MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by geodel | 2025-07-07 04:32:19+00:00
> big happy family companies long enough to develop far too much company-specific rather than industry specific expertise, just in time to get laid off at 50.

I think this is a great point. Lately this is number one thing I feel concerned about. Though paradoxically they are coming from different direction as pushing buzzword driven development too fast in process making stable products unstable, calling them out of date. And then getting rid of products along the people who worked on them as dead weight.
by JdeBP | 2025-07-07 04:33:03+00:00
When I see a commit like https://github.com/brianluft/heirloom/commit/445ea8ef7018ef0... , I am convinced that yes, this is the original source code. (-:

https://github.com/brianluft/heirloom/commit/3001b284130c399... is rather interesting. Not only for all of the implicit type conversions that the code turned out to be doing, but also for all of the things that were dropped.

It is not totally "modernized", though. Its idea of "Unicode only" is using WTF-16 rather than UTF-8 (which is possible on Win32 nowadays with code page 65001).
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-07-07 04:34:21+00:00
The length encoding is fun to think about, if you want it to go all the way up to infinity, and avoid wasting bytes.

My thought: Bytes C2–FE begin 1 to 6 continuation bytes as usual. "FF 80+x", for x ≤ 0x3E, begins an (x+7)-byte sequence. "FF BF 80+x", again for x ≤ 0x3E, begins an (x+2)-byte length for the following sequence, offset as necessary to avoid overlong length encodings. (Length bits are expressed in the same 6-bit "80+x" encoding as the codepoint itself.) "FF BF BF 80+x" begins an (x+2)-byte length for the encoded length of the sequence. And so on, where the number of initial BF bytes denotes the number of length levels past the first. (I believe there's a name for this sort of representation, but I cannot find it.)

Assuming offsets are used properly, decoders would have an easy time jumping off the wagon at whatever point the lengths would become too long for them to possibly work with. In particular, you can get a simple subset up to 222 codepoint bits by just using "FF 80" through "FF BE" as simple lengths, and leaving "FF BF" reserved.
What makes a good tech entrepreneur?
by lazy_debt | 2025-07-07 04:34:22+00:00
Genuine question. I do think you must have a good mix of business and tech development skills in mix but I am curious on the journey to get them. Is it something along the line of spending 2 weeks to build something then uses social media and network to market it?

For someone who wants to become a great entrepreneur, what should they try to do?
by timewizard | 2025-07-07 04:34:27+00:00
> then everyone benefits from cheaper widgets and you get paid for it.

Ah, but the original widget manufacturer bought a Senator, and so now there are onerous widget regulations that specifically target me while leaving them unscathed.

Don't you know widgets could somehow be dangerous in the hands of.. uh.. the Chinese?

> The real economy

It's possible it stopped existing decades ago. To quote the character of Dr Burry: "It's possible that we are in a completely fraudulent system."
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-07-07 04:35:20+00:00
If I give an LLM a fragment of text that starts with, "The fruit they ate was an <TOKEN>", regardless of any plan, the grammatically correct answer is going to force a noun starting with a vowel. How do you disentangle the grammar from planning?

Going to be a lot more "an apple" in the corpus than "an pear"
by ludicity | 2025-07-07 04:35:34+00:00
I was joking but maybe I really should do this. I'm lacking a lot of Linux fundamentals, let alone NixOS fundamentals, but I also love my setup so much. Here's the commit that made my wallpaper an animated hobbit house!

https://github.com/Nikhil-Suresh/nixos-configuration/commit/...

