MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by marcosdumay | 2025-07-18 04:32:48+00:00
At this point I'm even surprised that compliant cables and chargers exist so the GP can have that problem.

But I believe the specs are that way to avoid problems with OTG devices. If both devices decide to just push a voltage into the cable at the same time, you risk spending a great deal of energy or even start a fire. That said, there are better ways to deal with this issue; those are just slightly more expensive.
by _imnothere | 2025-07-18 04:33:11+00:00
While Nintendo does make good games such as Animal Crossing, their behavior makes me find it hard to support them with my money.

I bought first-gen Nintendo Switch with the faith that maybe I should support the devs for doing nice work, but after getting into the community, I found myself regretting giving my money to wrong hands, it may not be much, but money is money.
by ajross | 2025-07-18 04:33:50+00:00
Hm. No, I think the practice of using a capability for a bad goal is inherently worse than merely having a capability that can be used for a bad goal. (The whole principle behind the second amendment, after all!)

And we should condemn the overreach on its own terms and by its own moral failings and not just wave it away with a both-sides-ist "They're merely using it how they want".

Bad things are bad and we should say they are bad. Because at the end of the day every government is possessed of terrible power and the only reason any of them don't get worse is that we vote for the people who aren't bad.
by ern | 2025-07-18 04:34:01+00:00
I liked Claude Code when I used it initially to document a legacy codebase. The developer who maintains the system reviewed the documentation, and said it was spot-on.

But the other day I asked it to help add boundary logging to another legacy codebase and it produced some horrible, duplicated and redundant code. I see these huge Claude instruction files people share on social media, and I have to wonder...

Not sure if they're rationing "the smarts" or performance is highly variable.
by gopalv | 2025-07-18 04:34:26+00:00
> who will be able to bring even more of their ideas to life than they would have beforehand.

This is the core part of what's changing - the most important people around me used to be "People who know how".

We're slowly shifting to "Knowing what you want" is beating the Know-how.

People without any know-how are able to experiment because they know what they want and can keep saying "No, that's not what I want" to a system which will listen to them for without complaining supplying the know-how.

From my perspective, my decades of accumulating know-how is entirely pointless and wiped away in the last 2 years.

Adapt or fall behind, there's no way to ignore AI and hope it passes by without a ripple.
by blintz | 2025-07-18 04:34:35+00:00
I say this as a lover of FHE and the wonderful cryptography around it:

While it’s true that FHE schemes continue to get faster, they don’t really have hope of being comparable to plaintext speeds as long as they rely on bootstrapping. For deep, fundamental reasons, bootstrapping isn’t likely to ever be less than ~1000x overhead.

When folks realized they couldn’t speed up bootstrapping much more, they started talking about hardware acceleration, but it’s a tough sell at time when every last drop of compute is going into LLMs. What $/token cost increase would folks pay for computation under FHE? Unless it’s >1000x, it’s really pretty grim.

For anything like private LLM inference, confidential computing approaches are really the only feasible option. I don’t like trusting hardware, but it’s the best we’ve got!
by kennywinker | 2025-07-18 04:34:36+00:00
> If I'm that off, why even engage?

Yes, exactly. That’s why i didn’t engage on the topic, just on gender indicator words and spelling.

> Felt like the right thing to do.

Reacting terribly? Ok

> You're just repeating what I said now, but […] in an angry tone

You seem to have misread my tone. Patronizing? At this point yes. Angry? Not even a little bit miffed.

> I showed you where the spoon is

Wait, is there a spoon in the matrix? I don’t remember that bit. What a detailed reference. I’m humbled
by coderenegade | 2025-07-18 04:34:53+00:00
I'm going to go against the grain here and say that in my experience, self-taught engineers typically deliver worse products, and I say that as someone who is mostly self-taught, albeit lucky enough to have benefited from good mentoring. The best programmers I ever met all did software engineering or computer science, or were themselves mentored by others with a lot more experience.

