MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by logicchains | 2025-07-24 16:48:20+00:00
Recent LLMs are fairly good at following instructions, so a lot of the difference comes down to the level of detail and quality of the instructions given. Written communication is a skill for which there's a huge amount of variance among developers, so it's not surprising that different developers get very different results. The relative quality of the LLM's output is determined primarily by the written communication skills of the individuals instructing it.
by claudiulodro | 2025-07-24 16:48:36+00:00
> Before header bidding, publishers sold ad space through a “waterfall” method, offering the space to one ad exchange at a time, typically prioritizing whichever had previously offered the highest prices. But Google made it so that its AdX got “first look” access through DFP by calling it to submit a real-time bid before other exchanges got the chance to take part in an auction. That meant AdX could buy up any inventory it wanted as long as it met the publisher’s floor price, then pass the less desirable space to other exchanges, according to the DOJ.

[...]

> But Google moved quickly to reestablish AdX’s power. It created a competitor to header bidding called “Open Bidding,” which let Google take an extra cut of revenue. And under the adoption of header bidding, Google’s AdX ultimately got a “last look” advantage when publishers chose to feed the winning header bid into their publisher ad server — which most often was Google’s DFP. That’s because AdX’s advertiser buyers would then have the option to bid as little as a penny more than the winning header bid to secure the most attractive ad space.[0]

Google's header bidding-related shenanigans were a big part of the antitrust case against them, and they were found to be "monopolizing open-web digital advertising markets"[1], so I wouldn't say that it is mostly not controlled by Google.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/24/24253293/google-ad-tech-a... [1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-prevails-l...
by WaxProlix | 2025-07-24 16:48:44+00:00
That's true up to a certain threshold on 'probabilistically correct', right? At a certain number of 9s, it's fine. And increasingly I use AI to help ask me questions, refine my understanding of problem spaces, do deep research on existing patterns or trends in a space and then use the results as context to have a planning session, which provides context for architecture, etc.

So, I don't know that the tools are inherently rightward-pushing
by toast0 | 2025-07-24 16:49:36+00:00
One thing that raidz has going for it over a block level raid is that zfs knows which blocks are in use and recovery does not need to read all blocks on all disks to recover.

Zfs also prioritizes user reads and writes over recovery (resilvering), which may not be universal practice with RAID.

It's certainly still the case that if your redundancy drives failed, you're at greater risk of data loss, and IMHO, disk failure rate during repair is higher than base rate: maybe from extra use, but also because of the risk of correlated failures --- if your environment contributed to failure of the first N disks, the other disks were also in that environment and may be about to fail.
Ask HN: How did you navigate an illegal termination?
by infoseekadvice | 2025-07-24 16:50:16+00:00
I was recently terminated after requesting accommodations for my disability. I’m on the spectrum, and asked to not be penalized for performance if I had to retreat to a conference room to decompress after being screamed at by my direct supervisor – the rest was pretty basic stuff like don’t touch me without permission since people had a habit of sneaking up behind me and startling me rather than send a teams message. (An issue if you have sensory issues)

This is not actually the first time I’ve dealt with discrimination in the workplace.

Unfortunately, I work in a relatively specialized field (infosec).

Despite having more experience than during my last job search for analyst roles, some of it on things you simply can’t learn on in a home lab like a SIEM + having documented pentest experience, I haven’t gotten a single phone screen or interview.

Due to recent geopolitics “going federal” doesn’t appear to be an option.

How would you deal with a situation like the above? Should I expand my search to other titles? Maybe go into sales or something?

During my last search, the barrier seemed to be I couldn’t document my experience since I was mostly self taught, but I was at least getting interviews and people seemed to respect that I was honest in my skills and had a genuine interest in the subject matter. (It’s actually my “special interest” – every day I read HN + a custom multireddit I made to stay abreast of developments in infosec)

I’m feeling really dejected – I gave up on a dream of doing tech policy to “return to my roots” as a hacker here in my home county and my role, which was for a local government, was rewarding and had great benefits. (Pension, time off etc.)