I didn't use Nixvim or any of that cool stuff though. I stole a little Bash project called Tilde from my friend Victor Engmark to keep all my dotfiles in a repository and then symlink them to .config/ on all the machines I use.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-07-07 04:35:44+00:00
...yes, and? Every capitalist company wants to become a monopoly. It's just not always easy to do so. We have dozens of companies in the USA that have been trying to become monopolies for years, with tons of reporting on it. Only tech companies get this intense scrutiny. I feel like it's some weird quirk of human fear, like how people fear planes the most even though they're by far the safest mode of transportation. People are just wigged out more by tech companies than grocery stores, coffee shops, pharmacies or telecommunications companies.
by vidyesh | 2025-07-07 04:35:49+00:00
Kujtim started opencode few years back, they were developing this it even before any other CLI tools were in the market. Few months back thdxr(dax)(SST) and Adam started contributing to opencode. And quickly became the biggest contributors to the project. I think they also wanted to make it more presentable and Dax bought a domain and stuff while working on it. At some point charm approached Kujtim for some deal to move opencode to charm and keep working on it under them. Dax and Adam wanted to keep it open source as is. (Dax's commits were somehow squashed and removed at this point too) So they ended up rewriting opencode with the same name in TypeScript TUI away from Kujtim's vision. And thats where we are, since then opencode doesn't seem to have much progress done but Dax's opencode is being worked on non-stop.

This is a third party retelling of this story from some post I read, as I came to know about it only after Dax started working on TS TUI for opencode under SST.
by dqv | 2025-07-07 04:35:56+00:00
They did not bring the DSM into the conversation, someone else did. And the person you are responding to made no such conflation! They also made no such claim that "[having] a single symptom [means] someone has the condition." That might be how you decided to interpret what they said, but it is quite literally not what they said!

They simply stated that time blindness is a real issue and linked to an article which acknowledges exactly what you are describing: "Many people with ADHD struggle with a lesser-known but deeply frustrating sign called time blindness." (emphasis mine)
by lmm | 2025-07-07 04:36:10+00:00
> What is the difference between volume and liquidity for the purpose of this discussion?

You're the one asking "Why would liquidity matter here?", you tell me. Like I said, they're correlated well enough that it doesn't really matter as far as I can see.

> This is wildly rare in public markets.

Yes, but it's what happened here.
by iammabd | 2025-07-07 04:36:24+00:00
What you’re advocating for — intuition, iteration, vibe, play, even chaos — isn’t anti-process. It’s expert-level fluency in it. You bend the rules only once you’ve internalized them. You cut steps because you know the tradeoffs. You jump to the solution because you’ve seen the pattern a hundred times before.

That’s mastery...

But mastery is invisible to the junior team watching you work. They don’t see the ten years of bad wireframes you made to learn how to jump straight to the elegant solution. If they imitate your shortcuts, they won’t land where you do. They'll land in chaos, and confuse mess for magic.

So maybe the answer isn’t "Don’t trust the process." It’s "Don’t worship the process. Own it."

Because when we reframe process as a toolset, not a religion, we free ourselves to operate at our best.

The best design leaders I know don’t follow steps, they build their own internal compass, and then teach others how to build theirs.

Messy? Absolutely. But intentional & and that’s the difference.
by Syzygies | 2025-07-07 04:38:06+00:00
tmux! That was today's project. I'm using Claude Code Opus 4 to translate a K&R C computer algebra system (Macaulay) from the 1980's into C23. Finally getting to the "compiles but crashes" (64 bit issues) I found us living inside the lldb debugger. While I vastly prefer a true terminal to the periscope AI agent view in Cursor, it was still painful having at best a partial view of Claude's shell use, interleaved with our chat. What I wanted was a separate terminal session AI and I could share as equal partners.

tmux is the quickest way to implement such an idea.
by jongjong | 2025-07-07 04:38:18+00:00
Wealth shouldn't be conflated with currency units or the value of assets which are denominated in currency units, especially in a system where the total number of currency units is not fixed.

A lot of economic activities are rewarded simply by virtue of the fact that they found a short path of low-resistance from a public money printer to somebody's bank account. There are many government money printers around the world which can be tapped into. Normal value-creating businesses can't compete with such schemes.

Just look at Bitcoin as an example; it uses the same amount of electricity as the nation of Argentina to process a measly 4 transactions per second max (even though there are countless alternatives which are way faster, just as secure and less harmful to the environment). It's worth a lot of money, not worth a lot of value.

