MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lmeyerov | 2025-07-20 14:17:34+00:00
Yeah it is also a bit of a shibboleth: vibes coding, when I'm productive for the 80% case with Claude code, is about the LLM cranking for 10-20min. I'm instructing & automating the LLM on how to do its own context management, vs artisanally making every little decision.

Ex: Implementing a spec, responding to my review comments, adding wider unit tests, running a role play for usability testing, etc. The main time we do what he describes of manually copying into a web ide is occasionally for a better short use of a model, like only at the beginning of some plan generation, or debug from a bunch of context we have done manually. Like we recently solved some nasty GPU code race this way, using a careful mix of logs and distributed code. Most of our job is using Boring Tools to write Boring Code, even if the topic/area is neato: you do not want your codebase to work like an adventure for everything, so we invest in making it look boring.

I agree the other commenter said: I manage context as part of the skill, but by making the AI do it. Doing that by hand is like slowly handcoding assembly. Instead, I'm telling Claude Code to do it. Ex: Download and crawl some new dependency I'm using for some tricky topic, or read in my prompt template markdown for some task, or generate and self-maintain some plan.md with high-level rules on context I defined. This is the 80% case.

Maybe one of the disconnects is task latency vs throughput as trade-offs in human attention. If I need the LLM to get to the right answer faster, so the task is done faster, I have to lean in more. But my time is valuable and I have a lot to do. If rather spend 50% less of my time per task, even if the task takes 4x longer, by the LLM spinning longer. In that saved human time, I can be working on another task: I typically have 2-3 terminals running Claude, so I only check in every 5-15min.
by mrgoldenbrown | 2025-07-20 14:18:06+00:00
The math on advertising and brand loyalty has changed. There was an article posted to HN this week that explained it pretty well I think. It's easy to start a new brand now, so it's OK to risk ruining your current brand. The decline in quality isn't bewildering, it's exactly what our form of capitalism encourages.

https://www.gojiberries.io/advertising-without-signal-whe-am...
by ezst | 2025-07-20 14:18:17+00:00
For me Signal is not an option. Any pretty promise can be broken on a whim in the same fashion Facebook acquired WhatsApp and could then do whatever they wanted with it. Any pretence of user-friendliness has been defeated when Signal started pushing their crypto and bar their users from using an alternative client. Centralised services are problematic by design, and almost always abusive.
by Bluestein | 2025-07-20 14:18:52+00:00
Business practices are being enshittified to the point of 4chan. Profit, for the lulz.-

Not so long ago you'd gain traction through insight or depth. Now it's absurdity that wins the price, vanity upon vanity.-

At some point the idiogarchs are going to celebrate (celebrate) their accidents and dead as a win. Lol.-
by api | 2025-07-20 14:19:07+00:00
Your suspicion makes total sense.

A major problem with the whole model of production is that if you make a good product and saturate the market you die. It’s not the result of some conspiracy to make shit products. It’s a simple outcome from the fact that purchases are one time while businesses are ongoing, combined with shareholder demands to boost growth. Those demands in turn come from things like pension funds that have promised a return to their customers.

One “solution” is to build subscriptions into everything but there’s already a customer revolt against that for obvious reasons. It’s obnoxious.

I think the best solution is to decouple and unbundle production. Have small design houses (or even individuals) that design products and have low ongoing costs and big manufacturing concerns that make things. Something always needs to be made so they always have business. Design products around commodity parts as much as possible to make retooling affordable.

This kind of already exists in the form of boutiques with kickstarter and Etsy products, or at least those folks have trailblazed this model.
by Closi | 2025-07-20 14:19:13+00:00
Tesla Robotaxi is a classic case of premature optimisation - with Waymo they decided to deploy whatever technology worked best and did not cost-optimise at the start. Each Waymo vehicle is much more expensive than a Tesla, and has much more expensive sensors and compute.

Tesla on the other hand started with a load of constraints - smaller amounts of compute, cheaper sensors, needs to hit a price point as it will be installed in every vehicle sold - can't be $50,000 of dedicated self driving hardware per vehicle.

