MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cookiengineer | 2025-07-30 22:33:19+00:00
In the past I always talked about other devs in different mindsets. What we see is currently a developer fatigue of code that nobody understands anymore.

Usually that was when an engineer chimed in, and made the broken part into something more useful and more maintainable.

Then an architect looked at the codebase and tried to reduce its complexity.

Now, post LLM, it seems we have 100x the code written by devs, and engineers and architects are completely left out.

And that's what we are observing.

If you figure out how to test this, whether or not with e.g. a TDD MCP server or a DDD MCP server (or whatever workflow and architecture you prefer) you have a potential for a trillion dollar startup. We need to scale the efficiency of code reviews, because currently that is utterly broken as a concept and doesn't scale well enough.
by codingdave | 2025-07-30 22:33:28+00:00
The problem with the definition is that if a business has some ancient COBOL code with one guy left who understands it, then your definition would say that is not legacy code. And that is what makes no sense.

It becomes legacy when it is no longer running on a tech stack that matches the future strategy of the organization. Legacy is a strategic label, not an engineering label. There is no age where something becomes legacy, it happens when business strategy moves on to something else.
by mr_donk | 2025-07-30 22:33:35+00:00
Don't you think the next step is a programming language that isn't even meant to be human readable? What's the point of using an LLM to generate python or Swift or whatever? The output of the LLM should be something that runs and does whatever it's been asked to do... why should the implementation be some programming language that was designed for humans to grok? Once that's true the idea of it being maintainable becomes moot, because no one will know what it is in the first place. I don't think we're there yet, but that seems like the eventual destination.
by munificent | 2025-07-30 22:34:13+00:00
This is a good article, but it bugs me that it sort of only tells half the story.

Why are you making your structs smaller. Probably for "performance". If your goal is literally just reducing memory usage, then this is all fine. Maybe you're running on a small microcontroller and you just straight up don't have much RAM.

But these days, in most areas, memory is cheap and plentiful. What's expensive is CPU cache. If you're optimizing memory use for that, it's really about runtime speed and less about total memory usage. You're trying to make things small so you have fewer cache misses and the CPU doesn't get stuck waiting as much.

In that case, the advice here is only part of the story. Using bitfields and smaller integers saves memory. But in order to access those fields and do anything with them, they need to get loaded into registers. I'm not an expert here, but my understanding is that loading a bitfield or small int into a word-sized register can sometimes have some bit of overhead, so you have to pay attention to the trade-off.

If I was optimizing for overall runtime speed and considering packing structs to do that, I'd really want to have good profiling and benchmarks in place first. Otherwise it's easy to think you're making progress when you're actually going backwards.
by dustingetz | 2025-07-30 22:34:34+00:00
Peter Principle for codebases - codebase will continue to grow until nobody understands it, and then it will tread water until enough key personnel leave and then suddenly eng capacity is below the cost of servicing the debt and this is the point at which all control is fully lost. Eventually a younger sharper competitor will acquire it for the users or it will go through M&A repackaging or some other way to extract the last drops of money before discarding it
by skydhash | 2025-07-30 22:34:41+00:00
> An unreadable 100K loc program backed by 50K tests, guaranteeing behavior to the client requirements

Until the next set of needed changes due to exterior requirements. And this software is one of the pillar in the business. That is when you switch vendors if you were buying the service.

That is why support is always an essential part of B2B or even serious B2C. The world will change and you need to react to it, not just have the correct software now.
by 7373737373 | 2025-07-30 22:36:00+00:00
Agreed - the Metamath base language (and its verifier) seem to be the most tractable of all I've seen, although it is probably still quite far away from the complexity of the high level language(s) that compile to it.