Helping corrupt dictators to move around their money globally with impunity while baking the planet, does not add value to society; it destroys value.
by verandaguy | 2025-07-07 04:40:18+00:00
This is coming on the heels of David Suzuki stating in an interview that he no longer believes we can beat the momentum of climate change (adding that the best we can do right now is likely just hunker down), all while politicians in the US blame floods on anthropogenic climate change in the stupidest way possible -- by trying to pass legislation to ban chemtrails and weather control machines.

All three of these things, in the span of just a few days.

This is a grim, but just as importantly deeply stupid time to be paying attention to the climate. I'm having a hard time finding an optimistic angle about all of this right now.
by muzani | 2025-07-07 04:40:27+00:00
My parents did psychology and they always warned us about this.

Bayesianism helps but isn't taught well enough in school. Basically, we fail to handle the false positive and false negatives into the calculation, and this happens a lot with psychologists as well. This is really the point where people say untrained 'professionals' are dangerous - they can't evaluate that inaccuracy of the diagnosis itself.

This is the best explanation I've seen so far: https://betterexplained.com/articles/an-intuitive-and-short-...
by mrlesk | 2025-07-07 04:41:19+00:00
No mcp, just custom instructions.

When you initialize backlog in a folder it asks you if you want to set up agent’s instructions like CLAUDE.md. It is important to say yes here so that Claude knows how to use Backlog.md.

Afterwards you can just write something like: Claude please have a look at the @prd.md file and use ultrathink to create relevant tasks to implement it. Make sure you correctly identify dependencies between tasks and use sub tasks when necessary.

Or you can just paste your feature request directly without using extra files.

Feels a bit like magic
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-07-07 04:42:00+00:00
"Called back to the office" is such a weird turn of phrase, like you're cattle being called back to your pen. You people do realize that you have the power, right? They need you so they can make their crappy products. All you have to do is boycott working for tech companies until they let you work remote. We all saw remote work in the pandemic, how productive people became. We all know that return to office "for productivity" is a lie. They just want an excuse to pay for big offices, and an excuse for laying us off at a moment's notice. They will continue mistreating us until we stand up for our rights, together.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-07-07 04:42:41+00:00
I suspect this won't be up here long, HN has a pretty strong but unofficial and "community" enforced policy against bad news, especially relating to climate.

But that won't be an issue for long since climate change data will soon continually start disappearing. I seriously never imagined that we would lose Mauna Loa [0], which we might.

Given that even in this community, which is relatively data/science literate, there is enough energy to remove this content during a time when information is plenty, in just a few short a few short years, and in the absence of data, I suspect most people will revert to completely misunderstanding and underestimating the truly existential risks we are facing, despite the observable evidence being more clear than ever.

Already I've noticed in the reporting of the most recent Texas floods there is scant mention of climate change (sure you can find it if you look, but it should be the headline)

edit: as predicted, it's already gone!

0. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-mauna-loa-observatory-captured...
by sandworm101 | 2025-07-07 04:43:31+00:00
No shoot, bombs or bombers? I guess apple isnt interested in military contracts. Or, frankly, any work for world peace organizations dedicated to detecting and preventing genocide. And without talk of losing lives, much of the gaming industry is out too.

But i dont see the really bad stuff, the stuff i wont even type here. I guess that remains fair game. Apple's priorities remain as weird as ever.
by sublinear | 2025-07-07 04:43:54+00:00
> It’s an embarrassing thing when you realize that those irresponsible tendencies you had in your youth are still with you. To fuck up in a professional environment like Apple is like committing some social faux pas that reveals suddenly to all the guests your poor and unsophisticated upbringing.

Hard disagree. It reveals to management their own failings at setting expectations. Perhaps their heads were too far up their own asses to actually bother engaging with their team.

I know easter eggs are a tradition, but let's be honest. They're also a passive aggressive response to feeling bored and without a sense of direction. Why is that anyone's fault but management and ultimately the executives for yanking their attention away from actual work?
by Walf | 2025-07-07 04:44:36+00:00
Sorry, but you clearly have no idea what it's like to actually deal with this, at all. If I try to be on time to things, I will be stupidly early, or still think I have time to do tasks A & B before doing C, because they invariably take more or less time than I estimate. Or I start doing tasks X & Y, because I'm easily distracted, you know because it's a deficit in attention. Don't trivialise what you don't understand.