There are some scenarios where constraints lead to breakthroughs, but often for true-moonshot projects it is the opposite (see: Space shuttle, System/360, the manhattan project, LHC etc)
by kamranjon | 2025-07-20 14:19:17+00:00
The part that I always found difficult to square was not that Elon Musk towed this “no need for LiDAR” line so hard, but that Andrej Karpathy, who I generally consider a very reliable voice in this space, was also in strong agreement that cameras were all that was needed. Does anyone know if he still believes cameras is all you need?

Edit: Here is a link to Karpathy discussing the trade-offs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdiD-9MMpb0&t=5276s
by nobodyandproud | 2025-07-20 14:19:24+00:00
Some individuals are net assets. Many are not.

If I bring in $2 billion in cash to a 100 person town in the US, with a median income of $40k: I can hire none, some, or all of them for $40k to $60k; and make the cost of living too expensive by buying up most of the land, to the point that the remaining stock will cost double or triple the cost.

This is the majority of the oligarch class (Russia, China, Middle East, private equity) who’ve streamed into the democratic West and is an absolute net negative.

Then you have billionaires like Musk (politics aside) who aren’t parking their wealth but building new industries; and the cost of living goes up because of the wages and perhaps demand, as more workers stream in (net positive).

Then you have the rest of the billionaires (high finance, Amazon) whose method is wealth extraction through consolidation and off-shore labor (arguably net negative).
by vicnov | 2025-07-20 14:19:41+00:00
Yesbut… is it true? MSFT is very successful long-term.

You’re making an assumption that teams having control over their work will lead to better quality of product (which i agree) and then (I assume you predict), in return, will result in better financial performance.

But is that true? I am not so sure. I worked in some banks and it is very easy to come up with better products for consumers… that will make less revenue to the banks. I also worked in big tech, and so how prioritizing UX over paying customer requests is virtually impossible.

Oh… i also observed teams ACTIVELY not wanting to take steps to improve products because it would lead to taking risks, and most corporations incentivize you to he risk-averse.

This is a very interesting topic, with few clear answers beyond “culture has to be very good to build good products”
by ranger77 | 2025-07-20 14:20:06+00:00
All I do is COBOL. Everyday. Our team has led over 40 “modernization” efforts, with about half migrating the apps to an X86 platform. There are “tons” of COBOL apps in Production, and not just limited to Financial organizations. I work with County, State and Federal systems. Retail, Insurance, Telecom, and Manufacturing. It’s not uncommon to work on programs that were original written in the 80’s or 90’s

The IBM Z is feature rich, but expensive and limited by software choices for apps not running ZLinux. (Think virtual Linux server)

The biggest catalyst now is the increasing license cost of mainframe third party software
by immibis | 2025-07-20 14:20:10+00:00
Postgres claims to have some kind of commit batching, but I couldn't figure out how to turn it on.

I wanted to scrub a table by processing each row, but without holding locks, so I wanted to commit every few hundred rows, but with only ACI and not D, since I could just run the process again. I don't think Postgres supports this feature. It also seemed to be calling fsync much more than once per transaction.
by Winsaucerer | 2025-07-20 14:20:13+00:00
What sort of code are you writing? I find a lot of my stuff requires careful design, refactoring an existing system to work in a new way.

If the code I was writing was, say, small websites all the time for different clients, I can see it being a big improvement. But iterating on a complex existing platform, I’m not so sure that AI will keep the system designed in a maintainable and good way.

But if your experience is with the same sort of code as me, then I may have to re evaluate my judgments.
by andyjohnson0 | 2025-07-20 14:20:15+00:00
> i cannot understand the urge to compete with the pig or cow or chicken (especially) for meat production. they are so good at turning feed into meat.

Because they are living, somewhat sentient, animals that are capable of suffering. And using them as a food source requires that we kill them on a large scale.

