MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by roskoalexey | 2025-07-18 06:39:47+00:00
I'm not sure the no-code approach is actually dead, but AI is certainly transforming it.

The main problem with AI (aka vibe coding) is that you can start very easily and, in one or two prompts, receive an impressive start for your website or app.

But once you want to change, fix or improve something, that's where you can lose your money. It always feels "almost there, but not yet".

That's exactly where the wysiwyg/drag-n-drop UX comes to the rescue.

And some smart vibe-coding tools (e.g. Lovable) started adding visual development capabilities.
by fmajid | 2025-07-18 06:39:53+00:00
Dependencies introduce risks, but not using them at all puts you at a competitive disadvantage against those who are using them and thus achieve faster development time and time to market.

What you need is a process to manage dependencies:

1) Only consider open-source dependencies.

2) Introducing new dependencies requires a review. Not just a code review on the pull request introducing it, but checking the license, estimating how much work it would be to rip out, auditing it for history of security vulnerabilities or bugs, whether it is live and still gets updates, how vibrant the community is, and so on.

3) If possible, review your dependencies for possible security issues. Doing this at scale is expensive and the economics of this are still an unsolved problem (I have my ideas: https://blog.majid.info/supply-chain-vetting/).

4) Do not adopt a dependency you are not willing and able to take over the maintenance of, or fork if necessary. At a minimum, it means you have built it from source at least once, not just used binary packages maintained by someone else.

5) Preemptively fork all your dependencies. People can and do delete their repos out of pique, see left-pad.
by crinkly | 2025-07-18 06:41:00+00:00
Among non-technical friends, after the initial wow factor, even limited expectations were not met. Then it was tainted by the fact that everyone is promoting it as a human replacement technology which is then a tangible threat to their existence. That leads to not just lack of adoption but active sabotage.

And then there’s the large body of people who just haven’t noticed it at all because they don’t give a shit. Stuff just gets done how it always has.

On top of that, it's worth considering that growth is a function of user count and retention. The AI companies only promote count which suggests that the retention numbers are not good or they’d be promoting it. YMMV but people probably aren’t adopting it and keeping it.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-18 06:41:14+00:00
If you want to classify the quality, nutritional value and usefulness of the many foods we humans eat based on an absolute bare-bones definition of needs, we could all go on an extremely bland but moderately robust concentration camp diet and be more or less okay. Fortunately, food for the most part, among most people isn't so strictly defined by such dogmatic restrictions.
by thenoblesunfish | 2025-07-18 06:41:22+00:00
Maybe I'm naive, but .. aren't businesses slow to adopt anything new, unless possibly when it's giving their competition a large, obvious advantage, or when it's some sort of plug-and-play, black box improvement where you just trade dollars for efficiency ? "AI" tools may be very promising for lots of things but they require people to do things differently, which people are slow to do. (Even as someone who works in the tech industry, it's not like my workflow has changed all that much with these new tools, and my employer has to be much faster than average)
by NL807 | 2025-07-18 06:41:43+00:00
I consider myself being self-taught, but I'm also a graduate. I was teaching myself to do a lot of things before I even went to university, and continue to do so after graduating. The most significant difference before and after university is that now I'm more resourceful and more efficient in searching information that keeps me learning new things outside of academia. Put simply, university gave me better skills to learn, and opened new doors to resource materials i didn't know existed before.
by dSebastien | 2025-07-18 06:41:59+00:00
A few years ago I spent an unreasonable amount of time creating a RESTful API design guide for my employer. The goal was to standardize the way APIs would be created for all systems. We argued over HATEOAS, true REST with hypermedia, custom media types, status codes etc.

We ended up with what I consider to be a solid design guide rooted in the correct use of Web standards. Not REST but RESTful. Clear and understandable, uniform, etc.

