MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by friendzis | 2025-07-18 12:00:21+00:00
> > five years down the line, when documentation is badly outdated, there is no organizational memory left behind that component, original developers have transitioned to either different teams/departments or left the company altogether, the component is still well isolated, analyzable and possible to work on.

> This will be far more true for an external dependency - even one that's no longer actively developed - than for an internally developed component, IME. Just at the most basic level an external dependency has to have some level of documentation and at least be usable by someone other than the original author to even get picked up.

Not sure if I can agree with the sentiment, especially with the "at least be usable by someone other than the original author to even get picked up." part. Components are easily usable either because they sort of adhere to the UNIX philosophy "do one thing and do it well", which makes them inherently well isolated, or they are easy to integrate, falling on the kitchen-sink end of the spectrum, making them inherently hard to isolate. I think it has more to do with the functional domain of the component, rather than source.

> Sure, you need stay up to date, potentially even take over maintenance yourself, or accept the risk of not doing so, and none of that is free.

The more of a kitchen-sink the component is, the more maintenance effort there is and the higher the risks. However, in my previous comment I wanted to highlight integration risks: components on the kitchen-sink end of the spectrum are more likely to break interfaces due to feature work, nudging organization towards trunk based development. It's not inherently worse or better than leaf based development, it's a compromise, however my key point remains that larger external components shift the compromise externally, which is impossible to plan. In my experience, internally-facing external components that diverge too much simply get code frozen instead of getting required support, whereas internal components get maintenance effort allocated.
by hellohello911 | 2025-07-18 12:00:39+00:00
Sure - but I don't see the authors mention group convergence anywhere.

While the first 5 week post treatment actually looks impressive, I don't think the treatment arms being essentially the same after 6 months supports the conclusions of the study. Unless we backpedal and say the inactive grouo was microdosing (which has its own baggage...)
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-18 12:00:48+00:00
> What you're describing is called: programming. This can't be serious

What that statement is telling me is that the author at one point didn't consider logging to be a fully fledged formal non-functional requirement, more of an optional and/or informal side chore.

I used to work at a company that built software for mobile networks; their entire C codebase was full of logging statements, pretty much every step made in processing a signal was logged. Probably as a form of tracing, and automated instrumentation would possibly have been a better solution, but they were a bit old fashioned.
by oceanplexian | 2025-07-18 12:01:47+00:00
Deepseek R1 is better than any model released more than 6 months ago. You can plug it into open source equivalents of Claude Code like Goose. And it runs on a Mac Studio which you can buy at any consumer electronics store.

The people saying that big tech is going to Gatekeep their IDE or pull the plug on them don’t seem to realize that the ship has already sailed. Good LLMs are here permanently and never going away. You just might have to do slightly more work than whipping out a credit card and buying a subscription product.
by torginus | 2025-07-18 12:02:01+00:00
I wasn't assuming they'd be able to predict what superintelligence (or any other outcome) would do to society, I was assuming they'd be able to predict what it will do to the value of their investments. I don't think it'd be unreasonable to expect them to able to do a ROI calculation over some timeframe.

For example, it might be very well next to worthless, if anyone can build superintelligence once the right algorithms are discovered and they run their GPUs for long enough, they'll have to sell it at cost.
by kjksf | 2025-07-18 12:02:12+00:00
Governments print money because they want it and are ok with you loosing yours (via inflation).

What you describe (buy high, sell low) is the opposite so what incentive the government (or anyone else) has to loose money? Sticking it to Bitcoin?

BTW: it's not that I FIND fiat lacking. Fiat IS lacking. See all the printing of money by US, EU and everyone else. Most recent US budget is projected to add 5 $trillion, which will be printed.

I merely RECOGNIZE the fiat is lacking and Bitcoin isn't.
by jorangreef | 2025-07-18 12:02:27+00:00
We apply this pretty much fully at TigerBeetle [1].

