MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Dig1t | 2025-07-18 10:33:57+00:00
I have myself physically tried to build housing and can confirm that this is definitely the case.

Zoning is probably the single biggest block to affordable housing in this country.

I was raised in a construction friendly household, I have the ability to build housing. I saw there was empty land in my city that could nicely fit about 5 houses on it (it was a 5-acre plot). I noticed that housing had become extremely expensive in my city and thought well heck why not try to be the change I want to see in the world and try to increase the housing supply.

Problem was that my 5-acre plot was zoned as “single family” which meant that I was legally allowed to build 1 house on it and not 5. So I tried to get the plot rezoned to a classification that allowed more than one house. Had to pay an engineer over 50k to create a plan for the city that was acceptable, including environmental impact study and drainage plans.

The zoning board committee said they would approve 2 houses to be built on the site but didn’t want to allow more because they were worried there wasn’t enough public transport available in the area (even though each planned house would have its own garage and road access). And literally I’m not kidding one of the members even mentioned that he was worried about this zoning change being motivated by a desire to (in his words): “enrich yourself”.

There are so many bureaucratic barriers to building housing in the US. Zoning is just one layer of bureaucracy that can be tens of thousands of dollars and years of back-and-forth with the city. There are even more layers with their own set of costs. Trying to actually build something is a radicalizing experience. It really feels the system is set up to intentionally limit supply and slow people down.
by surgical_fire | 2025-07-18 10:34:39+00:00
> I find this perspective so hard to relate to. LLMs have completely changed my workflow; the majority of my coding has been replaced by writing a detailed textual description of the change I want, letting an LLM make the change and add tests, then just reviewing the code it wrote and fixing anything stupid it did.

I use it in much the same way you describe, but I find that it doesn't save me that much time. It may save some brain processing power, but that is not something I typically need saving.

I extract more from LLM asking it to write code Infind tedious to write (unit tests, glue code for APIs, scaffolding for new modules, that sort of thing). Recently I started asking it to review the code I write and suggest improvements, try to spot bugs and so on (which I also find useful).

Reviewing the code it writes to fix the inevitable mistakes and making adjustments takes time too, and it will always be a required step due to the nature of LLMs.

Running tasks simultaneously don't help much unless you are giving it instructions that are too general that will take it a long time executiny - and the bottleneck will be your ability to review all the output anyway. I also gind that the broader is the scope of what I need it to do, the less precise it tends to be. I achieve most success by being more granular in what I ask of it.

My take is that while LLMs are useful, they are massively overhyped, and the productivity gains are largely overstated.

Of course, you can also "vibe code" (what an awful terminology) and not inspect the output. I find it unacceptable in professional settings, where you are expected to release code with some minimum quality.
by 0manrho | 2025-07-18 10:35:10+00:00
> I suspect a lot of the flakiness is not the chip itself

Most certainly. Doesn't change the fact that Realtek being present is a huge redflag, even if it's not a cheap device, regardless of whether it's realtek's fault or the OEM/ODM/SI that integrated them into the system in question. It basically screams "we phoned this part in", though it's certainly not always true, it's true enough that I refuse to use them (be it by disabling them or just opting for entirely different hardware so I can avoid that headache).

Broadcomm is certrainly better than Realtek, but it's still a "Replace at soonest possible convenience" tier as well. Intel is far far more reliable in my experience (save for some of their combo bluetooth/wifi cards, but their dedicated wired ethernet cards have always been great for me. The i210/211 class of integrated bottom tier ones can be hit and miss though.
by jraph | 2025-07-18 10:35:45+00:00
OP said "I do worry about my data with them", it seems to be the best they could do to try resolve this would be to delete the data.

But indeed, that's me thinking that you should care a lot more about your privacy and the privacy of your relatives than anything 23andMe provides.

I mean, I think I would find it fun to discover relatives, but not at this cost.
by Ygg2 | 2025-07-18 10:35:59+00:00
I don't quite get what you mean by:

> Naturally those of us with experience in compilers, type systems theory and such, see it differently, we are at another level of understanding.