At the end of the day though the real challenge was more to make people adhere to those conventions. Why? Because most developers don't care at all. They want to finish their "Agile" sprint on time. They don't care about architecture, correctness, enterprise-wide homogeneity etc. Beyond the lack of ONE actual standard, that's the other real major problem.

https://github.com/NationalBankBelgium/REST-API-Design-Guide...
by stouset | 2025-07-18 06:42:00+00:00
I agree with your assessment of the problem. It’s already been broken out into discrete chunks that are all simply solvable in short order. Even finding neighbor squares is reasonably straightforward (generating all 8 candidates is basically trivial, then pass them through a filter for each of the four edges).

But your take on the stress component of an interview is way off base. There’s a huge difference in having stress on you to deal with other people’s problems vs. your own. An interview candidate may be in financial trouble and may have been struggling for months to find employment in a terrible job market. This is existential stress on a completely different level than a customer wanting a feature yesterday.
by overfeed | 2025-07-18 06:42:03+00:00
War bonds, rationing and other measures long since abandoned were introduced then too. How weird would it be if everyone were still limited to 8oz of sugar per month in 2025 due to the exigencies of WW2? It's no less weird when it comes to healthcare being linked to remuneration. Heck, there are better free market approaches not adopted by the US, since its usually horny for that sort of thing, right up until it's pro-labor I guess.
by aniforprez | 2025-07-18 06:42:07+00:00
If my windows device fails, I'm not going to Microsoft. I either fix the offending part of my desktop or laptop, or reinstall the OS or move to a different OS. If something is wrong with my android phone, I'm not going to Google since I don't own a Pixel and will go to the manufacturer of the phone. If it's a purely software issue, there are steps I can actually take to flash a different ROM though admittedly it's not an easy process.

Here Apple not only owns the device but also the software it's running as well as distribution of apps for this device except for CLI tools distributed by brew or other package managers. At least with a Mac I can install and run applications over the Internet. With an iPhone that's not at all possible (not sure about the status of side loading with the EU ruling and all)
by R0m41nJosh | 2025-07-18 06:42:17+00:00
I have been building https://mozaic.link with a friend for a while. It's a bookmark manager with a funny UI. We wanted to make a product with it and get rich but we have no time and we suck at marketing. I use it everyday though.

BTW Pocket was nice because it saved articles so that you can read them offline with a distraction free experience (we don't do that).
by aflag | 2025-07-18 06:43:16+00:00
Is that backed by any evidence? Taking 2 hours to perform a 1 hour task makes you half as productive. You are exchanging that for the uncertain prospect that it will be worth it in the long run. I think it's more likely that if you take 30 minutes to do the task in one year from now it's because AI got better, not because you made the code more AI friendly. In that case, those people taking 1 hour to perform the task now will also take 30 minutes to perform them in the future.
by mlsu | 2025-07-18 06:43:30+00:00
Tough for me to speak about embedded in general, but many companies are on vendor toolchains or paid compilers by choice, and it is the right choice to make given the tradeoffs involved.

IAR for example is simply a fantastic compiler. It produces more compact binaries that use less memory than GCC, with lots and lots of hardware support and noticeably better debugging. Many companies have systems-engineering deadlines which are much less amenable to beta quality software, fewer software engineering resources to deal with GCC or build-chain quirks (often, overworked EEs writing firmware), and also a strong desire due to BOM cost to use cheaper/less dense parts. And if there is a compiler bug or quirk, there is someone on the other end of the line who will actually pick up the phone when you call.

That said, some of those toolchain+IDE combos absolutely do suck in the embedded world, mostly the vendor-provided ones (makes sense, silicon manufacturers usually aren't very good at or care much about software, as it turns out).
by tjansen | 2025-07-18 06:43:34+00:00
It depends on the time of day. I have noticed that certain posts of mine are getting downvotes earlier in the day (when there are more Europeans) and upvotes later (when the Americans are in the majority). Other posts are getting upvotes early and downvotes later.