Reason being that TigerStyle is not only about shipping safer software, but shipping it in less time [2], factoring in the Total Cost of Ownership to end users. In other words, not only optimizing our development time, but also all the time spent in production with subsequent fixes.

[1] https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025-02-27-why-we-designed-tige...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3WYdYyjek4
by kcplate | 2025-07-18 12:02:51+00:00
> We need words people understand now to describe what's happening now.

Ok, so use words appropriate to what is happening. When you work to redefine “scary” words in an attempt to try and piggyback on their negative history you minimize that history.

> Curious what you consider fascist about people who hold zero corporate or political power

The point was that I don’t consider what we see today as fascist and you shouldn’t either…because it’s not.
by ciconia | 2025-07-18 12:02:52+00:00
Because it's (mostly) useless bullshit. I mean, apart from generating fake images/videos, and cheating in high-school/college, what's the value proposition? It doesn't really remove humans from the equation, because you still need a "prompt engineer" to get any result that is sort of correct most of the time. So you pay for a superstar AI magician, you pay for the ridiculous amount of compute this needs, and you still need to babysit it in case it starts hallucinating, so what's the point?
by csa | 2025-07-18 12:04:55+00:00
> That is assuming that it is really a force multiplier which is not totally evident at this point.

I really think that this is a lack of imagination at this point for people who actually think this way.

There are two easy wins for almost anyone:

1. Optional tasks that add value but never reach the top of the priority list.

2. Writing routine communication and documentation.

> Anything that is realistically a force multiplier is a person divider. At that point I would expect people to resist it.

The CEOs who are using AI as an excuse to reduce head count are not helping this narrative.

AI will not solve their problems for large staff cuts. It’s just an unrelated excuse to walk back from over hiring in the past (esp. during Covid).

That said, I think that framing AI as a “person divider” is baseless fear-mongering for most job categories.
by prasadjoglekar | 2025-07-18 12:05:02+00:00
Well, "fact checkers" like Politifact are precisely what are considered biased themselves. Sampling from a biased dataset still shows the same bias.

https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/items/8f9a6f3b-efd7-46f3-b4be...

You may be aligned with the alleged or real partisanship of Politifact, so to you there's no problem here. But team Harris and Buttigieg lost the election.

Hence these consequences (from Wikipedia):

In January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg announced an end to Meta's eight-year partnership with PolitiFact, claiming that "fact checkers have just been too politically biased."[62][63
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-18 12:05:12+00:00
This is a good point. However, the base is relatively narrow; there are many, many more people working in the popular frameworks and languages like e.g. React or Java or what have you than there are people who work on the fundamentals and have that low level understanding. And I'm afraid people at that level are going to become rare.

It's not hopeless though, it feels like that in the past decade, some of the smartest minds working at the lower levels of abstractions have come up with great new technologies. New programming languages that push the envelope of performance and security while maintaining good developer experience, great advancements in microchip technologies, that kinda thing.

It's important to maintain access to universities and higher education, where people who have the interest and mindset can learn and become part of this base that powers the greater software market.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-18 12:05:57+00:00
The usual write code on the server that can be copy pasted on the client, like form validations.

Plus many SaaS vendors now have node only SDKs, so if I want to use C# or Java, I have to advocate for the team to write their own REST bindings, instead of using the existing SDK, naturally a quixotic battle that I won't bother with.

In favour of Typescript, it has been designed by the same key architect as C#, so I don't feel that bad using yet another language from one of my language designer heros.

And if I need some additional perf on the server beyond V8, there are always native node modules.
by jamifsud | 2025-07-18 12:06:05+00:00
I've been using Claude Code for weeks now and I've found it to be fantastic at writing / debugging tests unit / integ tests that don't require external context. Still needs some guidance of course but it's been a huge productivity improvement.

Unfortunately, I can't say the same for other types of tests like E2E tests. It makes sense why: CC doesn't have access to all of the context to determine what's going wrong. During an E2E test suite run it can't pause to look into the console, view whats on the page, look at the backend logs, etc. I tried writing some utilities to snapshot and log the state of parts of the page when a test failed and this did help a bit, but not enough to get the same productivity boost for other types of tests.