I could handle not being a cultural fit for DC, but I feel like my homeland has abused me.

Feelings aside, as a practical matter… I need income.

Has anyone else navigated a situation like this? How did you manage to get interviews and eventually a role? Are there any projects I could do to help make myself more marketable?

(In the past I’ve done things like fly out to network at Defcon but that is not feasible this year due to my financial situation.)
by iamflimflam1 | 2025-07-24 16:50:20+00:00
I would expect most developers to fail at this challenge. Here’s the doc - you’ve got one chance to get the API to do this.

I can’t tell from the description if the LLMs are allowed to try and then correct based on any errors received.

Though it would be surprising if that helped. Most APIs don’t tell you what you’ve done wrong…
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-07-24 16:50:29+00:00
> People that have gotten used to not directly using brakes to indicate you are slowing down is a dangerous thing with how reliant we are on the standard indications that you are slowing.

Most, if not all, EVs will light up the brake lights when you're slowing via regen braking as long as the deceleration rate is above a certain threshold. I know my Tesla does.
by inanutshellus | 2025-07-24 16:50:34+00:00
> It's a teaching prop that (imho) tells people to look at things as if they are wrong- rather than assume they're right.

I think you have that exactly backwards. Meaning... the "prop" would be to assume the fence-builder was right, not wrong, and you need to find the why before you can remove the obviously-dumb-thing-with-visible-no-purpose.
by dijit | 2025-07-24 16:50:41+00:00
idk, I'm not a software engineer. I'm a sysadmin.

Or, am I a "devops engineer"?

or.. a "SRE"...

or... am I a platform engineer?

You know what, I don't know.

What I do know, is that people keep trying to make my job obsolete, only to hire me under a different title for more money later. The practices and the tools are the same too, yet to justify it to themselves they'll make shit up about how the work is "actually, a material difference from what came before" (except, it's really not).

I'm still employable after 20 years of this.

I'm not a software engineer, and I'm not a tech CEO - I don't care, but people have been trying to replace me my whole career (even myself: "Automate yourself out of a job” is a common sysadmin mantra after all). Yet, somehow, I'm still here.
by iLemming | 2025-07-24 16:50:51+00:00
Exactly this. When speaking about static or dynamic type systems, you can't discuss them in isolation, you need to specify because the holistic experience of types in JS, Python, Clojure, Elixir, Haskell, Rust, etc. will differ, sometimes drastically. Leaning too much to any side is perilous; it may create a false narrative in your head about what types fundamentally mean and how they should be used.

Camping too long on either side may create wrong assumptions like that all/most problems are type problems; make you conflate implementation with concepts and make you miss the real tradeoffs; you'd start ignoring context and scale.

Static types aren't always about "safety vs. flexibility" - sometimes they're about tooling, refactoring confidence, or documentation. Dynamic types aren't always about "rapid prototyping" - sometimes they enable architectural patterns that are genuinely difficult to express statically.

One really needs to see how Rust's ownership system or Haskell's type inference offers completely different experiences, or how Clojure's emphasis on immutability changes the dynamic typing game entirely.
by ryandrake | 2025-07-24 16:50:51+00:00
Yep, same problem on Windows. It's almost always a mistake to give 3rd party developers unrestricted access to your filesystem, because they don't care and will shit their files all over it.

I wish more applications were distributed by the Mac App Store, because I believe App Store distributed apps are more strongly sandboxed and may not allow developers to abuse your system like this.
by rapind | 2025-07-24 16:50:59+00:00
I mean it's working for me. It's definitely not living up to the hype IMO (market is way overvaluing), but I wouldn't want to work without it any more, which is actually saying a lot.

This take is as a senior (greybeard) developer using paid claude-code in the terminal only (I use plain vim for my own code). I'm running my own business while wearing all of the hats, so I'm not as worried about becoming obsolete, but I also have zero motivation to get other businesses using it (I'm not invested into any AI companies)!

