me was house painting) will not.

Therefore I will bear the monotony of sitting in front of a computer all day for a few decades
Show HN: I built an AI brand generator to stop wasting days naming side projects
by ntahami | 2025-07-31 19:42:01+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m a solo builder, and I made Brandkiit after getting stuck too many times trying to name and brand new ideas. I’d get excited about a side project, but before I could start building, I’d lose days (sometimes a whole week) trying to find:

• a name that felt right • an available domain • a decent logo • matching colors and fonts

…all before I wrote a single line of code.

Brandkiit is a tool that takes your idea and instantly gives you a full brand kit — including:

• name + domain availability • logo • color palette • font pairing • CSS file export you can send to your favourite code tool

It’s meant to help indie hackers, designers, and product folks get started without getting stuck in the branding spiral.

Would love your feedback! Happy to answer any questions.

Nima
Show HN: Flowcus – Kanban Board for OmniFocus and Apple Reminders
by orsobi | 2025-07-31 19:42:03+00:00
I've been an OmniFocus user for years but always felt something was missing – I could capture everything but couldn't see the bigger picture of my work. Traditional task managers are great at collection and to do lists but I think they don't solve the problem of visualising and managing work.

*What It Does*

Flowcus is a macOS app that visualises your OmniFocus, Apple Reminders & plain text tasks as a customisable Kanban board. It's not intended to replace your task managers, rather it enhances them by providing:

- Visual workflow with customisable columns and swimlanes - Drag-and-drop task management that syncs back to your original task managers - Work-in-progress limits to prevent overcommitment - Eisenhower matrix view for prioritising important vs. urgent work - Ability to mark tasks as blocked and visualise dependencies - A unified view of tasks from multiple platforms - Throughput & ageing work metrics

For example, you might have research tasks in OmniFocus, meeting reminders in Apple Reminders and basic tasks in plain text. Flowcus shows them all on one board, letting you drag tasks from "In Progress" to "Done" and having that status change sync back to the original app.

## Why It's Useful

Traditional task managers aren't great at showing you a holistic view of your work. Flowcus bridges this gap by applying lean thinking principles to personal productivity:

1. *Makes work visible* - See all your tasks in one place across different stages 2. *Limits work in progress* - Stop starting, start finishing with WIP limits 3. *Manages flow* - Identify and eliminate bottlenecks in your workflow 4. *Provides feedback* - See how work moves through your system over time

For OmniFocus power users, Flowcus adds the visualisation layer that's always been missing. For people juggling multiple task systems, it unifies your tasks without forcing you to use multiple apps. That's the idea anyway...

## How I Built It

I started with Python scripts to extract OmniFocus data, but realised I needed proper two-way sync and a native Mac experience. I used Claude Code to help me build the first version to integrate with OmniFocus's AppleScript interface and Apple Reminders' EventKit framework. The app monitors changes in real-time and propagates updates back to the source systems. The first prototype was rough but I could see the benefits straight away: I could visualise my work, arrange it into swimlanes, identify when I was overcommitting and track the flow of work across different stages.

## Current Status

The app is currently in beta (v0.2.5). I use it every day to help me manage my work. I can't do without it now. I'm considering adding more task manager integrations at some point. I'd love feedback from any fellow productivity geeks and OmniFocus users – thanks!
by spion | 2025-07-31 19:43:12+00:00
I think agents have a curve where they're kinda bad at bootstrapping a project, very good if used in a small-to-medium-sized existing project and then it goes downhill from there as size increases, slowly.

Something about a brand-new project often makes LLMs drop to "example grade" code, the kind you'd never put in production. (An example: claude implemented per-task file logging in my prototype project by pushing to an array of log lines, serializing the entire thing to JSON and rewriting the entire file, for every logged event)
by randomsofr | 2025-07-31 19:43:53+00:00
I would agree with the post, in this case your dad knew a lot about his trade, so it wasn't a new industry for him.

The coffeeshop example is great, i've seen that a couple times, where people that like drinking coffee, open a coffeeshop, and since they don't know a lot about beans, or equipment, they end up doing bad purchases, choosing bad providers, and the result is just bad.
by ofalkaed | 2025-07-31 19:44:21+00:00
>You need an instrument that you really want to pick up and play, that stays in tune, etc. It doesn't need to be $1500, but at $150 they better have an uncle who's a guitar tech.

If you really want to play you will play regardless of the instrument you have. Like many, I started with cheap instruments, so I figured out how to fix them or at least make them better. I was 12 and wanted to play guitar, my parents were not willing to spend money on it and just found some handme downs from the relatives, and I made it work because I wanted to play guitar. Ended up teaching myself lutherie, made some money, made some instruments. These days it is easier than ever to maintain your own instrument with the internet to answer all your questions, I had to learn to repair and maintain my guitar by working backwards from books on construction since that is all my library had.