And because industrial-scale meat production causes huge suffering to the animals caught-up in it, as well as serious environmental damage.
by dspillett | 2025-07-20 14:20:30+00:00
> My suspicion is that when products are successful and mature but reach market saturation, profit growth pressure leads to cutting some corners on every iteration,

I'm sure that is certainly part of it, especially when multiple players are competing at least partly on price or apparent value. One consideration once price based competition is significant is that absolute quality may drop while measures of quality/price value improve¹.

Another issue is that when something is new, to the company or the buying audience, it is often a flagship product/service so gets a lot more attention. As things become something the company rattles off as a matter of course and we consumers interact with them daily, that level of attention per production unit diminishes considerably.

As well as playing directly into this, possibly leading to an actual drop in quality, mass production has a less obvious effect on the perception of quality. If you are making hundreds or less and a couple fail, they are probably noticed before leaving the factory and if not the consumer gets a relatively personal service with fixing/replacing the item. If you are making hundreds of thousands many more bad units get into circulation (the absolute failure rate increasing even if the failure ratio drops) and processing returns is less logistically easy. That perception problem has become more significant in the last couple of decades as unhappy voices always tended to be louder and social media can act as a megaphone for both happy and unhappy voices.

This is a complex area with many things feeding into actual quality issues, the perception of them, and sometimes the perception of the matter being worse than it really is overall.

--------

[1] for instance, maybe in a made up example quality goes down by 5% when cuts or mass production bring the price down by more than 10%, so buyers get better for the same money but worse absolutely
by yszhu | 2025-07-20 14:20:56+00:00
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Show HN: Generate bitmap fonts from custom images
by Voycawojka | 2025-07-20 14:21:20+00:00
Calligro is an open source tool for generating bitmap fonts. It uses the same specification as AngelCode's BMFont but unlike other similar programs it's designed specifically to work with characters you draw yourself.

Basically, you export a template, draw your characters in it with any graphics editor, and then import it back to Calligro and generate a bitmap font.

It has both online and offline version. I just released version 2.0 with completely revamped UI.
by FredPret | 2025-07-20 14:21:28+00:00
Whey protein is definitely among the better options, but I once did what you described, and then switched to eating a large amount of chicken breasts.

I definitely feel a bit better, and have a much easier time building muscle.

If you run the numbers, you can actually eat a shocking amout of protein (300g+ / day) from lean meat while maintaining a calorie deficit.

And if you buy frozen chicken breasts from Costco, I think it’s actually cheaper than whey!

That said - you do you, whey has its place in many lifestyles.
by ethbr1 | 2025-07-20 14:21:46+00:00
I’d boil it down thusly:

What do agents provide? Asynchronous work output, decoupled from human time.

That’s super valuable in a lot of use cases! Especially because it’s a prerequisite for parallelizing “AI” use (1 human : many AI).

But the key insight from TFA (which I 100% agree with) is that the tyranny of sub-100% reliability compounded across multiple independent steps is brutal.

Practical agent folks should be engineering risk / reliability, instead of happy path.

And there are patterns and approaches to do that (bounded inputs, pre-classification into workable / not-workable, human in the loop), but many teams aren’t looking at the right problem (risk/reliability) and therefore aren’t architecting to those methods.

And there’s fundamentally no way to compose 2 sequential 99% reliable steps into a 99% reliable system with a risk-naive approach.
by seanhunter | 2025-07-20 14:22:06+00:00
Waymo works in a remarkable range of situations. I took a waymo in LA and our route came through an awkward four-way intersection at the crest of a hill on a residential street. Another driver went through the stop when we had right of way, saw us and then just stopped, completely blocking our side of the road. The waymo just backed up a couple of yards and then slowly went round the wrong side and proceeded on its route. That is, in a weird situation it did exactly what a good, cautious human driver would do. Small sample, but it makes me think they are not doing what you say, they are just actually trying to approach the problem seriously rather than Tesla’s “full speed and damn the torpedoes” approach.
by jvanderbot | 2025-07-20 14:22:21+00:00
On reflection (being an engineer) it makes sense this would happen even without malice. Engineering teams on existing products are incentivized to keep innovating. It's ideal if you can reinvent a part of a product or process while maintaining functionality but often it's easier to get an 80/20. So, a large number of small corner cuts reduce overall quality and costs. If in fact you try to increase functionality, that's actually a new product. The inevitable S curve of profits from any given product means businesses are incentivized to move improvements to new products, leaving old ones to be cut to death.
by lll-o-lll | 2025-07-20 14:22:30+00:00
> Same can be said for most electronics and even clothes. I’m not saying that a high price label guarantees high quality, just that the spectrum of cost vs quality has broadened, even within big name brands.