Derived from it, the currently best attempt to achieve an unambiguous and secure language seems to be Metamath Zero: https://github.com/digama0/mm0
by toast0 | 2025-07-30 22:36:01+00:00
> And "contaminated land"? How contaminated are we talking about here? It's crippling to any hope of widespread brownfield redevelopment that something so minimally invasive could be shut down by nebulous, ill-defined contamination. Perhaps we need a standard grading system for land contamination instead of just lumping gasoline and arsenic in the same category.

If the article is accurate, the cleanup was completed by January 2024, and first phase of work started September 2022. So who knows how long cleanup took, long enough to mention, but less than 1.5 years. The city website about the project [1] says the contamination was removed in 2022, so maybe not very long at all. The site's former use was as an electrical substation, so I'd expect soil contamination from spilled transformer oil, and similar things; some nasty stuff, but usually not a lot of it.

Sounds like the root cause of delays is availability of appropriate chargers, and probably a lack of priority. Also, 8 EV chargers doesn't sound like much, but if they're level 3 chargers, that's a lot of power if 8 cars plug in at the same time, which necessitates a bit of engineering and oversight. If it were 8 level 2 ev chargers, that would probably be a quick and easy install.

[1] https://www.seattle.gov/city-light/in-the-community/current-...
by zizee | 2025-07-30 22:36:03+00:00
The vast majority of people cannot do the structured thinking to model the real world in a fashion that a computer can understand. That is a key attribute of a good dev. If someone can do this, and describe it well enough to a LLM, they are a dev. It's not devs that will be taken out of the loop, unless you define a dev as someone who is just a translator between human language and machine code.
by flyinglizard | 2025-07-30 22:36:32+00:00
It becomes legacy once the organization understands that the codebase, or platform, or business case, is obsolete. It does not mean it's immediately phased out; it may continue working for decades more with some love and attention, but it's clear that it is in the past rather than the future. The easiest way to tell if a project is legacy is how desirable it is for programmers in the company to work on.
What I have learned about startups from building my own
by Taikhoom10 | 2025-07-30 22:36:44+00:00
Build and launch fast, charge your customers and assess the situation.

Talk to customers, understand the problem you are solving deeply

Do not buy into conventional wisdom

Use first principles

VC isn’t always the path, again don’t buy into conventional wisdom

Talk to your users and iterate accordingly

You don’t need to hire a ton, often small is better and more productive

Buy into Paul graham, Steve blank and others

Always learn from your failures.

Iterate, pivot if necessary

Find market gaps, fill them in. Aka identify opportunities

Be delusional yet realistic at the same time

Constantly test new things

Learn from your users, understand how they are using your product.

Don’t get obsessed with adding features, start with doing one thing really well and then adding features on top of that.

When marketing never do ads, terrible conversions. Ideally if you build a really great product your users will do the marketing for you.
by baduiux | 2025-07-30 22:36:59+00:00
I decided for myself that there’s no need to buy a domain up front. I don’t even let myself look for potential domain names or start asking ChatGPT to provide me with some naming ideas. Most of the time, the project don’t even reach MVP state. During development and research I also learn more about my project and similar products thus helping me decide on a good name.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-07-30 22:37:00+00:00
A story about a non-technical friend: friend vibe coded a SaaS last year and started generating revenue with almost no marketing; all word of mouth and inbound in a niche industry. Used Replit and Supabase to build the thing; I am still really impressed by what he was able to do given how complex the app ended up becoming as he interacted with customers.

What I think happened: there are two incumbents in this space that are not happy about him showing up and charging a fraction of their monthly cost for a better, more modern product (their products are Windows-based desktop software). So they hired hackers to hack his SaaS (because these hackers have never demanded money). Unfortunately, that vibe-coding resulted in some bad code that made it easy to hack. First, the user list was leaked on the FE of the code and the hacker emailed all of the customers. Second, the hacker got a hold of his Stripe key and issued every customer a refund. Third, the hacker has been trying to inject XSS attacks into app (we'll see a random `<script>alert()</script>` tag in some fields)

I think indeed, vibe-coded software in the hands of the inexperienced is instant tech debt. But at the same time, he was able to prove out a viable business in a matter of a few months with no engineering background and no technical capability.