>So far no shop has been able to do anything about that.

It is an issue with the bridge, the nut, and or the tuners, on a guitar of that age it is a fair chance it is a combination of all three. I am guessing you are bringing the instrument to normal guitar shops that primarily do sales and lack anyone even remotely competent when it comes to repair.
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-07-31 19:44:33+00:00
I disagree. The PC post never demeans projects that purposefully move slowly with intent, but rather criticizes boondoggles that move slowly due to utter incompetence. The only pejorative text in the PC post is this:

>San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. It opened in 2022, yielding a project duration of around 7,600 days. “The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet weather since the project started,” said Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson. The project cost $346 million, i.e. $110,000 per meter. The Alaska Highway, mentioned above, constructed across remote tundra, cost $793 per meter in 2019 dollars.
by rgovostes | 2025-07-31 19:44:59+00:00
Third-party vendors are selling parts harvested from damaged, used devices. Apple’s prices do seem astronomical, but the comparison isn’t Apple’s to apples.

Also, how do these prices compare to what Apple charges for an out of warranty repair? If it’s the same, there’s no story. https://www.simplymac.com/ipad/how-much-does-it-cost-to-fix-...
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-31 19:45:52+00:00
Many Asus home routers advertise compatibility with and/or run OpenWRT internally, so yes to a certain reading.

Here's a random example I found:

https://www.asus.com/networking-iot-servers/modem-routers/al... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250704161852/https://www.asus....
by slg | 2025-07-31 19:46:03+00:00
While I agree that it would be great if artists had more freedom to create whatever they wanted, I think it is overly cynical to dismiss commercial art as somehow lesser. I think this specifically is a great example of that. It isn't really an ad for anything else beyond other art. It doesn't need to be as intricate, involved, and for a lack of a better word, artistic as it is. The only reason it ended up that way is because artists had personal pride in making it. This is true for countless pieces of art. Nearly all the music or movies people listen to and watch today are commercial art. That doesn't make them any less noble than art created by someone who has no financial incentive to create art.
by dmezzetti | 2025-07-31 19:46:21+00:00
It's always worth checking out the MTEB leaderboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/mteb/leaderboard

There are some good open models there that have longer context limits and fewer dimensions.

The benchmarks are just a guide. It's best to build a test dataset with your own data. This is a good example of that: https://github.com/beir-cellar/beir/wiki/Load-your-custom-da...

Another benefit of having your own test dataset, is that it can grow as your data grows. And you can quickly test new models to see how it performs with YOUR data.
by jmkr | 2025-07-31 19:46:22+00:00
I think in the western world, Art, and music are both long term projects. So much so that we seem to have "reinvented" music at least twice. Once after the Greeks into classical western music, then again when jazz went into tonal harmony.

At least parts of it are "scientific" and "directed," see the Lydian Chromatic concept for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydian_Chromatic_Concept_of_To...
by alnwlsn | 2025-07-31 19:46:42+00:00
A friend of mine once wrote a dictionary[1]. It has all the (normal) one syllable words in English, defined using only other one syllable words. He decided to work on it by focusing on one letter per year, so A was in 1991, B was 1992, and the book was finished in 2017, 26 years later.

It's not even a very long book - only a few hundred pages - but I'm sure if I tried to do the same thing all at once, I'd probably have lost interest around B or C, so I suppose it was a worthwhile strategy.

[1] It's not online anywhere as far as I know, sorry.
by boogiewoogie | 2025-07-31 19:46:56+00:00
Thanks for including it. Ollama is very good at what it does. Including the feature is showing mindful growth in helping ollama be that skateboard, scooter, car, etc that the developer needs for LLM at that time. Making it appeal to casual/hobbyist is the right approach.

PS totally running windows here and using kesor/ollama-proxy if I need to make it externally available.
by echelon | 2025-07-31 19:47:02+00:00
I'm really starting to hate on Rust macros due to the compilation times. The core language is fine, but macros are the mind killer.

We're progressively banning macro usage from our Rust monorepo. Macro-heavy dependencies are also going to be pruned eventually.

As much as I love Serde, it makes compile times for projects like async-stripe absolutely productivity killing. It interferes heavily with work.