Electric Kettles - Microwaves. The components that make up the actual boiling of water are now standard and all come from the same chinese manufacturer. You can pay $20 to $1000 for the same thing. The expensive one will look much better. Microwaves are the same - large numbers of manufacturers to all the same guts just different skins.

Retail clothing is the most obvious example. There used to be mid market clothing manufacturers that would produce clothing locally and try to compete on quality. That’s almost gone now. There’s just not enough demand.
by dakiol | 2025-07-20 14:22:43+00:00
> Gemini 2.5 PRO | Claude Opus 4

Whether it's vibe coding, agentic coding, or copy pasting from the web interface to your editor, it's still sad to see the normalization of private (i.e., paid) LLM models. I like the progress that LLMs introduce and I see them as a powerful tool, but I cannot understand how programmers (whether complete nobodies or popular figures) dont mind adding a strong dependency on a third party in order to keep programming. Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools. I am afraid that in a few years, that will no longer be possible (as in most programmers will be so tied to a paid LLM, that not using them would be like not using an IDE or vim nowadays), since everyone is using private LLMs. The excuse "but you earn six figures, what' $200/month to you?" doesn't really capture the issue here.
by jmaker | 2025-07-20 14:23:03+00:00
> but as any user knows they are top tier at instruction following, highly reliable and predictable, and have a certain intangible theory of mind that is unique to Anthropic.

I’m not such an “any user” as in my experience they are exceptionally terrible at following my instructions and cutting edges whenever they like, I have to iteratively get more and more specific at what they should not do, all the time trying to predict their misbehavior. To then see a certain point or a threshold at which they throw my instructions out the window to match and reproduce the very things or patterns I wanted to avoid and likewise with the things and patterns I explicitly instructed them to use or apply.

Very unreliable.

> have a certain intangible theory of mind that is unique to Anthropic.

That’s quite poetic.
by teiferer | 2025-07-20 14:23:10+00:00
> Both Communism and Socialism are failed ideologies. Millions dead.

Geez, seriously? The most successful societies in the world and human history have combined aspects of capitalism and socialism. A market based economy with social constructs that just provide better lives for people than pure capitalism would. Examples are not just the often-cited nordic countries. Germany, France, even the U.S. in its not-so-distant history have embraced that to great success. "Millions dead" is just as much populistic nonsense as the equally misguided doomsday scenarios painted by hardcore haters of capitalism.
by eviks | 2025-07-20 14:24:23+00:00
> Whenever this kind of discussion comes up around these parts, you can bet on there being a bunch of people complaining about Brew, but Macports basically never comes up.

Macports comes up all the time, just like you've mentioned it here. It has a few user friendly benefits (no sudo, more up-to-date apps, better gui clients, slightly easier to add custom package, etc), but in general hard to say exactly why one app wins
by walleeee | 2025-07-20 14:24:24+00:00
Where in Marx do you find claims like reality is a middle-class fiction or all value is subjective? The labor theory of value is premised on an idea of surplus value as a very real thing. Substituting subjective theories takes the air out of the analysis, doesn't it?

I'm perhaps willing to grant "all that matters is making people act" in the sense that he was far more thoroughly a revolutionist than a scientist.