I think the difference comes down to how you view programming. The self-taught programmers I've met typically see programming as a means to an end, and take "it runs on my machine" as the measure of success. Someone with more discipline will understand that that's the lowest bar and mostly a given for someone whose job is to write code. The real measure is can you come back to it in 6 months and know what you did? Can you easily expand on it to add new functionality? There's a craft there that isn't obvious unless you've done enough coding for long enough to run into the problems that software engineering is designed to solve. And if you're built like that, mentoring helps bridge that gap, because you understand why certain techniques exist. They're not just arbitrary patterns.

So I don't think it's being self-taught that makes the difference, but rather, being the kind of person who writes code that gets revisited. Even if you make a hash of it, it'll give you context so that when someone better than you comes along and points out a better strategy, you understand why it's an improvement. And I think that's true regardless of whether you're self taught, or you have a degree, it's just that having a degree in software gives you those strategies from the get-go, even if you don't necessarily have the context.
by Gabriel_7w7 | 2025-07-18 04:34:53+00:00
This is the most comprehensive explanation ever attempted about the science of audiobooks vs. traditional books to this date. And even though this was driven by relentless curiosity, research, and passion for analysis, I might be wrong in some points and future evidence may prove that. This is a personal investigation to be taken by a grain of salt and not as the ultimate truth. The key concept presented, Learning‑to‑Exertion Ratio (LER), is a new metric to measure learning efficiency for the individual learner and is the main apportation of this guide. It captures the effectiveness and efficiency variables present in reading and listening to help learners find the best modality for them, whether that is books, audiobooks, or both, to maximize learning and minimize fatigue. This combination of characteristics helps to maximize the amount of knowledge you can gain, specially over the long term, for your personal goals, study, or curiosity.

Creating this guide has been a personal passion for me that has helped me to understand this subject more deeply and to optimize my own learning for my knowledge journey and I hope it does the same for you because all of this was created for you, the smart guy who relentlessly wants to find complex answers to, seemingly, simple questions and don't stop until that hunger is satisfied.

Note: The section about the mathematics of LER is completely optional and, if you like, you can skip it.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-07-18 04:35:07+00:00
I am failing to find it, but Simon Willison had a post where he vendored some small (<1000 line) blob of code instead of adding it as a dependency. The trick was that he had some Github action(?) automation which would automatically check if the vendored version ever fell out of sync with upstream. Get the benefits of vendoring while minimizing your actual support burden.

Only a realistic strategy for small bits of code, but I have considered do the same for a few utility libraries which are a focused niche, but subtle enough that you would rather outsource the complexity.
by ninjin | 2025-07-18 04:35:39+00:00
> I love OpenBSD and I'm really interested in got for several years. I just hope that this https://framagit.org/stsp/got/-/blob/main/got/got.c?ref_type... gets removed at some point.

It is an OpenBSD culture reference though [1], not some sort of attempt at an insult. I would personally be sad to see it go as it does make me smile when a program is not too "corporate" and reminds me every time I see it that I have the power to pull through on my own (most of the time) if I just put my mind to it.

[1]: https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#51b
by jackblemming | 2025-07-18 04:35:44+00:00
Heh, I get to totally dunk on this guy by calling him a vibe coder for not using lazy evaled string interpolation.

Wait a second.. If I do ANY ACTUAL engineering and log out the time savings, it's completely negligible and just makes the code harder to read?

It is complete insanity to me that literally every piece of programming literature over the past sixty years has been drilling the concept about code readability over unncessary optimizations and yet still I constantly read completely backwards takes like this.
by lossolo | 2025-07-18 04:37:52+00:00
I understand your argument. The recipe that finally let RLHF + SFT work without strip mining base knowledge was real R&D, and GPT 4 class models wouldn’t feel so "chatty but competent" without it. I just still see ceiling effects that make the whole effort look more like climbing a very tall tree than building a Saturn V.

GPT 4.1 is marketed as a "major improvement" but under the hood it’s still the KL-regularised PPO loop OpenAI first stabilized in 2022 only with a longer context window and a lot more GPUs for reward model inference.