Has anyone had any luck with this? Any strategies to share?
by m4rtink | 2025-07-18 12:06:45+00:00
Mobile phones and a lot of embedded systems have minimal system firmware like this and it is a total disaster, basically forcing you to have per device special software releases with all the hardware specific things EFI would abstract for you, enabling a generic system software image supporting many devices.

As a result, many of these devices are buggy, insecure & are never updated once shipped or updates get abandoned soon after.
by sidewndr46 | 2025-07-18 12:08:04+00:00
I think the Apple USB-C charger I have is compliant and so is the cable. I actually use it to charge my Samsung phone primarily, but inadvertently discovered that it won't run a Raspberry Pi 4 at all. The $12 adapter that is sold for that purpose runs the Raspberry Pi 4 just fine. Apparently because it just supplies 5 volts all the time, no matter what the device says.
by AUnterrainer | 2025-07-18 12:08:22+00:00
QuestDB is just a DB. What people get wrong about KDB is that it's so much more. It's a programming language with DB capabilities. You can use for real time streaming, in memory DB and on disk DB. You can build your entire analytics on top of that. There's nothing else out there that let's you build and entire framework/platform with just one single tech stack.
by kjksf | 2025-07-18 12:08:50+00:00
The difference is that bank has a CEO that can take your money or loose it by doing risky things with your money.

Bitcoin network doesn't have a CEO. It is what it is and will always be that. Bitcoin network will not decide, at some point, to lend out your bitcoin at 100x leverage. There will never be a run on Bitcoin network because it always has the same amount of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin network is already "regulated" by the code.

Bitcoin regulations are merely governments trying to regain control they had with banks (they can get all the info they want about you, they can order banks to shutdown your account, like Canadian government did).
by viraptor | 2025-07-18 12:09:13+00:00
Then you should give pipewire a serious go with multiple channels. It's way better than MacOS stack which doesn't really do independent multichannel by default. There's an API for it that some paid apps use that lets you do it. Meanwhile pipewire just lets you connect whatever wherever. I managed with pipewire to get lower latency on Bluetooth headphones than MacOS allows at all.

What happens with 6 channels? You just connect them where you want and it works.
by michaelcampbell | 2025-07-18 12:09:52+00:00
> But nobody is applying this fully or they'd still be at the beach collecting sand.

To this point I posit almost all of the "this good, that bad" type of posts are just "at my point on the abstraction continuum, this thing is better than that thing" without taking into account any context.

For most assembly is too low level for their context/use case, but for some, the C programming language is too HIGH level, as it was originally designed to be (but not for me).
by muzani | 2025-07-18 12:11:12+00:00
From what I see, you have to get your claude.md instructions right, and most of it is using planning mode. The CLI is exactly how you interact with it. It's less vibe code and what I'd call supervisory code.

It's less about writing code, more about building an engine that codes. It's hands off but unlike Cursor, it's not as eyes-off. You do observe and interrupt it. It is great for full on TDF - it figures out the feature, writes the test for the feature, fails the test, rewrites the code to pass. But at some point, you realize you got the instructions wrong and because you're outside the loop, you have to interrupt it.

I think it's a natural progression, but it's not for everyone. The people who hated not being able to write functions will hate claude code even more. But some people love writing their engines.
by lpat | 2025-07-18 12:11:18+00:00
I don't think you can just willy-nilly copy code from StackOverflow and sign it with your name. It's license forbids it. You also can't just sign your friend's code with your name unless she explicitly gives you permission. In both cases you are not the author of that code.