To be honest, I could probably even be using it better, but I haven't spent much time yak shaving over my setup beyond zen mcp.

That being said, I think anyone looking to invest into established AI companies right now is in for a rude awakening. I think it'll be a commodity / utility like cloud computing with tons of competition and not a ton of differentiating features. That's just my opinion though, and I could be horrendously wrong!
by zer00eyz | 2025-07-24 16:51:13+00:00
I'm going to assume based on the authors name, and the sources name that this is all very "western". We have gotten very good at exporting all the misery elsewhere while we medicate and entertain ourselves and pretend that the savagery and the suffering do not exist.

The take here is very much Brave New World, going to visit the savages, and complaining about it. And then contrasting it with the "normal" sterilized life that the author leads.

It is neither self righteousness or morality: It is an abject lack of self awareness and of sheltered existence.
by mauvehaus | 2025-07-24 16:51:38+00:00
Relevant: a Red Sox fan goes to Wrigley Field and finds it better[0]. For my money: Fenway Park is a goddamn terrible place to watch a ballgame, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Parking sucks, traffic sucks, the seating is cramped, and the food is expensive, but it's idiosyncratic, weird, and not designed to create an experience to within an inch of its life. Love that ballpark, and I say that as a Guardians fan by birth.

https://www.overthemonster.com/2025/7/23/24472798/fenway-par...
by rovr138 | 2025-07-24 16:51:41+00:00
> Contributed Code

> In order to keep SQLite completely free and unencumbered by copyright, the project does not accept patches. If you would like to suggest a change and you include a patch as a proof-of-concept, that would be great. However, please do not be offended if we rewrite your patch from scratch.

Propose it.
by bediger4000 | 2025-07-24 16:52:01+00:00
It's good that the USA found a final arbiter of truth. Since the founding fathers, the history of the USA has been married by wrong choices of names, wasted time and money on industrial competition, and patent wars, not to mention all the wasted time, money effort and emotion in court trials and law enforcement. Now, we have Trump.

I guess we'll have to come up with a system or method for efficient use of Trump's time to pick all of The Right Things, however.
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-24 16:52:03+00:00
> It’s easy to want to keep working how we’ve always worked

There is no “how we’ve always worked”; there was no steady state. Constant evolution and progressive automation of the simpler parts has been the norm for software development forever.

> with hope of getting back to pre 2022 levels of software hiring and income. AI stands in the way of that.

It doesn't, though. Productivity multipliers don't reduce demand for the affected field or income in it. (Tight money policies and economic slowdowns, especially when they co-occur, do, though, especially in a field where much of the demand and high income levels are driven by speculative investment, either in startups or new ventures by established firms.)
by gs17 | 2025-07-24 16:52:03+00:00
> I suspect that itch.io may consider working with somebody like CCBill to allow payments for adult content, and use a "normal" processor for everything else. That is what I would do, or at least attempt to do.

Except AFAIK Visa/MasterCard are not okay with this. Because it's not actually about fraud or chargebacks.

> The cost of 15 minutes of labor from a human being wipes out the profit on the next zillion transactions

Chargeback fees are paid by the merchant for card-not-present transactions, regardless of outcome. It's not a real reason, regardless, since there'd be no point to go so fine-grained about what adult content is banned if all adult content has chargeback/fraud issues.
by pcrh | 2025-07-24 16:52:28+00:00
I am quite puzzled how an LLM could even start "write" a scientific paper.

Say you start with a set of findings, for example, western blots, data from a transgenic mouse engineered for the relevant gene, and some single cell sequencing data. Your manuscript describes the identification of a novel protein, editing the gene in a mouse and showing what pathways are affected in the mouse.

What material would you give the LLM? How would the LLM "know" which of these novel findings were in any way meaningful? As far as I'm aware, it is unlikely that the LLM would be able to do anything other that paraphrase what you instruct it to write. It would be a return to the days before word processing became common, and researchers would either dictate their manuscripts to a typist, or hand the typist a stack of hand-written paper.