Now he's hiring a developer to shore it up.

Was it worth it? Yes, it is terrible, shoddy, insecure code, but he proved out a viable business with just a few hundred dollars of investment.
by jemmyw | 2025-07-30 22:37:28+00:00
They aren't banning viewing videos, they're banning kids having an account I believe.

I'm sure their approach to enforcement will be something along the lines of relying on the websites to sort it out and fining them if they don't. The govt doesn't need to enforce the age check themselves or even provide or suggest a mechanism.

I imagine any smaller players in this market will just stay away from having an official presence in Australia.
by phsource | 2025-07-30 22:37:29+00:00
This is pretty impressive results given that this is not from one of the major AI labs. Congrats: https://blog.withmeka.com/meka-achieves-state-of-the-art-per...

Out of curiosity, what do you think contributed to this working better than even OpenAI agent or some of the other tools out there?

I'm not that familiar with how OpenAI and other agents like Browser Use currently work, but is this, in your opinion, the most important factor?

> An infrastructure provider that exposes OS-level controls, not just a browser layer with Playwright screenshots. This is important for performance as a number of common web elements are rendered at the system level, invisible to the browser page
by crote | 2025-07-30 22:37:40+00:00
I think the fact that the Azure growth rate accelerated so much says enough: if you find yourself in a gold rush, be the one selling pickaxes and shovels.

Meanwhile, they are pushing AI tools in your face in every application, yet even with all the companies trying out AI these days they only managed an 18% growth in productivity tools for businesses? They were achieving a growth rate of ~14% before the AI boom!

They might have a great quarter selling compute to AI startups, but what's the long-term future of those investments going to look like when end users just aren't that interested in AI?

Also,

> Microsoft ended its fiscal year with 228,000 employees, the same as a year ago. The company laid off 6,000 people in May, and another 9,000 this month. In a note to employees last week, Mr. Nadella said he understood the frustration over the layoffs despite the fact that “by every objective measure, Microsoft is thriving.” He called the contradiction, “the enigma of success.”

Literally billions of dollars of profits, and they still can't think of any way to avoid mass firings. If that's what success is supposed to look like, I shudder to think what a poor quarter is going to be.
by alkyon | 2025-07-30 22:38:18+00:00
Fully agreed, this Gil Kopatz could as well write articles in Der Stürmer. The same rhetoric was used by the Nazis. For instance, they compared Jews to rats:

Caption: “When the vermin are dead, the German oak will flourish once more.” (December 1927)

https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/images...
by t0lo | 2025-07-30 22:38:26+00:00
I'm an australian who completed the esafety survey which helped guide this policy. I pushed for anonymous temporary age verification tokens generated through a government app.

Social media is undermining the fabric of our societies and destroying a whole generations emotional development. I support this- in part because I know those who want to get around enough or be private will always find a way, but it has a positive, reality affirming effect on the public.

Watch the press conference from our PM and comms minister from yesterday to understand that this is coming from a place of compassion or control. They have said repeatedly they will always ensure a non id method is ensured. I know there are flaws in that though. https://youtu.be/SCSMQUmrh38?feature=shared
by exasperaited | 2025-07-30 22:38:29+00:00
> If the primary legislation we already have makes it out of committee to be loaded down after

But it wouldn't be. I mean, you can't retrofit this onto the US system now anyway, but the primary/secondary split culturally leads to much, much smaller primary legislation.

Our system still produces bloated things like the UK tax code, but the general thrust of UK primary legislation is that it is absolutely small enough to be read fully and debated.
by strogonoff | 2025-07-30 22:38:52+00:00
> The other extreme is people chasing paper-thin focus, which, I guess, isn't as easy to obtain on smaller sensors.