And it's the main reason why I rarely write comments on HN. Everything is so political. If people don't agree with you, they downvote you. Your karma only reflects the popularity of your views. If you're writing something that is controversial, it's likely to lower your karma, if one side can downvote it before the other side sees it.
by seanhunter | 2025-07-18 06:43:36+00:00
I speak as someone who used to build trading algorithms (not the high speed ones) for a living for several years, so knows that world pretty well. I highly doubt anyone who does that will host their stuff on random servers even if you had something like FHE. Why? Because it's not just the code that is confidential.

1) if you are a registered broker dealer you will just incur a massive amount of additional regulatory burden if you want to host this stuff in any sort of "random server"

2) Whoever you are, you need the pipe from your server to the exchange to be trustworthy, so no-one can MITM your connection and front-run your (client's) orders.

3) This is an industry where when people host servers in something like an exchange data center it's reasonably common to put them in a locked cage to ensure physical security. No-one is going to host on a server that could be physically compromised. Remember that big money is at stake and data center staff typically aren't well paid (compared to someone working for an IB or hedge fund), so social engineering would be very effective if someone wanted to compromise your servers.

4)Even if you are able to overcome #1 and are very confident about #2 and #3, even for slow market participants you need to have predictable latency in your execution or you will be eaten for breakfast by the fast players[1]. You won't want to be on a random server controlled by anyone else in case they suddenly do something that affects your latency.

[1] For example, we used to have quite slow execution ability compared with HFTs and people who were co-located at exchanges, so we used to introduce delays when we routed orders to multiple exchanges so the orders would arrive at their destinations at precisely the same time. Even though our execution latency was high, this meant no-one who was colocated at the exchange could see the order at one exchange and arb us at another exchange.
by eviks | 2025-07-18 06:44:16+00:00
Of course it is, these form just a tiny subset of well known issues of PDF.

Here is a simple illustration of a copy & paste fail from this very page:

From html: a single sentence

> Since mozilla announced the sunsetting of pocket, I started looking for alternatives, including building a light version for my personal use. But nothing came out of my research.

From PDF: a newline split of a single sentence after light because PDF is generally too dumb to use sentences for text

> Since mozilla announced the sunsetting of pocket, I started looking for alternatives, including building a light > version for my personal use. But nothing came out of my research.
by konart | 2025-07-18 06:44:19+00:00
>This process will probably lead to a situation where in a year, it will take me 30 minutes with AI to do a task that would have taken me an hour otherwise

How do you figure?

>Because during those 2 hours I will make my code base more understandable to help the AI cope with it.

Are you working in a team?

If yes - I can't really imagine how does this work.

Does this mean that your teammates occasionally wake up to a 50+ changes PR\MR that was born as a result of your desire to "possibly" load off some of the work to a text generator?

I'm curious here.
by barisozmen | 2025-07-18 06:45:03+00:00
You can do that by encrypting the names. You send encrypted names to the FHE-server, and then the server does necessary sorting computations on it.

The point of FHE is it can operate on gibberish-looking ciphertext, and when this ciphertext decrypted afterwards, the result is correct.

Indeed, there are those working on faster FHE sorting: https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/551.pdf
by Terr_ | 2025-07-18 06:45:06+00:00
Could we glimpse more about this possible future by looking at rich people who grew up with (human) personal assistants at their beck and call? Alas, not a group that commonly volunteers for psychological studies.

Me, I'm pessimistic. I think the key problem is the kind of stupid: People won't just offload math problems or memorizing the capital of Assyria, but executive function.

Then we'll be caught flat-footed by wilting plants, the machine will suggest Brawndo, and people will nod along because craving electrolytes sounds reasonable.
by ashdksnndck | 2025-07-18 06:45:27+00:00
23andMe’s new business model (Anne Wojcicki and Regeneron both had the same plan for it) is to use the data for drug development. That’s theoretically where the $$$$ is. Turns out you can use statistical association between genes and other biomarkers to discover drugs that will succeed in clinical trials.