Your advice is as ignorant as saying 'just do more fun things' to someone with depression.
by mrlesk | 2025-07-07 04:46:29+00:00
Hehe. It was a veerry lucky situation.

I sent a message to someone telling that I was working on backlog.md and it turned the name into a link automatically.

I wanted to remove the link and I clicked on it accidentally and discovered that not only there was nothing on that domain but was not registered yet. I got the domain few mins later :)
by grues-dinner | 2025-07-07 04:47:27+00:00
The first half of that already happened with the OK gesture: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-49837898.

Though it would be fun to see what happens if an LLM if used to ban anything that tends to generate heated exchanges. It would presumably learn to ban racial terms, politics and politicians and words like "immigrant" (i.e. basically the list in this repo), but what else could it be persuaded to ban? Vim and Emacs? SystemD? Anything involving cyclists? Parenting advice?
by bravesoul2 | 2025-07-07 04:47:43+00:00
> I became a cautionary tale though and would occasionally warn off the new hires who might have had an inkling to do something similar. And true to my word, I would tread very carefully from that day on with an eye to what Apple HQ would think about any of my actions — and potential consequences (intended or not).

And that is probably the day the culture died a bit. Hearing that tale, I'd stick to the specification every time. And get an email trail.
by JeremyNT | 2025-07-07 04:48:11+00:00
I've settled on aider and vim.

The best experience I've had is to completely divorce editing from vibe coding. Ask the chatbot to do something, then review the results as if a junior developer submitted them - that means diffs and opening files in the editor.

Fundamentally I think these are really distinct operations. I understand why the kitchen sink IDEs jam the genAI tools into their UIs, but I don't think it's necessarily important to link the two functions.
by 0xfaded | 2025-07-07 04:48:27+00:00
This reminds me of auto-generated got commit messages. I can't fathom that someone would go to the effort of authoring a PR,and then not bothering to describe what they did. Unless of course they didn't actually go through the effort of authoring the PR, and may not even be fully aware of what's in there. I've stopped giving thorough code reviews to coworkers who can't use code generation responsibility, and often times they haven't reviewed the code themselves. Heck, I've been giving my PRs self-reviews since long before AI.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-07-07 04:48:44+00:00
One thing that is obvious when you deal with current AI is that it is very adept with words but lacks understanding. This is because understanding is different from forming word sequences. Understanding is based on the shared sameness. We, people, are same. We are parts of a whole. This is why we are able to understand each other with such a faulty media as words. AI lacks that sameness. There is nobody there. Only a word fountain.
by mrlesk | 2025-07-07 04:49:57+00:00
1) How will it work with multiple branches? Simple: using git :) Git allows to fetch certain files from other branches including remote ones without checking out those branches.

The state is always up to date no matter if you are running backlog.md from main branch or a feature branch.

It works well when there are not many branches but I need to check if I can improve the performance when there are lots of branches.
by ssivark | 2025-07-07 04:50:21+00:00
Curious to see examples of interesting non-boilerplate work that is now possible with AI. Most examples of what I've seen are a repeat of what has been done many times (i.e. probably occurs many times in the training data), but with a small tweak, or for different applications.

And I don't mean cutting-edge research like funsearch discovering new algorithm implementations, but more like what the typical coder can now do with off-the-shelf LLM+ offerings.
by o11c | 2025-07-07 04:50:25+00:00
Eh, not really.

"engage", "engorge", "engrave", "engross", "engulf" are all fairly common words that are either often or exclusively pronounced that way (some dictionaries might show /in-g/, but /n/ is really /ŋ/ before g or k, even if they remain). Since these can take prefixes, this also proves we're not limited to being at the start of a word. Searching for words that can be spelled with with "ing" or "eng" finds a few more but nothing super interesting (though a few are in the middle of a word).