The actually hard part of writing scientific papers is not putting the words "down on paper" so to speak, but deciding what to say.
by bugglebeetle | 2025-07-24 16:52:34+00:00
I’m not sure this follows as SOTA LLMs are pretty good at writing Rust, so wouldn’t this also make it easier for codebases to move leftward in your analogy? For example, I was resistant to use Rust for a lot of things because a). The community is somewhat annoying and pedantic, even by software engineering standards b). The overhead in getting colleagues up to speed on Rust code was too much of a time suck. LLMs solve both those problems and we’re now migrating lots of stuff to Rust, my colleagues can ask lots of questions (of Google Gemini Pro 2.5), without burdening anyone or being met with disdain, and seem generally more curious and positive about these moves/Rust overall.
by tremon | 2025-07-24 16:52:40+00:00
Not linked yet is the Debian Packaging Portal: https://wiki.debian.org/Packaging

There's two tutorials/walkthroughs linked from there:

- how to build an existing Debian package: https://wiki.debian.org/BuildingTutorial

- how to package new software for Debian: https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debmake-doc/ch05.en.html
by schwartzworld | 2025-07-24 16:53:05+00:00
> If you keep outdated comment or documentation in your code without anyone noticing, I'd say you have a pretty big issue with your review process.

Its easy to say that, and probably true, but in a large company with a shared codebase, you don't always have that kind of control. Someone intends to fix something, then the work gets deprioritized or they leave the company or forget.

Maybe you've never seen a comment and realized that the code that goes with it isn't there anymore, but I have. Comments and documentation are important but there's a spectrum of usefulness. On one end it "TODO: Fix this later" and on the other end are comments that are really important with a whole range in between.

The reality is, tickets are the way of making sure work gets scoped and accounted for. If your company measures velocity, having the actual amount of work you do represented in tickets is the way you show what you are actually doing all day. Why wouldn't you want future work to be ticketed? Who does it help?
by b112 | 2025-07-24 16:53:26+00:00
That's quite the jump.

Some real world users asked for a fix. They did not mean they asked specifically for this fix.

There were other ways to handle this.

With Debian's system, you could wipe the state files, and for example eth0/etc would be reassigned per initialization order. Worked fine.

Even if you didn't like that, pre-Systemd udev allowed assigned by a variety of properties, including bus identifiers.

It was merely that Redhat, as usual, was so lacking in sophistication, unlike Debian.
by jevndev | 2025-07-24 16:53:28+00:00
The “Stop at first level of type implementation” is where I see codebases fail at this. The example of “I’ll wrap this int as a struct and call it a UUID” is a really good start and pretty much always start there, but inevitably someone will circumvent the safety. They’ll see a function that takes a UUID and they have an int; so they blindly wrap their int in UUID and move on. There’s nothing stopping that UUID from not being actually universally unique so suddenly code which relies on that assumption breaks.

This is where the concept of “Correct by construction” comes in. If any of your code has a precondition that a UUID is actually unique then it should be as hard as possible to make one that isn’t. Be it by constructors throwing exceptions, inits returning Err or whatever the idiom is in your language of choice, the only way someone should be able to get a UUID without that invariant being proven is if they really *really* know what they’re doing.

(Sub UUID and the uniqueness invariant for whatever type/invariants you want, it still holds)
by 9rx | 2025-07-24 16:53:56+00:00
> You need warehouses, logistics, and all sorts of other fixed costs that exist before you can start recouping your investment.

That type of business is rarely appealing to VCs. VCs seek rapid growth and quick exits. Warehouses are the antithesis of that. Hard to scale and even harder to sell. It is an investible business for the right type of investor, but VCs and investors are not synonymous.

> once it's past the threshold where noise no longer dominates.

You are technically correct here, but we're clearly talking about the stage before you've already overcome the noise floor.