Really? I used a nice longer (maybe 80mm equivalent) lens on an APS-C system a while ago, and it gave very shallow DoF while being much lighter and more practical (cheaper, etc.) compared to what I can find for a full frame. Not going to look up the physics but I was under the impression that shallow DoF is easier on smaller sensors (I don’t mean phone small, just crop small).
by tnt128 | 2025-07-30 22:39:06+00:00
My advice: It’s probably not that you’ve lost interest in your project — it’s more likely that you don’t know what to do next and you’re defaulting to your comfort zone: building the product.

Here’s an easy way to test this: imagine your product suddenly takes off — it gets picked up on Reddit or Hacker News, you start getting lots of users and feedback. Would you still feel uninterested? Or would you find yourself energized, working late into the night to improve it?

That thought experiment reveals something important: there’s a gap between building a product and getting people to use it. You haven’t figured out how to bridge that gap yet, so you stay in “builder mode” — because it feels safe and familiar.
by reactordev | 2025-07-30 22:39:08+00:00
Aspb ‘83 baby, that’s 80s parenting for you. Boomers saying “Oh he’s just hyper” or “Oh he’s shy” or “Oh she’s just in her own world” and brushing it under the rug. Combine that with processed food additives of the 90s and I look exactly the same as I did in high school only with grey hair instead of brown!
by pedalpete | 2025-07-30 22:39:19+00:00
Rivalry and competition does not mean enemy.

Can you imagine what life would be like for either Federer or Nadal if the other didn't exist? It might be quite boring to play knowing you're always going to stomp every competitor.

Use your competition to make you better, not just prove how good you are.

This is the attitude we see in great competitors who get beyond their ego.

[Edit] - what I originally commented wasn't a great example, so I re-wrote it.
by bluGill | 2025-07-30 22:39:20+00:00
Anyone with 80 acres is buying used tractors. They are likely hiring someone else with a combine to harvest their fields (harvest needs a lot more labor than the 80 acre farm has so when you hire a combine you get a team of 3-4 people which also includes grain carts and semi trucks to get your grain from the field to the elevator (which might be something you own and might be something town).

I work for John Deere, though I don't speak for the company. All tractors are built to order, which means when someone buys a new tractor the dealer has several months to sell the trade-in. When the new tractor arrives from the factory the truck unloads the new one, and loads the trade in to take to someone else. A good dealer will have a list of farmers and what equipment they all have so they can put this deal together. As a result the only tractors a dealer has are service loaners (which are sometimes rented), which makes all the accountants happy.
by old-gregg | 2025-07-30 22:39:27+00:00
> I don't get it. Wouldn't going from 1 second to 0 seconds add the same amount of money to the yearly profit as going from 2 seconds to 1 second did? Namely, $1M

Of course the joke was silly. But perhaps I should have provided some context. We were making industrial automation software. This stuff runs in factories. Every saved second shrinks the manufacturing time of a part, leading to increase of the total factory output. When extrapolating to abusrd levels, zero time to manufacture means infinite output per factory (sans raw materials).
by zahlman | 2025-07-30 22:39:47+00:00
The people I know who are into crypto all seem to think Ethereum is on the decline and Solana is the next viable competitor in that space. For technological reasons, even. Apparently it's easier or better to work with, in ways that I don't particularly care about digging into very much.

> The price of ETH really took off during the 2021 bull market, when it hit an all-time high near $5,000 – a rally characterized by the rise of decentralized finance, better known as DeFi, and NFTs. But it's struggled to fully come back since the 2022 crash and hasn't yet revisited those highs. This week, it's trading near $4,000 — a psychologically and technically challenging resistance level for ETH investors.