Obviously words where "g" is pronounced /dʒ/ (like "j" for those who can't read IPA) aren't subject to this.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-07-07 04:52:02+00:00
I used to work for a company which later got bought by Fiserv (a large payments provider). I had these headaches re: transaction data. Wrote a lot of SQL to reconcile the pairwise sync problem. I tried to convince them that this is a problem for a blockchain, but I grew impatient and left.

Just a few weeks ago Fiserv launched a stablecoin on Solana: https://investors.fiserv.com/newsroom/detail/2848/fiserv-lau... I doubt they listened to me, probably just came to the conclusion independently.

So I'd say that it has caught on, just in a way that doesn't involve the users' preferences as much as I'd like. Because it's not like Fiserv is going to let their end users transact with any of the other assets on Solana. They'll wrap it in an interface that just calls it "$" and the user will be none the wiser.
by tauntz | 2025-07-07 04:52:44+00:00
The sign is also used in Estonia.

Officially defined in https://www.riigiteataja.ee/akt/126112024009?leiaKehtiv -> https://www.riigiteataja.ee/aktilisa/1261/1202/4009/MKM_2901... -> sign no 718.

Google translate of the official sign definition: "sign 718 "Sight" refers to the location of tourist objects (sights of interest to tourists, heritage conservation, nature conservation or other objects);"
by Animats | 2025-07-07 04:52:59+00:00
A really good point in that note:

"But the fundamental problem is that LLMs don’t get better over time the way a human would. The lack of continual learning is a huge huge problem. The LLM baseline at many tasks might be higher than an average human's. But there’s no way to give a model high level feedback. You’re stuck with the abilities you get out of the box."

That does seem to be a problem with neural nets.

There are AIish systems that don't have this problem. Waymo's Driver, for example. Waymo has a procedure where, every time their system has a disconnect or near-miss, they run simulations with lots of variants on the troublesome situation. Those are fed back into the Driver.

Somehow. They don't say how. But it's not an end to end neural net. Waymo tried that, as a sideline project, and it was worse than the existing system. Waymo has something else, but few know what it is.
by jader201 | 2025-07-07 04:53:07+00:00
I’m actually growing bored with tech news, in general (as someone in the software engineering field), and am starting to be drawn more to things like advances in health and medical sciences, disease treatment/prevention, etc.

I wish there was an HN of everything outside of tech.

(Of course, these sometimes overlap, but for articles talking about how tech/AI is helping solve medical problems, I’ll allow it.)
by toast0 | 2025-07-07 04:53:38+00:00
I've still got dead zones near me. If I were cycling with someone, and we wanted to chat on headsets, there's at least a few places I might ride where we'd hit dead air. If we're on different networks, then we both need coverage to communicate with cellular.

Might be more reasonable to use higher bandwidth, lower latency codecs over bluetooth as well?
by mrlesk | 2025-07-07 04:53:57+00:00
2) AI Agents have issues editing larger files.

Correct. One of the instructions that ships with backlog.md is to make the tasks “as big as they would fit in a pr”. I know this is very subjective but Claude really gets much better because of this.

https://github.com/MrLesk/Backlog.md/blob/main/src/guideline...

You will notice yourself that smaller atomic tasks are the only way for the moment to achieve a high success rate.
by tudorconstantin | 2025-07-07 04:56:24+00:00
I have this personal theory that some time after an external stress-related impulse (be that negative - ww2, cold war, becoming paralyzed, etc, or positive - inheriting money, winning the lottery, not having to work for the rest of your life, finding the love of your lufe, etc), the brain adjusts and one comes back to the baseline of their perceived normal stress level. And that’s why we see people who are always happy and seemingly stress free despite having nothing, and ones that always seem stressed to the max despite having everything
by crazylogger | 2025-07-07 04:56:29+00:00
Humans are checked against various rules and laws (often carried out by other humans.) So this is how it's going to be implemented in an "AI organization" as well. Nothing strange about this really.

LLM is easier to work with because you can stop a bad behavior before it happens. It can be done either with deterministic programs or using LLM. Claude Code uses a LLM to review every bash command to be run - simple prefix matching has loopholes.