MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SeanAnderson | 2025-07-04 22:37:04+00:00
I find it surprisingly difficult to lower my standards once I feel committed to an idea. I wish this article leaned a little more into ways to address that sort of dilemma.

Don't get me wrong, I agree fully with the article. I put it into practice plenty well in many areas of my life. I've made great progress with my diet, self-care, and physical fitness routines by keeping my goals SMART.

And yet, a few years ago, I got this idea in my head for a piece of software I wanted to create that is, if not too ambitious, then clearly asking all of me and then some. The opening paragraph of the article really resonated with me -- "The artwork that will finally make the invisible visible."

And so, I've chipped away at the idea here and there, but I find myself continually put off by "the gap" - even though I know it's to be expected and is totally human.

Part of me wishes I had never dared to dream so big and wishes I could let the idea go entirely. Another part of me is mad and ashamed for thinking like that about a personal dream.

Anyway, don't know where I'm going with all this. Just felt like remarking on the article since it struck close to home.

P.S. if you haven't seen the Ira Glass video, I'd take a look. It's pretty inspirational. Here's Part 3 which is what the article was referencing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE
by timr | 2025-07-04 22:38:19+00:00
> I don't disagree with your assessment of the world today, but just 12 months ago (before the current crop of base models and coding agents like Claude Code), even that 10X improvement of writing some-of-the-code wouldn't have been true.

So? It sounds like you're prodding us to make an extrapolation fallacy (I don't even grant the "10x in 12 months" point, but let's just accept the premise for the sake of argument).

Honestly, 12 months ago the base models weren't substantially worse than they are right now. Some people will argue with me endlessly on this point, and maybe they're a bit better on the margin, but I think it's pretty much true. When I look at the improvements of the last year with a cold, rational eye, they've been in two major areas:

* cost & efficiency * UI & integration

So how do we improve from here? Cost & efficiency are the obvious lever with historical precedent: GPUs kinda suck for inference, and costs are (currently) rapidly dropping. But, maybe this won't continue -- algorithmic complexity is what it is, and barring some revolutionary change in the architecture, LLMs are exponential algorithms.

UI and integration is where most of the rest of the recent improvement has come from, and honestly, this is pretty close to saturation. All of the various AI products already look the same, and I'm certain that they'll continue to converge to a well-accepted local maxima. After that, huge gains in productivity from UX alone will not be possible. This will happen quickly -- probably in the next year or two.

Basically, unless we see a Moore's law of GPUs, I wouldn't bet on indefinite exponential improvement in AI. My bet is that, from here out, this looks like the adoption curve of any prior technology shift (e.g. mainframe -> PC, PC -> laptop, mobile, etc.) where there's a big boom, then a long, slow adoption for the masses.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-07-04 22:39:02+00:00
I disagree strongly at this point. The code is generally good if the prompt was reasonable at this point but also every test possible is now being written, every ui element has the all required traits, every function has the correct documentation attached, the million little refactors to improve the codebase are being done, etc.

Someone told me ‘ai makes all the little things trivial to do’ and i agree strongly with that. Those many little things are things that together make a strong statement about quality. Our codebase has gone up in quality significantly with ai whereas we’d let the little things slide due to understaffing before.
by Yizahi | 2025-07-04 22:39:14+00:00
I didn't mean it like that, certainly nothing unfair about Valve. It's just that GOG tries to differentiate by being slightly more consumer oriented than all other competitors - no DRM as a principle, much longer refund window, ability to legally download a complete installers for games, interop (basic) with competitors, programs to update abandonware for modern systems etc. But it seems that it's not enough to become successful even after years of hard work and becoming a stable recognized brand.
by rufus_foreman | 2025-07-04 22:39:16+00:00
>> Are off-leash dogs in your part of the world a consistent threat to your safety

Killed people here, yeah. What's the recourse when a pit bull kills you, skeeter2020? Can you tell me that? When you're dead from a pit bull attack, what's your recourse?

I'm really interested in the answer.
by paulryanrogers | 2025-07-04 22:39:41+00:00
Pinto's gas tank liner wasn't going to cost that. It's absence cost lives and Ford's reputation to please some idiot cost cutter.