> Plausible Analytics

They claim to be self-funded — in other words, acting as their own VCs. Which is all well and good when you're already rich, but if you're already rich (and not looking to get richer) why not just hire a concierge/matchmaker? What do you need a poor man's app for?
by smcl | 2025-07-24 16:54:04+00:00
It was a very high-profile example of exactly this type of shenanigans during a live game picked up by the biggest broadcaster in the country, which will have been watched by millions across the world. The claim was that this simply isn't allowed happen, and it literally happened. I don't even particularly like the English leagues, but this is a daft thing to brush off
by klaff | 2025-07-24 16:54:06+00:00
I have a Subaru (ten years old w/ >200k miles on it's chain-type CVT), and I thought the justification for it was that it was more efficient than previous systems.

From a mechanical engineering standpoint, the Subaru CVT uses a fairly conventional lock-up torque converter at the input, but that gets locked as you pass something like 15-20 mph (once the lowest gear ratio is satisfactory w/o the torque converter function) and beyond that all shifting of the CVT is done w/ the torque converter locked. In addition, the clamping force of the sheaves is adjusted per the torque load of the transmission to minimize the frictional losses.

Anyway I'm curious about data comparing efficiency of conventional and CVT automatics.
by no_wizard | 2025-07-24 16:54:08+00:00
Corpus also matters. I know Rust developers who aren't getting very good results even with high quality prompts.

On the other hand, I helped integrate Cursor as a staff engineer at my current job for all our developers (many hundreds), who primarily work in JavaScript / TypeScript, and even middling prompts will get results that only require refactoring, assuming the LLM doesn't need a ton of context for the code generation (e.g. greenfield or independent features).

Our general approach and guidance has been that developers need to write the tests first and have Cursor use that as a basis for what code to generate. This helps prevent atrophy and over time we've find thats where developers add the most value with these tools. I know plenty of developers want to do it the other way (have AI generate the tests) but we've had more issues with that approach.

We discourage AI generating everything and having a human edit the output, as it tends to be slower than our chosen approach and more likely to have issues.

That said, LLMs still struggle if they need to hold alot of context. For instance, if you have a bunch of files that it needs to understand to also generate code that is worthwhile, particularly if you want it to re-use code.
by freeourdays | 2025-07-24 16:54:16+00:00
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Developers often struggle with slow and bloated command-line shells. Popular frameworks like Oh My Zsh, while feature-rich, cause significant startup delays and introduce unnecessary complexity.This forces users to either endure poor performance or spend considerable time manually configuring a patchwork of individual plugins and tools to achieve a fast, productive setup.

A pre-configured, high-performance shell kit solves this by bundling a curated selection of best-in-class, lightweight tools for features like prompt customization, fuzzy search, and auto-suggestions.It provides a fast, powerful, and ready-to-use terminal experience out of the box through a simple installer and a minimal configuration, eliminating the bloat of traditional frameworks and the hassle of manual setup.
by sroussey | 2025-07-24 16:54:18+00:00
The quick answer is yes, today. But there are battery technologies that require less and less in development.

Also, rare earth elements are not that rare. But they are not concentrated, and finding concentrations of them is kinda rare. Event then, you have to mine a lot of area to get them, which is not great for the environment. And since Americans (and everyone ex-China) has not been doing it for decades, only China has advanced the technology to extract and refine it for decades.

This lack of refining is similar to our lack of working on solar which will but us behind potentially forever, or until there is a big enough disruption to overcome the decade of experience. You can look at chipmaking and see that such things are not easy.
by jedberg | 2025-07-24 16:54:29+00:00
The people who are saying AI will replace everyone are people who don't actively deploy code anymore. People like CEOs and VPs.

People who are actively deploying code are well aware of the limitations of AI.

A good prompt with some custom context will get you maybe 80% of the way there. Then iterating with the AI will get you about 90% of the way, assuming you're a senior engineer with enough experience to know what to ask. But you will still need to do some work at the end to get it over the line.

And then you end up with code that works but is definitely not optimal.