They retired GPT 4.5 after five months and told developers to fall back to 4.1. The public story is "cost to serve” not breakthroughs left on the table. When you sunset your latest flagship because the economics don’t close, that’s not a moon shot trajectory, it’s weight shaving on a treehouse.

Stanford’s 2025 AI-Index shows that model to model spreads on MMLU, HumanEval, and GSM8K have collapsed to low single digits, performance curves are flattening exactly where compute curves are exploding. A fresh MIT-CSAIL paper modelling "Bayes slowdown" makes the same point mathematically: every extra order of magnitude of FLOPs is buying less accuracy than the one before.[1]

A survey published last week[2] catalogs the 2025 state of RLHF/RLAIF: reward hacking, preference data scarcity, and training instability remain open problems, just mitigated by ever heavier regularisation and bigger human in the loop funnels. If our alignment patch still needs a small army of labelers and a KL muzzle to keep the model from self lobotomising calling it "solved" feels optimistic.

Scale, fancy sampling tricks, and patched up RL got us to the leafy top so chatbots that can code and debate decently. But the same reports above show the branches bending under compute cost, data saturation, and alignment tax. Until we swap out the propulsion system so new architectures, richer memory, or learning paradigms that add information instead of reweighting it we’re in danger of planting a flag on a treetop and mistaking it for Mare Tranquillitatis.

Happy to climb higher together friend but I’m still packing a parachute, not a space suit.

1. https://arxiv.org/html/2507.07931v1

2. https://arxiv.org/html/2507.04136v1
by jbotz | 2025-07-18 04:38:07+00:00
Yes, ants evolved from wasps, and it's really not that surprising if you take a close look at a typical ant and a typical wasp, pretty much the only difference are wings and coloring. There also exist wingless wasps, and some of them are black and really quite indistinguishable from ants by non-entomologist. And that's after over 100 million years since the ants diverged from the wasps! Talk about a successful evolutionary design. Your closest relative from 100 million years ago was a little vaguely rat-like thing. (Edit to answer your specific question: the ancestor of ants and wasps obviously was winged and flying, since both families still have at least some winged members).

As a sibling has already pointed out ants do fly during "nuptial flight", and then discard their wings... wings would only be a hindrance for their largely underground lifestyle. Also ants have retained the stinger which also functions as an ovipositor (egg layer), and some species still use it for defense and pack a wallop of a poison, right up there with some of the of the worst wasps. Google "bullet ant" for some good stuff. Other ants just bite, and the burning you feel is from their saliva which consists mostly of an acid named after ants: fourmic acid (ant is "formica" in latin).

Edit to add one more random factoid that will surprise a lot of people: termites are not related to ants at all, and they evolved from... (drumroll)... cockroaches! It's rather harder to see the resemblance, except for their diet... both are capable of digesting (with help from endosymbiotic microbes) pure cellulose. And while termites don't really resemble ants either, parallel evolution has chosen the same strategy of retaining the wings for the fertile individuals who go on a nuptial flight and then discard their wings and try to found new colonies.
by rlupi | 2025-07-18 04:38:18+00:00
Very thoughtful comment, let me try to capture it more clearly.

Zuckerberg recently said that those not using AI glasses will be cognitively disadvantaged in the future.

Imagine an AI-native from the future and one of the fancy espresso coffee machines that we have today. They will be able to know right away how to operate them from their AI assistants, but they won't be able to figure out how they work on their own.

That's the future that Zuckerberg wants. Naturally, fancy IT offices will likely be gone. The AI-native would have bought the coffee machine for nostalgia effect for a large sum, trying to combat existential dread and feeling of failure which are fueled by their behavior being even more directly coerced into consumption.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-07-18 04:38:18+00:00
I never claimed it was useful for targeted searches by modern standards. It's primarily a time saving measure from my perspective. If I come across a paper and it is in a publication that has a track record of publishing shoddy results I am likely to prioritize other works (assuming that I have a large potential pool of them to investigate).