I get that people do it anyway but I guess it's kind of a grey-area because it's hard to tell after the fact that some snippet has been copied from SO.
by exe34 | 2025-07-18 12:11:27+00:00
> With my mac I have far fewer, but the ones you have, you’re often stuck with. Generally these are about flakiness with the automagic stuff. Like the camera feed switching to your iphone for a while (whether you want it or not), then suddenly refusing for weeks even when you do want it

This is the kind of thing I could absolutely not stand unless I was getting paid for it. I paid for the laptop. This button does X. When I press this button, it needs to do X. Let me at least fix it so that it does X. If it was a free laptop or I was getting paid to sit around waiting for X to work again, that's absolutely fine. But if I paid for it, it should either work or let me fix it.
by jtrn | 2025-07-18 12:11:59+00:00
Welcome to year 30 of trying to prove psilocybin works for psychiatric illness. And still in the pilot stage.

Even taking the data at face value, the trial cannot disentangle the drug effect from expectancy, psychotherapy, and statistical noise. The enormous effect sizes are almost certainly inflated, multiple-comparison error is uncontrolled, and the participant pool is highly self-selected. Until a preregistered, parallel-group, active-placebo, adequately powered study with blinded independent raters replicates these findings, their practical value for routine cancer care remains minimal.

It’s so interesting to see how strong the drive to prove something works is, overriding everything. As a clinical psychologist, I would welcome this kind of therapy if it worked. But this is just sad. It’s just like listening to people claim that ivermectin can cure everything.

Show me one place where this therapy is conducted by people who haven’t "drunk the Kool-Aid," and I’ll be impressed. It’s so frustrating to work with actual patients and see how much these therapies really don’t work in reality. These kinds of biased studies pop up all the time without actually panning out. I’m starting to think that people promoting therapy, giving false hope, and spending money on research like this should be viewed as corrupt and evil.
by jorangreef | 2025-07-18 12:12:02+00:00
Appreciated your post, Lewis!

From the beginning, TigerStyle was intended not only for TigerBeetle as infrastructure, but for software (up and down the stack) in general.

Nobody wants buggier, slower software. And so TigerStyle as a methodology was codified primarily to address this problem: How to write “higher quality software in less time”? [1]

Before designing TigerBeetle, I was finding the principles more and more valuable, regardless of whether I was doing frontend or backend work, and so brought them into TigerBeetle.

Of course, software higher up is likely to use some dependencies, but there's always a cost, and this principle (“do more with less”), at least in my experience, tends to prove valuable when applied.

[1] Some of the background motivation behind TigerStyle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3WYdYyjek4
by pavlov | 2025-07-18 12:12:12+00:00
"“Our father, Gary Kildall, was one of the founders of the personal computer industry, but you probably don’t know his name. Those who have heard of him may recall the myth that he ‘missed’ the opportunity to become Bill Gates by going flying instead of meeting with IBM. Unfortunately, this tall tale paints Gary as a ‘could-have-been,’ ignores his deep contributions, and overshadows his role as an inventor of key technologies that define how computer platforms run today.

"Gary viewed computers as learning tools rather than profit engines. His career choices reflect a different definition of success, where innovation means sharing ideas, letting passion drive your work and making source code available for others to build upon. His work ethic during the 1970s resembles that of the open-source community today.

"With this perspective, we offer a portion of our father’s unpublished memoirs so that you can read about his experiences and reflections on the early days of the computer industry, directly in his own voice."

Sounds really interesting. Thanks for making this available!
by Arnt | 2025-07-18 12:12:16+00:00
Every rule applies poorly to some corner case. That is a necessary consequence of being simpler than reality: Every time you simplify a model by disregarding a rare or unimportant trait, you make the model poor for the cases where that rare/unimportant trait applies. And you have to simplify, to avoid an unmanageably complex rule. (Let me tell you about the German tax code some day. They really tried to be fair and didn't value simplicity or comprensibility highly.)

In the case of this tree, the computed value according the rule is a very high value, and the real-world value is also a very high value, so what's the problem? This is a rule that produces a fairly good result even in a case where it may be expected to apply badly. That's not a bad rule.
by lxgr | 2025-07-18 12:12:33+00:00
I can’t talk to ChatGPT hands-free on my Apple devices, but I can to ChatGPT.