I mean yeah, you might have a new perspective, but so can it be a blinder to how people learn language. Curse of knowledge, and all that.
by jauco | 2025-07-18 10:36:13+00:00
Just to provide a counterpoint (and to show that there is no 1 true answer) I switched from my linux machine to a mac when my carefully selected hardware kept having a graphics card crash when closing/unclosing the lid. And this was the last straw, it’s an endless sequence of micro cuts (power throttling bugs, scroll being different across apps, issues with crappy hardware at a client)

On the other hand most of these microcuts can be researched, solved or scripted away. With my mac I have far fewer, but the ones you have, you’re often stuck with. Generally these are about flakiness with the automagic stuff. Like the camera feed switching to your iphone for a while (whether you want it or not), then suddenly refusing for weeks even when you do want it.

Also, the mac has no tiling wm that comes within a parsec of i3. I miss i3 daily. So. Much. Especially with multiple screens.

But then again, I enjoy opening the lid of my laptop daily as well. And being able to close the lid and put it in my bag, without first listening if it succesfully went to sleep. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I guess what I’m saying is: pick the annoyances that give you the smallest emotional response at this time in your life.
by blep-arsh | 2025-07-18 10:36:34+00:00
Yes, I've bought a chinese ("Acasis" brand) TB4 hub which has three TB4 downstream ports and an USB 3.x hub with three downstream 10 Gbps USB-C ports. There are also weird combos like one downstream TB3 + three downstream USB-C 3.x. Still not great, but it's better than a single downstream port.
by wink | 2025-07-18 10:36:35+00:00
Interestingly I've only ever ran into this problem (as being a problem) in Advent of Code - you need a certain (more exotic) graph algorithm and you only find an example that goes contrarian to your current model.

At work I don't seem to need these weird algorithms, or they are in the language's standard library/default math or graph package and it's not worth reimplementing anyway.
by feynmanalgo | 2025-07-18 10:38:44+00:00
I see two trends recently: 1. low skill people using it for trivial projects. 2. devs writing out the whole app into memory/context down to the names of the files, interfaces, technologies, preparing the testing, compilation framework and then hand-holding the llm to arrive (eventually) at an acceptable solution. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4_YYrIKLac

80% (99%?) of what you hear about llms are from the first group, amplified by influencers.

I'm guessing people feel the productivity boost because documenting/talking to/guiding/prompting/correcting an LLM is less mentally taxing than actually doing the work yourself even though time taken or overall effort is the same. They underestimate the amount of work they've had to put in to get something acceptable out of it.
by surgical_fire | 2025-07-18 10:38:46+00:00
> Corporate enthusiasm for AI is seen for what it actually is, a chance to cut head count

I mean, it is the reason why the usual suspects push it so aggressively. The underclasses much always be pushed down.

It's mostly bullshit, on most areas LLMs cannot reliably replace humans. But they embrace it because the chance that it might undermine labor is very seductive.
by yorwba | 2025-07-18 10:39:57+00:00
In the case of searching Google, E(x) is the encrypted query and y is Google's database. Can you compute E(x + y) without doing at least as much work as computing E(y)? I don't think so. Instead, you use public key cryptography so that the server can compute E(y) (yes, encrypting the entire database) without being able to decrypt D(E(x)) = x.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-18 10:40:02+00:00
Potentially the only thing AI is good at is trudging through tedium. The barrier OP identified for FHE is tedium.

Searching Google query by query as one prosecutes a question with FHE would be annoying. Asking an on-device LLM to go back and forth with Google using FHE is not. I'm also assuming that FHE won't cover all operations, and that its coverage would be both constantly changing and well documented, which is another place where an LLM could abstract away smoothly failing back from FHE to open querying.

Put another way, AIs' text-first prompt-oriented UI seems to be a good fit for FHE in a way that e.g. a dashboard is not.
by 0manrho | 2025-07-18 10:40:21+00:00
3 actually:

Realtek itself (Questionable quality on a good day)

The implementation of Realtek by the ODM/OEM/SI into whatever part is being shipped, which given Realtek is the defacto "budget" option for networking, it's often done as cheaply and shoddily as possible, even if the chip itself actually isn't crapware.