If there were some absurd scenario where the benefit is prohibitively expensive then we could debate that.

As it is, I'm afraid too many people in charge at Boeing and similar manufacturers have a terrible sense of priorities and tradeoffs. We should never have outsourced regulation to the manufacturers themselves.
by leakycap | 2025-07-04 22:41:05+00:00
The market is not easy right now. I would not leave unless you have something definite lined up.

> 1. Be pushed into a workflow that will cause my technical growth to stall or degrade

Whether your growth stalls or degrades is up to you, but in my country your employer's ability to tell how you how to produce/deliver the work (not just the outcome desired) is the difference between being an employee and contractor

You should remain open to new things in this industry. Hate it or not, AI is currently the new thing in our line of work.

> 2. Be overseeing a bunch of AI-generated spaghetti 2-3 years from now

How you implement code, including human review and understanding of code, is key. I have never copy and pasted code into development from an LLM/AI helper. I've certainly asked it questions about the code, tested the code output, had it add comments to help me understand the code it wrote and produce alternate methods that better fit my needs, etc.

"No spaghetti" in the codebase will prevent having to take care of it, but that doesn't mean small modular components, troubleshooting, general ideation of different approaches to see what can scale, etc. isn't going to be really helpful.

> I'm a 'senior engineer' with ~5 years of industry experience and am considering moving on from this company

5 years is not what I would consider a big bargaining chip in today's market full of seasoned developers, including those who started when they were in middle school and are applying for the same jobs as you would be.

Can you work with your employer to effectively introduce some AI tools and workflows to help ideas, changes, revisions, new features, or even documentation?

Don't jump until it is safe, and remember the next place is likely just slower or one leadership away from asking their employees the same thing your employer is.
by pedalpete | 2025-07-04 22:41:19+00:00
I've been guilty of this myself for our neurotech sleeptech company, and I still owe HN a better blog post clarifying our positioning.

I think there are a few reasons you see this in health/medical community.

1) just helping people understand a different view of the problem is often enough for one blog post. Stuffing new way to look at solution and new solution together can sometimes be a bit much.

2) we have to be cautious from a regulatory perspective about what we say, and sometimes in being too cautious don't give the people who REALLY want to understaned the processes enough to go on. For our company, I used to say things like "we can increase the synchronous firing of neurons which results in reduced 15^% drop in early night cortisol, and 14.5% increase in hrv....".

But prior to regulatory approvals, we can't point directly to neurological or physiological processes, which means we kinda end up talking around the solution a bit.

3) in marketing, they want to connect and build an audience, so they are dripping more information over time. One post gets feedback and interest from one group, then you do another, and another. It's about building the community and connecting with people, not just a "here's a problem, do the thing, thanks". If you are trying to build a business, you probably need to get in front of people 7-8 times, particularly if you're taking a new approach to a problem, to build trust and brand recognition.

It's not the best, but it is the way the world works.
by cm2187 | 2025-07-04 22:41:53+00:00
Correlates to a popular French joke. They bring in a cat to get rid of the mices in a ministry. The cat does wonders and all the mices are gone. A few months later, the mices are all back. The minister asks "what's going on with the mices", "it's the cat, sir, he has been made a full time civil servant".
by throw0101d | 2025-07-04 22:42:05+00:00
> Was it obvious from day one or an idea that came later in the design phases.

The Bitcoin paper came out in 2009, and the deflationary criticism was already recorded in 2010:

* https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Deflationary_spiral&...

2014 article:

* https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2014/06/the-perils-of-bitcoi...
by tonymet | 2025-07-04 22:42:20+00:00
my ryzen7 Beelink has been the best PC I've owned. Great performance, excellent reliability (only 1 BSOD in 2 years), great utility.

I ended up consolidating 3-4 Raspis onto a single HyperV server and alpine / debian VMs.

Pi zero 2 is the last compelling raspberry pi . Great for running cpu-bound servers like DNS, static web, network monitoring.