Admittedly, SOL hasn't recovered either. But BTC is at around double its 2021 peak.
by frereubu | 2025-07-30 22:39:58+00:00
That feature isn't what I think the parent comment is asking for. What you've linked to is specifically YouTube Kids, and it's groups of channels whitelisted by the YouTube team. What I think the parent comment is asking for, and I want too, is full availability of all YouTube channels, but the ability to block everything except whitelisted channels. I agree, it's too niche a product. But I often think that people whose response to complaints about kids' access to inappropriate content is "you need to parent your kids" is fine, but I need the tools to do that! A tool like this would be a godsend.
by crazygringo | 2025-07-30 22:40:16+00:00
> I also agree with the author in that I'm not sure what elevated trains did to hurt people.

They're horrifically ugly for pedestrians and city life generally. If you've been around the elevated subway tracks in Brooklyn, for example, they're not pleasant to be around. They block out the sun, they're incredibly noisy, they make the street claustrophobic, they definitely become streets to avoid unless necessary.

Yes, they have a nice view if you're a passenger. But they make the city much, much worse for everyone below them.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-30 22:40:57+00:00
I'm no astronomer trying to have work published, but wouldn't a mistake like that be one of the most obvious things to attempt to test your own work against before releasing the results? Is the fear of releasing an obvious mistake and the damage to one's reputation just not present anymore, or is first to publish so critical that mistakes are forgiven? To me, if I was going to present a paper that goes against existing conventional thinking, I'd want to make sure my paper stood up to the most rigorous review including (especially?) from HN commenters.
by khaledh | 2025-07-30 22:41:23+00:00
It might even get further. I imagine a day where AI would generate an executable neural network that models (and is optimized for) a specific problem; i.e. kind of a model that runs on a neural network runtime or VM. Who cares what the NN is doing as long as it's doing its job correctly. The big catch, though, is the keyword "correctly" and I would add "deterministically" to it, in order for users to trust it.
by cubefox | 2025-07-30 22:41:25+00:00
One thing I didn't know until recently was that Lean doesn't solve the problem of verifying that a formal theorem actually states what we think it states rather than something else.

In some cases that's not an issue, because the formal statement of the theorem is very simple. E.g. for Fermat's Last Theorem, which can be formally expressed with "(x y z : ℕ+) (n : ℕ) (hn : n > 2) : x^n + y^n ≠ z^n". But in other cases it might be much harder to verify that a formal statement actually matches the intuitive informal statement we want.

Of course, Lean or similar languages still offer the huge potential of verifying that a formal statement is provable, even if they don't help with verifying that the formal statement matches the intended informal statement in natural language.
by mrob | 2025-07-30 22:42:30+00:00
UI on phone apps still is terrible. Have you ever used a desktop with high-end gaming peripherals (fast monitor/keyboard/mouse), running a light desktop environment such as LXQt on Xorg, with animations disabled? The feeling of responsiveness leaves all mobile devices in the dust. Any modern CPU+SSD is fast enough, but good peripherals are still rare and make a huge difference. Most phones are still running 60Hz displays. A touchscreen is inherently clumsy compared to mouse+keyboard. Mobile UI feel is worse than desktop computers from the 90s.
by giantg2 | 2025-07-30 22:42:48+00:00
This ban includes watching videos. The law says they must take action to prevent underage persons from accessing their services. This means they will likely have to require login and age verify any accounts. The carve out in the article is talking about teachers and parents being allowed to show the content to the kids.

"The govt doesn't need to enforce the age check themselves or even provide or suggest a mechanism."

I suppose it will be up to the courts to decide what is reasonable as an age check. However, the government has said that they don't want to include full ID checks, which is why one would assume they would provide guidance on how to comply.
by exasperaited | 2025-07-30 22:43:31+00:00
> I think you are not going far enough though: All code is legacy code. So vibe coding's ability to make writing more code faster isn't special because it's code nobody understands: Your hand-rolled code is also bad.

This is "but humans also", which I believe should be a recognised fallacy at this point.

Not all code is legacy code, for one thing; some is small enough that it is absolutely live in the minds of developers.

The best practical definition of legacy code is that it is voluminous, entrenched and owned by nobody currently in the organisation. Vibe code typically meets two of those requirements the moment it is produced.