If a nature paper claims a seemingly impossible result I'll most likely spend the time to at least glance through it and see if maybe my preconceptions were mistaken. If something on arxiv looks like nonsense I'm not going to waste any time on it (unless someone else told me it's worth it).
by jandrewrogers | 2025-07-18 04:38:23+00:00
All software engineers are essentially self-taught. Building non-trivial complex software requires the acquisition of enormous amounts of knowledge you didn’t learn at school. If you can’t teach yourself, you aren’t going to go very far.

I’ve never noticed much difference between the people with CS degrees and the ones that don’t. It is always people with relentless curiosity and stamina that have the elite skills. The only thing I might attribute to people without CS degrees is they seem more likely, in my experience, to come up with interesting ideas that actually work by taking unorthodox approaches to classic CS problems.
by zdw | 2025-07-18 04:38:37+00:00
To clarify, I'm not thinking of code/libraries written by a huge company, more about open source code that has been scaled far beyond your deployment size by someone/anyone else.

Also, if you're using some feature that isn't regularly exercised (like your Swift protobuf example), it's probably doesn't have the variety of use to be covered by Hyrum's Law (see https://www.hyrumslaw.com ), which is definitely a different aspect of the Ubiquity criteria.
by 9rx | 2025-07-18 04:40:10+00:00
> if this is too much, how will you do when asked to solve even harder problems with tight schedules and/or demanding customers?

Isn't the whole reason you are joining a team is so that you have a support network when such situations arise? The period of acting alone to join that team is a temporary aberration and is to be recognized as such.

You may as well be the business selling to those demanding customers if you have what it takes to handle going at it alone. It will be far more profitable. But if you don't have it...
by mym1990 | 2025-07-18 04:40:58+00:00
Abstraction has always been a part of programming. Are you going to deride someone for not remembering how to write a sorting algorithm from scratch when .sort() is available? This is just another instance of that, trivial as it may be. The next abstraction level for programming is just natural language, if you want to try to gate keep that, have fun.
by iaw | 2025-07-18 04:41:19+00:00
My experience has been that Claude can layout a lot of things in minutes that would take me hours if not days. Often I can dictate the precise logic and then claude get's most of the way there, with a little prompting claude can usually get even further. The amount of work I can get done is much more substantial than it used to be.

I think there is a lot of reticence to adopt AI for coding but I'm seeing it as a step change for coding the way powerful calculators/workstation computers were for traditional engineering disciplines. The volume of work they were limited to using a slide rule was much lower than now with a computer.
by kimixa | 2025-07-18 04:41:22+00:00
It's a junior engineer that doesn't learn - they make the same mistakes even after being corrected the second that falls out their context window (even often with "corrections" still there...), they struggle to abstract those categories of mistakes to avoid making similar ones in the future, and (by the looks of it) will never be "the senior". "Hiring a Junior" should really be seen as an investment more than immediate output.

I keep being told that $(WHATEVER MODEL) is the greatest thing ever, but every time I actually try to use them they're of limited (but admittedly non-zero) usefulness. There's only so many breathless blogs or comments I can read that just don't mesh with the reality I personally see.

Maybe it's sector? I generally work on Systems/OS/Drivers, large code bases in languages like C, C++ and Rust. Most larger than context windows even before you look at things like API documentation. Even as a "search and summarizer" tool I've found it completely wrong in enough cases to be functionally worthless as the time required to correct and check the output isn't a saving. But they can be handy for "autocompletion+" - like "here's a similar existing block of code, now do the same but with (changes)".