Pi-5 performance, especially with IO, is not worthwhile.
by cwillu | 2025-07-04 22:42:39+00:00
A word being fuzzy does not mean it has no meaning and that it can therefore be used for anything. A word being used in a particular (but fuzzy) way hundreds of years ago does not mean that it can't have a different (and fuzzy) meaning today. Yes, words drift, but the vague fuzzy notion that engineering meant 20 years ago still has value, and if the word has lost that meaning with no replacement, that's a problem.
by akkad33 | 2025-07-04 22:43:33+00:00
I've worked with some junior developers and my experience has been the same as yours. We work primarily with typed languages. With junior developers I see two ways it goes: either they write code that does not take advantage of the type system, typing everything as basic string or numeric types. On the other end of the spectrum, those who go to the extremes where they build a complicated type hierarchy with abstractions more complicated than the problem space requirements
by grogers | 2025-07-04 22:44:23+00:00
> Reasonable people who’s opinions I respect, have called this hack anything from “brilliant” to “an afront to all morals”. I think it is OK.

It's definitely a clever hack given the constraints of malloc, but this anecdote made me smile very widely.

In addition to multi-core becoming the norm causing it to be less performant than alternatives, I imagine the "sanity checking" aspects of phkmalloc were subsumed by things like ASAN.
by trhway | 2025-07-04 22:44:27+00:00
>What evidence do you have that the birds killed by cats are mainly old or ill?

it is well established pattern of predation in the Nature. Again, you specified the total number without providing the old/ill number. The relation of those numbers can completely change the conclusion, and i can only wonder why you didn't provide the old/ill number.

>Cats being an invasive species in most places on earth

What planet "earth" you're talking about? On the 3rd planet from Sun the wild cats are practically everywhere. And in the places where there are no cats, there are still similar predators - ferrets, foxes, etc.

>And yes, birds hitting man made structures is a major problem. There can be two bad things at once.

No 2 bad things here. Predation by cats is natural, and thus mostly good, in the Nature-way, for the species being predated upon. The man made structures are really bad as i described in my previous comment. Yet somehow you want to tackle the first and not the second.
by liurenju | 2025-07-04 22:44:33+00:00
Hi all,

I am a founder working on AI applications, and I have noticed that building the backend for AI apps feels much more complex and fragmented than for traditional SaaS. Things like usage-based billing, managing credits, LLM streaming (with session resuming), user behavior analytics, and integrations with multiple model providers all add a lot of overhead before you can even focus on the product itself.

I am thinking of starting an open source project called AiBase (https://github.com/liurenju/AiBase) to handle these backend pain points out of the box, so teams can focus on building their core AI features instead of wrestling with infrastructure.

For those building or planning to build AI products, do you feel these are major pain points? Would you use an open source Backend as a Service for this, or do you prefer rolling your own solution? What would you want to see in such a project for it to actually be useful? Would love to hear your experiences and honest opinions, including “this is not a real problem,” “I would never use BaaS for AI,” or any similar feedback.
by janfoeh | 2025-07-04 22:44:40+00:00
Here is the Kaisersaal in Berlin being moved on air cushions in 1996 [1]. And wasn't a better part of Chicago jacked up building by building some time in the 19th century to make room for a sewage system?

[1] https://www.bz-berlin.de/archiv-artikel/hier-schwebt-ein-den...
by acdha | 2025-07-04 22:45:00+00:00
If he wanted fiscal stability, he would have been lobbying Congress rather than incurring massive costs for the government. DOGE’s reckless violations of law and policy have guaranteed many large lawsuits, sloppy staff cuts regardless of merit have decreased efficiency across the board, and cuts to things like the IRS reduce revenue. This is the opposite of a serious effort to improve efficiency, in large part because they started from the belief that there was a massive fraud and waste problem based on ideology rather than sober analysis.
by SkyPuncher | 2025-07-04 22:45:33+00:00
I ended up in a similar situation last year. Amazing job, but typical startup stresses combined with some situational stuff in my personal life (moving, new jobs for partner, kids, day-care changes, etc, etc, etc) left me completely broken. I ended up leaving my job to take care of my family (thought I was done with my career, but it ended up being a sabbatical - back at the old job and doing great now)

It took about 6 months for the brain zaps to start fading. Then another 6 months for me to start feeling capable of really doing my job well. I'm 18 months into "recovery" and I still think I have another 6 to 12 months before I feel like my old self again (so about 2 to 2.5 years in total).