So, I suppose, if everyone could use the data, everyone could use it to develop drugs, not just 23andMe. That’s good if you want more drugs to be developed and released… bad if you don’t.
by piva00 | 2025-07-18 06:46:16+00:00
Stock buybacks are the indirect rule, it wasn't even allowed for most of the existence of stock markets, it's the odd one out which created perverse incentives.

It's not about regulating executive compensation, it's to close a gap that was opened and only led to poorer decision making at the executive/board level, there's no advantage to the company. It's a stupid instrument with no reason to exist except to return money to shareholders in a way they can avoid taxation events.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-07-18 06:46:20+00:00
A Windows 11 24H2 ISO will install on a machine w/o a TPM 2.0 module using the command line argument "/Product Server". (You can do this as either an "upgrade" to Windows 10 or on a clean machine by using the Shift-F10 shortcut to get a command prompt and run the setup from there.)

I'm on mobile and don't have a reference handy but search-engine this and you'll find instructions.
by kindkang2024 | 2025-07-18 06:46:24+00:00
> While some animals could deal with concepts closely associated with real phenomena, and therefore they can use words to name things or maybe even actions, they cannot go further and use abstractions over abstractions. As the result they cannot deal with a recursive grammar.

I prefer to think that animals simply haven’t been lucky enough to invent a suitable naming system that could serve as the foundation of their civilization. If they were fortunate, they might bootstrap their own form of civilization through recursive or iterative divisive naming-—naming the act of naming itself. Naming is the foundation, and everything else naturally follows from there.

As Laozi said over 2,500 years ago in the Dao De Jing:

“The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; The named is the mother of all things.”

(Just days ago, AnthropicAI even mentioned Laozi in a tweet: https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/1925926102725202163 )

P.S. By the way, the entire Dao De Jing advocates thinking beyond symbols, transcending naming—not being constrained by it—and thus connect the reality and following the Tao, which embodies the will of love, frugality, and humility. Yet, few truly understand it fairly, as Laozi emphasized in his book. Perhaps we humans can transcend naming altogether eventually, with advancements like Musk’s brain-communication chip, we might soon discover how human wills are encoded and potentially move beyond the limitations of naming.
by brabel | 2025-07-18 06:46:54+00:00
After many years using libraries without any sort of vetting process, I completely agree in principle that most code out there is bug infested garbage. One dependency had a concurrency bug so severe it almost cost our company our biggest customer early in our journey. We forked and completely rewrote the library as after looking at the source it was clear they didn’t have nearly as much care with their code as we did. This was the worst case but we faced many bugs in widely used libraries. We can’t replace them all as time is short but if we could we would probably replace most of them.
by flohofwoe | 2025-07-18 06:47:08+00:00
> and a legacy OpenGL driver too

FWIW, the OpenGL 'driver' on macOS and iOS is just an layer on top of Metal for many years now - e.g. same thing as ANGLE, DXVK or MoltenVk, just maintained directly by Apple.

The important difference both of D3D and Metal compared to Vulkan is that Vulkan lacks steering and vision (e.g. it's not a technical problem at all but a cultural/organizational).

Vulkan development looks like GPU vendors just come up with random Vulkan extensions which then from time to time are blessed by Khronos and elevated into the core API.

This "throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks" approach was already the biggest problem in GL (and my naive younger self thought that this obvious problem would be fixed with Vulkan - alas it turned out that this was the one thing that Khronos didn't change). This is really not how a 3D API should be designed.
by stpedgwdgfhgdd | 2025-07-18 06:47:24+00:00
This is the dream, but we are not yet there. For any reasonable complex code base, CC needs guidance, like avoiding duplicate code/use library function. Write more tests. Sometimes there is a much more elegant solution for a problem. Claude will find it, but you need to hint and ask.