They generally seem pretty good at being like a template engine on non-templated code, so thing like renaming/refactoring or similar structure recognition can be handy. Which I suspect might also explain some of those breathless blog posts - I've seen loads which say "Any non-coder can make a simple app in seconds!" - but you could already do that, there's a million "Simple App Tutorial" codebases that would match whatever license you want, copy one, change the name at the top and you're 99% of the way to the "Wow Magic End Result!" often described.
by LambdaComplex | 2025-07-18 04:41:47+00:00
I've solved plenty of hard problems at work, but none of them have ever looked like "count the grid squares adjacent to a given grid square while taking the grid's edges into account so the program doesn't blow up because you tried to access an invalid index."

And if I did have to do something like that at work, I promise my manager would give me more than 25 minutes to do it.
by motorest | 2025-07-18 04:42:21+00:00
> This is a sign that the user hasn't taken the time to set up their tools.

You are commenting a blog post on how a user set up his tools. It's just that it's not your tool that is being showcased.

> You should be able to type log and have it tab complete because your editor should be aware of the context you're in.

...or, hear me out, you don't have to. Think about it. If you have a tool that you type "add logs" and it's aware of best practices, context, and your own internal usage... I mean, why are you bothering with typing "log" at all?
by forgotoldacc | 2025-07-18 04:42:43+00:00
>Dr Birley said many examples of stone and marble toilet benches existed from across the Roman Empire, but this is believed to be the only surviving wooden seat.

So the article you link says, in colloquial English terms, that stone and marble toilets from the period are pretty common but wooden toilet seats are basically all disintegrated. Only one (1) wooden seat is known to remain.
by stingraycharles | 2025-07-18 04:44:19+00:00
It kind of is in the same way that Windows used to be root-only. This was a known issue. / vulnerability because those who understood the risks were generally smart enough to avoid getting exploited. The general population, however, did not understand this and the consequences of this became bigger and bigger.

With AI, there’s a whole class of people who don’t really know what they’re signing up for when installing these types of MCP servers. It may not be a vulnerability, but a solution is necessary.
by YZF | 2025-07-18 04:44:20+00:00
Those best programmers you ever met; Was their first introduction to programming in university?

The single very best programmer I've ever known was self taught. He went part way through a CS program and dropped out but that was after he was already the best I've ever met. Incredible skills. Software that worked. Incredible productivity. Across different languages and technologies.

Rarely have I met someone who didn't have interest in software and computers before university (e.g. as a kid or teenager) be a really great software engineer. I've met many who took CS or Engineering because it's a good profession, they can make money, and have no passion or particular aptitude.

In my opinion the best mix is a combination of self taught and some formal schooling. Passion, aptitude and education. You can learn the formal stuff on your own but it's harder to do.

All of us software engineers are self taught. The stuff we do is generally not taught in university. I have a CS degree but 99% of what I do is not that. That's not to say formal education in CS and various related areas is not useful. In some specific software engineering jobs perhaps more so than others.
Ask HN: Are LLMs good for implementing features in existing web apps?
by endorphine | 2025-07-18 04:44:29+00:00
So I have a typical medium-sized Rails codebase, but with significant code that's not the dead simple CRUD stuff. For example, it talks with third-party APIs, does user authentication, uses Postgres FTS plus some other things.

I'm bored to work on it lately, and I was thinking whether using an LLM I could implement new features for it.

Are any of the current models at this point yet? I guess it should need to have a big context so that it reads all the views/controllers/models.

If so, which tool would you use? Something like Codex or Claude Code?
by noisy_boy | 2025-07-18 04:44:35+00:00
Expensive doesn't equal great either. My ThinkPad thunderbolt hub, which is not cheap by any standards, can't route HDMI without randomly restarting itself every few minutes. Connecting the same cable directly to my ThinkPad laptop works perfectly fine. Sort of defeats the whole point of buying a hub. I have sort of given up on hopes of getting a high quality hub - it's a money sink
by imoverclocked | 2025-07-18 04:45:35+00:00
Excellent question.

I don’t speak for Apple but certainly you can appreciate that there is a fine balance between providing basic functionality and providing apps. Apple works to provide tools that developers can leverage and also tries to not step on those same developers. Defining the line between what should be built-in and what should be add-on needs to be done carefully and often is done organically.