Time is really the only solution. You can't just think your way through it. You have to left your body's rewards systems re-adapt and re-learn how to be a healthy, happy human.
by kaiwenwang | 2025-07-04 22:45:45+00:00
As an adult I lived in Georgia, South Carolina, Ohio for internships and visited the major cities: Seattle, SF, Chicago, NYC, Boston, DC, Dallas, Philly.

Most of the United States is suburbanized, and if you want to rent an apartment near the city it tends to be that gray laminate style I've described for $1500/mo with roommates.

Most of the people who managed to have a family in a major city area are doing well for themselves, prior to asset and rent inflation because they have accessible goods and knowledge to them.

I didn't even know what IKEA was until age 18.

Because the national system of laws and transportation forms a certain culture, Costco regardless of the location is the same. The STOP signs in the United States are all the same. The processing of foods all follow certain guidelines. There are certain stores existing up to the limits of the locale, and only certain producers because society has centralized so heavily. So I think my claim of generality is reasonable.
by gjm11 | 2025-07-04 22:45:55+00:00
For what it's worth, I had a similar "that looks like AI writing" response, and it wasn't because it was "too polished". And having looked at the rest of your comment history, the only reason why I'm only at 90% confidence it's all AI-generated rather than 100% is your explicit claims to the contrary. Today's LLMs have a definite style that is, sorry, not the same thing as being "polished", and if your comments have "zero automation involved" then it's quite the extraordinary coincidence how much more like an AI you sound than any other human writer I have ever encountered. And a further coincidence that this very AI-sounding human just happens to be selling services to "unlock Meaningful Business Outcomes With AI".
by TJSomething | 2025-07-04 22:45:59+00:00
Under this idea, most engineering isn't engineering. Some of the oldest engineering is ad hoc battlefield engineering to construct siege engines and building tunnels to deliver explosives. That frequently only needed to work one time.

With bridges, you only need that high confidence because there are high costs and risks. Also, the stakeholders are usually governments, who require very predictable results. All that effort is worth it because the artifact will be useful for a long time for a lot of people.

It might be okay if some widget only lasts for 6 months. So, you empirically shave off material until it's as cheap as possible while failing at an acceptable rate.

The cost of shipping is low for software, so the risk profile is even more different. This can be shifted for high stakes software and I think there are some social issues there, but many things are shaped more like Facebook than aircraft control systems. They can fall over and no one's going to actually die.

I think the core of engineering is in evaluating these tradeoffs and figuring out where you can expend effort most efficiently.
by palata | 2025-07-04 22:46:18+00:00
> CMake's scripting language really is pretty poorly suited for it's role

The vast majority of projects only need a handful of features from CMake. Sure, it's a weird language and there is enough to criticise. The fact remains that 99% of the complaints I see are from people who write very bad CMakeLists. First learn how to not make a big mess with it, and then you can start complaining, IMHO.

I have had that with other technologies that "everybody hates but is forced to use". The technology is never perfect, so there are always reasons for criticism. But I see a lot more invalid criticisms from people who don't use the technology correctly than valid ones.

Because Javascript is not perfect does not mean that the developers can't possibly be responsible for a bad Javascript codebase.
by chaoskitty | 2025-07-04 22:46:55+00:00
Did you read the article? The administration's excuse / explanation is that it's not illegal to remove data because it already exists elsewhere:

> said the information will be housed within NASA to comply with the law

So you think they'd accidentally misconfigure DNS, then explain that the site has been brought down because they comply with the law some other way? That doesn't make any sense, and suggesting this might just be a mistake in light of this information just makes you seem like an apologist.
by xgb84j | 2025-07-04 22:47:14+00:00
If you mean the Buddhist meditation: I joined a local group a few years ago. I wasn't super serious about the practice until I saw how directly it can improve my life. Even now it's hard to find this much time every day.