But your antipodal impression of Marx and "Western thought" misses the many strands which make up the latter, as well as the fact that he was no island: he was steeped (and elements of his thought remain visible) in a diverse intellectual tradition which is by no means a monolith.
by evrimoztamur | 2025-07-20 14:24:39+00:00
Besides ultra-processed foods 'hysteria,' basic ratios I consider here are:

- protein to fat (which is roughly 1.4 in Beyond Meat (20g protein / 14g fat in 100g) versus 2.5-3.5 in beef (30±5g protein / 12.5±2.5g fat in 100g)) - protein to mass (20% vs ~30%) - micro-nutrients to mass (a very wide variety of minerals, vitamins, and other unknown nutrients present in beef) - carbohydrates (not present in substantial amounts in meat and around the same amounts in tofu/tempeh as in Beyond Meat; but I don't think it's as major a statistic as previous ratios)

I eat chiefly vegetarian, and refuse to see why Beyond Meat exists beyond 'we can do it and it may get more people to eat vegetarian.'

The industrial overhead of producing Beyond Meat and all the effort that went into creating it simply doesn't make sense to me compared to beans and plant-based protein friends like tempeh/tofu/seitan. Latter are an order of magnitude more scalable than both Beyond Meat and Regular Meat.

All the processing plants and factories built to make this ultra-processing possible, the logistics and supply chains set up to bring all the necessary additives and components together, the grandiose packaging and marketing efforts... I don't get it. It's not a product made for a real audience.
by Zambyte | 2025-07-20 14:24:43+00:00
The state of modern personal electric vehicles (PEVs) is outstanding though; good enough to replace owning a car for most people! I personally have been riding an electric scooter this summer, and paired with a nice backpack, it has comfortably replaced all of my regular driving. For people who want to carry more than me, an e-bike with panniers or a cargo e-bike would likely meet your needs. Electric longboards and electric unicycles are also worth considering, and I have seen a couple of those around my city, but the e-scooters and e-bikes have dominated due to their capacities and how easy they are to ride.
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-07-20 14:24:47+00:00
> Yeah, I find it pretty telling that the person arguing against eugenics is in its distilled essence telling me to not reproduce, because I might have an undesirable trait I do not wish my children to inherit.

I did not say that at all. Mitochondrial diseases are not transmitted 100% to the children so I am saying go ahead and reproduce and accept the results.
by roxolotl | 2025-07-20 14:24:48+00:00
This does a great job illustrating the challenges with arguing over these results. Those in the agi camp will argue that the alterations are mostly what makes the ai so powerful.

Multiple days worth of processing, cross communication, picking only the best result? That’s just the power of parallel processing and how they reason so well. Altering to a more standard prompt? Communicating with a more strict natural language helps reduce confusion. Calculator access and the vast knowledge of humanity built in? That’s the whole point.

I tend to side with Tao on this one but the point is less who’s right and more why there’s so much arguing past each other. The basic fundamentals of how to judge these tools aren’t agreed upon.
by LeftHandPath | 2025-07-20 14:25:00+00:00
I wonder if the sunk cost fallacy - that usually refers to an abstract cost, like time or money - would truly be the same effect as an aversion to retracing a path in 3D space.

Possible, or even likely, but interesting nonetheless. Towards the end of the article, they describe an interesting other direction of their research that's not so directly correlated with sunk cost:

> More recently, we’ve been examining a related form of hesitation. This time, it’s not in switching paths, but in committing to one at all.

> “While it might seem that having enticing options (e.g., a great apartment one could rent, a fun event one could sign up for) would make commitment easier, we’ve found that it’s often the loss of a great option that finally pushes people to choose. People often hold out for something even better, but the disappearance of a pretty good option inspires some pessimism that encourages people to grab onto what is as good as they can get for now.”
by 3036e4 | 2025-07-20 14:25:04+00:00
At least half the reason I have a Gemini server running (the protocol, not the LLM), but no web sever anymore, is that it uses Trust On First Use, like SSH, rather than requiring all the complexities of CAs.

Not saying all of the web should switch to that while keeping everything else the same, but in some contexts it is just nice to use something simpler, as long as the risks are known to users.