Besides that, many people don’t install any apps, and Apple not pre-installing a reasonable LLM to cater to that market just seems incredibly out of character.

And there’s enough credible reporting and personnel reshuffling happening to suggest that it’s not available yet because they failed to make it work, not because they didn’t try.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-07-18 12:13:36+00:00
Having strong opinions on technical errata makes you sound smart and like you know what you're doing to the people who might want to hire you. Saying "I didn't bother to optimize this because it doesn't affect our bottom line" can be so easily reinterpreted as "I'm incompetent and never even thought about this angle in the first place". The OP has chosen an effective middle ground to communicate that they're serious about their work.
by snowwrestler | 2025-07-18 12:13:51+00:00
Please go rewatch the iPhone keynote by Steve Jobs. Everyone remembers the beginning; few seem to remember that he brings out 3 other CEOs to highlight the integrations between the iPhone and those companies.

Or consider that they spent a decade highlighting that their computers were powered by Intel, after leaving their proprietary PowerPC architecture—again, under Steve Jobs.

Or go all the way back to 1997 when Steve Jobs had Bill Gates on the screen at Macworld and announced that IE would be the default browser on Mac.

It’s easy to fall into a caricature of Apple, where they insist on making everything themselves. What is more accurate is to say that they are not afraid to make things themselves, when they think they have a better idea. But they are also not afraid to do deals when it is the best way forward right now.
by whobre | 2025-07-18 12:14:08+00:00
He was nothing like BG. Gary was an inventor, educator and most of all a visionary. He hated running a business, even though he started DRI after failing to convince Intel to buy CP/M.

Yes, there are quite a few videos on YouTube about him, named “The man who should have been Bill Gates” but that’s just click baiting. Watch the special episode of “The Computer Chronicles” about Gary Kildall and see what his friends and business associates say about him.
by mynameajeff | 2025-07-18 12:14:36+00:00
This is cool but I can't seem to find the best way to give a better location closer to my area when I live in a rural enough location that I don't have a good city (with a name that isn't overshadowed by a more popular version elsewhere) or airport nearby

Edit: for some reason upon trying again coordinates work, first time I tried the same url I kept getting "unknown location"
by jvanderbot | 2025-07-18 12:15:58+00:00
At the end of the day when I'd be thrashing or reverting as much as I write, I can let Jesus take the wheel for a bit to refresh.

On small issues it's usually just a glance over the diff, on harder issues it's not challenging to scold it into a good path once something starts coming together, as long as it's a localized edit with a problem I understand. I'll often take over when it's 40-60% there, which is only possible b/c it does a good job of following todo lists.

I've moved into a good daily workflow that emphasizes my own crafting during the times I'm sharp like mornings, and lets AI do the overtime and grunt work while I prepare for tomorrow or do more thoughtful writing and design.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-07-18 12:16:19+00:00
Because usually the "euphoria" people feel is their biology failing due to mild poisoning. It is why most people will often upchuck within a few minutes of ingestion.

People may think they are finding enlightenment, but are no different from the local deranged squirrels aggressively howling at passerby after nibbling Amanita in the fall. Apparently the squirrels use the mushroom to help preserve food stores, and it doesn't poison them as severely (often fatal for humans.)

Paul Stamets is a weird dude, but his work contains some profoundly detailed observations.

People need to think about Fungi as closer to animals that don't move on their own, and acknowledge they rapidly adapt genetically to survive. Pretty to photograph, but often far more complex than people like to admit. =3
by K0balt | 2025-07-18 12:16:50+00:00
Impressive.

In aviation, this gets us a Cessna 172 in a two seat configuration that has about a 2 hour endurance and insane takeoff performance.

Translated to a slippery aerodynamically optimized composite 2 seat plane, that could be around 3 hours / 330nm of endurance.

Reasonable electric light aviation is gradually coming within reach.