This is a book that helped me getting started: https://www.amazon.com/Roaring-Silence-Discovering-Mind-Dzog...
by michaelt | 2025-07-04 22:47:43+00:00
It depends.

If you're spending 99% of your time on your favourite websites that you've already tuned the blocking on? Barely a problem.

On the other hand if your job involves going to lots of different vendors' websites - you'll find it pretty burdensome, because you might end up fiddling with the per-site settings 15+ times per day.
by ghuntley | 2025-07-04 22:48:12+00:00
Canva has seen a 30% productivity uplift - https://fortune.com/2025/06/25/canva-cto-encourages-all-5000...

AI is the new uplift. Embrace and adapt, as a rift is forming (see my talk at https://ghuntley.com/six-month-recap/), in what employers seek in terms of skills from employees.

I'm happy to answer any questions folks may have. Currently AFK [2] vibecoding a brand new programming language [1].

[1] https://x.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/1940964118565212606 [2] https://youtu.be/e7i4JEi_8sk?t=29722
by kalkaran | 2025-07-04 22:48:24+00:00
I had sciatica for years and inflation in my hips so bad I could barely walk 500 meters while in college. Basically only kept going by iboprufen, naproxen and paracetamol. I tried everything. Acupuncture/LSD/ultra sound/kiro/physio/yoga had mri’s/xrays/you name it I had dr. Sarno’s healing back pain for 2 years on my shelf before I took a holiday and read the whole thing in one go. Fell asleep for 4 hours and woke up pain free for the first time in 7 years. Started to come back a few times but I would just read the book again and go for a run. Been smooth sailing for 10 years now.
by ryao | 2025-07-04 22:48:33+00:00
> The RTX 50 series are the second generation of NVIDIA cards to use the 12VHPWR connector.

This is wrong. The 50 series uses 12V-2x6, not 12VHPWR. The 30 series was the first to use 12VHPR. The 40 series was the second to use 12VHPWR and first to use 12V-2x6. The 50 series was the second to use 12V-2x6. The female connectors are what changed in 12V-2x6. The male connectors are identical between 12V-2x6 and 12VHPWR.
by aziaziazi | 2025-07-04 22:48:36+00:00
> It honestly seems like it benefits Google more than it hurts them. It directly hurts advertisers, but not enough that it would stop anyone from advertising.

GP fights agains ads, not Google. And not being able to win 100% of the gain shouldn’t restrain someone from taking action it they consider the win share worth the pain.

> $38,000 in clicks boosts Google's revenue by $38k

You should include costs here, and if (big if) a substantial part of the clicks comes from bots and get refunded, the associated cost comes on top of the bill. At the end the whole business is impacted. I agree 50/50k is a penny through.

> I hate ads […] I manage a Google Ads account

[no cynism here, I genuinely wonder] how do you manage your conscience, mood and daily motivation? Do you see a dichotomy in what you wrote and if so, how did you arrive to that situation? Any future plan?

I’m asking as you kind of introduce the subject but if you’re not willing to give more details that’s totally fine.
by anonymousiam | 2025-07-04 22:49:01+00:00
I agree with everything you've written. The required engineering was just too ambitious.

I ordered one on announcement day (11/21/2019). Yeah, I thought it was ugly, but the main selling point for me was its promised ability to go 500 miles on a single charge. (Apparently Musk has a habit of making promises he cannot keep.)

I really wanted that 500 mile range. My two homes are 300 miles apart, and I don't want to waste my time at a charging station while traveling between them. I also liked the idea of using the truck as a power-wall for my (4kW) solar plant.

I cancelled my order and got my $100 back (after inflation ate about 20% of it).

The Lucid Air (GT) offers similar range (512 miles), but it's not a truck, which I also really wanted. (I have enough cars already.) Also, the price of the Lucid Air was more than double that of the promised CT price. In the end, the CT price went up and the Lucid Air price went down, so they're now within about 10% of each other.