If people use Claude without a critical eye, our code bases will grow immensely.
by zettabomb | 2025-07-18 06:49:31+00:00
That would be true if both sides were exactly 5.0V, but they're not. There's a 5% tolerance, from 4.75V to 5.25V, and in practice you will see chargers often run "5V" at 5.1V intentionally, to account for resistive loss in the charging cable. If you accidentally connect your "5V" device to the host's "5V" you may find that the host simply disables the port, which has happened to me more than once. So no, you can't just blindly connect them together.
by eviks | 2025-07-18 06:50:28+00:00
> Sometimes it's easier to write it yourself than install the dependency...

A few examples wouldn't hurt...

> Their breaking changes can trigger expensive re-writes of your own code to handle a new interface.

Don't update them or NIH-update them just like you'd do with the original NIH code. Still a net win in saving the time for the initial coding

> You need to ensure they end up on your clients' machine.

Vendoring exists?
by RamblingCTO | 2025-07-18 06:52:15+00:00
No, AI is just garbage. I asked AI a clear cut question about battery optimization in zen. It told me it's based on chrome, but it's based on firefox.

Ask it about a torque spec for your car? Yup, wrong. Ask it to provide sources? Less wrong but still wrong. It told me my viscous fan has a different thread than it has. Would I have listened, I would've shredded my thread.

My car is old, well documented and widely distributed.

Doesn't matter if claude or chatgpt. Don't get me started on code. I care about things being correct and right.
by lazide | 2025-07-18 06:52:37+00:00
Personally, everyone I’ve seen using AI either clearly didn’t understand what they were doing (in a ‘that’s not doing what you think it’s doing’ perspective), often in a way that was producing good sounding garbage, or ended up rewriting almost all of it anyway to get the output they actually wanted.

At this point I literally spend 90% of my time fixing other teams AI ‘issues’ at a fortune 50.
by slow_typist | 2025-07-18 06:53:07+00:00
Inevitably at least one person downvoted this. Predictably so in a thread where people feel entitled to state what "most Europeans want". I am European. Of course I want this war to end today. The idea that a consumer who searches with Kagi is responsible for the war is just … misleading. This is not a question of "picking your battles". Establishment of a fair business model for search could even prevent future wars.

I wanted to point out that holding Kagi to your believed highest standards does lead to moral inconsistencies on a very material level if other providers of commodities are not held to the same standards.

That is not whataboutism.

Now - if you are European and still feel like downvoting me - go to the next MEP‘s local office first and ask them what they do about the facts stated in my first post. After that you are cordially invited to come back and still downvote my posts. Literally any of my posts. Oh you don’t know the address? Try the search engine of choice but don’t think to hard about the global implications of doing so…
by hdjrudni | 2025-07-18 06:53:40+00:00
My perspective is a bit different. I've been fiddling with image generators a fair bit and got pretty good at getting particular models to generate consistently good images. The problem is a new model comes out every few months and it comes with its own set of rules to get good outputs.

LLMs are no different. One week ChatGPT is the best, next is Gemini. Each new version requires tweaks to get the most out of it. Sure, some of that skill/knowledge will carry forward into the future but I'd rather wait a bit for things to stabilize.

Once someone else demonstrates a net positive return on investment, maybe I'll jump back in. You just said it might take a year to see a return. I'll read your blog post about it when you succeed. You'll have a running head start on me, but will I be perpetually a year behind you? I don't think so.
by greatgib | 2025-07-18 06:53:44+00:00
It's totally subjective that it is better. It's not like it can "execute code" inline like f-string. Just the replacement character is the same, end of the comparison. And any way the point is that more that it totally breaks the general convention for no valid reason. It's not even optional.

For gcp jobs you can just output the structured log in the standard output so I don't see the purpose here. There are other structured logging libraries if this is what you need.

For the backtrace yes, because logging.exception will be broken by default and all tools that process the backtrace automatically like sentry. And again, for no valid reason except than "look, my traceback looks so much cooler on my screen because I added crap and new lines when printing it"...