Crates.io would be fantastic if it had compile time metrics and macro metrics reported for projects and dependencies.
by giantg2 | 2025-07-31 19:47:08+00:00
I don't have much experience but I played around with a USB Coral TPU. I did not try it with an LLM, but with used some image recognition stuff. Seemed OK, but wasn't as intense as an LLM would be. You'd probably have better luck with the Jetson you mentioned, or with one of Coral's more powerful options.
by falcor84 | 2025-07-31 19:47:22+00:00
> Sure you can't point it to a Jira ticket and get a PR

You absolutely can. This is exactly what SWE-Bench[0] measures, and I've been amazed at how quickly AIs have been climbing those ladders. I personally have been using Warp [1] a lot recently and in quite a lot of low-medium difficulty cases it can one-shot a decent PR. For most of my work I still find that I need to pair with it to get sufficiently good results (and that's why I still prefer it to something cloud-based like Codex [2], but otherwise it's quite good too), and I expect the situation to flip over the coming couple of years.

[0] https://www.swebench.com/

[1] https://www.warp.dev/

[2] https://openai.com/index/introducing-codex/
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-07-31 19:47:38+00:00
I think most people (especially software engineers) who fantasize about leaving their office jobs and running a small retail or restaurant business are not upset with having to write code all day - they're upset with the people they work with/for and fantasize about independence, even if that means a more difficult day to day job. Or, they're unhappy with the sterile environment they work in and are disillusioned with the abstract nature of B2B products (what am I selling? Whose life am I improving by selling it?) and want to work with something whose value is more easily demonstrated.

I think that when someone tells you they fantasize about starting a small local retail business, that we shouldn't just shit on their naivite; we should listen to what they're really trying to say and help them find something that checks the boxes for them:

1. Something in the real world, preferably with physical products/services on physical products

2. Something with a larger degree of independence

3. Something whose value to the customer is obvious

4. Something which improves the world or their community in some way, and is not just extracting value from others.

Personally, I love writing software, but I hate Software companies
by exabrial | 2025-07-31 19:47:41+00:00
If I were a hospital, financial brokerage, etc, I would use Cisco.

But since we're a small business < 50 employees, with 4 sites (office, call center, colocation, cloud) Ubiquiti makes it unbelievably easy to administer, even though I know I'm leaving plenty of performance on the table in terms of switching performance, latency, QoS, and throughput.

Surprised at S2S VPN performance at these price points as well! More than adequate!
by kjksf | 2025-07-31 19:47:57+00:00
I think this page describes "what" but not "why" of Carbon.

Carbon exists so that it's possible to migrate a large C++ code base, like Chrome, from C++ to something saner, incrementally.

The most important attribute of Carbon is not the specifics of the syntax but the fact that it's designed to be used in a mixed C++ / Carbon code base and comes with tooling to convert as much of C++ as possible to Carbon.

That's what makes Carbon different from any other language: D, Zig, Nim, Rust etc.

It's not possible to port a millions line C++ code base, like Chrome, to another language so large C++ projects are stuck with objectively pretty bad language and are forced to continue to use C++ even though a better language might exist.

That's why Carbon is designed for incremental adoption in large C++ projects: you can add Carbon code to existing C++ code and incrementally port C++ over to Carbon until only Carbon code exists.

Still a very large investment but at least possible and not dissimilar to refactoring to adopt newer C++ features like e.g. replacing use of std::string with std::string_view.

That's why it's a rational project for Google. Even though it's a large investment, it might pay off if they can write new software in Carbon instead of C++ and refactor old code into Carbon.
by bee_rider | 2025-07-31 19:48:37+00:00
I dunno. I think we should separate out the stuff that fundamentally has to take a long time, like the pitch experiment, from stuff like Notre Dame, which just took a long time because they lacked the resources to do it all at once. Like OK, it takes a long time to build a big church because you need to find all the right rocks or whatever. But the pitch, that’s the universe taking a long time to tell us something.

(I’m being flip for comedy/emphasis sake, of course Notre Dame is pretty impressive too).
Show HN: Patio Ask, a Perplexity-style DIY home improvement assistant
by rocknrollisdev | 2025-07-31 19:49:17+00:00
Hey HN! I’m the founder of Patio and I’m excited to share our newest beta feature: Ask. It’s like Perplexity, but focused entirely on DIY and home improvement.

What it does:

Instant answers to your home improvement questions ("How do I weather-proof a deck?")

Curated how-to articles from top DIY sites

We built this because we hated hunting through dozens of tutorials to find one clear answer. Ask brings everything into a single, conversational interface—no more context switching between blogs and videos.

Would love your feedback

- Does it understand your DIY questions?

- Are the suggested articles relevant and high-quality?

- What features would make it indispensable for your projects?

Thanks for checking it out—looking forward to hearing what you think!