And the USB interface as you point out. There's a whole rabbit hole that I'm unfortunately all too familiar with when it comes to diagnosing and dealing with USB. PCIe passthrough via a USB4/TB combo chip isn't as reliable as just using PCIe directly, but it's still better than a non-pcie passthrough usb interface.
by erincandescent | 2025-07-18 10:41:47+00:00
USB A->C cables are supposed to have a Rp pullup on CC1, and leave CC2 disconnected. Huawei made some A->C cables which (incorrectly, and spec-violatingly) have Rp pullups on both CC lines, which is how you signal you're a power sourcing Debug Accessory

Your Pixel 4A is entering debug accessory mode (DebugAccessory.SNK state in the USB-C port state machine); other devices probably don't support debug accessory mode and just shrug.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-07-18 10:41:59+00:00
Call me childish, but I don’t want to ask Microsoft to sign a certificate for me before I install software onto my own hardware.

I don’t care if it’s required for every installation of if it’s once per hardware. I want to install software without asking a third party for permission. I want this to be doable entirely offline.

Plus, keeping Microsoft’s CA installed greatest reduces any security which I’d get from SecureBoot.
by Neywiny | 2025-07-18 10:42:15+00:00
It's interesting. On embedded, heap allocation is usually not done. If it is, it's permanent- free does nothing. Not always the case, you can enable a real alloc/free algorithm, but usually you don't need to free so it doesn't matter. The stack, though... If you take 2KB of stack and you haven't linked that much in, good luck trying to find that "bug" for why everything gets corrupted/crashes. My point here isn't that 2KB is big for embedded, it's actually that I'd prefer it just either statically allocates the memory or uses the heap so I can at least get an "out of memory" error
by eulgro | 2025-07-18 10:42:15+00:00
I definitely would never use Python in production. But it remains an amazing tool for prototyping and writing quick dirty scripts.

I can reasonably expect Python to be installed on every Linux system, the debugging experience is amazing (e.g. runtime evaluation of anything), there's a vast amount of libraries and bindings available, the amount of documentation is huge and it's probably the language LLMs know best.

If there were two languages I would suggest anyone to start with, it would be C and Python. One gives a comprehensive overview of low-level stuff, the other gives you actual power to do stuff. From there on you can get fancy and upgrade to more advanced languages.
by owebmaster | 2025-07-18 10:42:31+00:00
It might be a vibe coding fatigue. Or simonw fatigue. I for one lose any curiosity when I see a vibe coded project/post because I've used LLMs so much that I don't find the generated results impressive or even interesting at all.

They all still sucks big time and this won't change with a better prompt or model, there's no breakthrough and compared to 6 months ago they did not get that much better.
by glimshe | 2025-07-18 10:42:50+00:00
As a someone who came to the US as a foreign worker, I just want to make one correction. When you say:

> From a geo political perspective, would you rather have these people working to build up US industry, or have them starting and staffing competition in their home countries?

This doesn't happen nearly as often as you probably think. Starting a company in many countries (including my birth country in Latin America) is very difficult. Not only there is no financing, but the justice system is also slow to resolve inevitable contract disputes. Additionally, government regulations crush advanced businesses to the point where it's really difficult for companies to compete internationally. The US remains one of the best places to start a tech company.

Given this, many smart people in my home country decide to work for the government in highly-paid paper-pushing roles, throwing away years of study and computer expertise.
by DarkNova6 | 2025-07-18 10:43:02+00:00
No homage can be great enough if the original from the 90s looks better than their contemporary counterpart.

The new movie looks like a collection of scenes containing 2-3 people on a bluescreen, with pre-rendered backgrounds that look worse than the last 2 video game entries (which were genuine pieces of art).

I wanna love it, but I'm currently watching 90s anime and I am impressed by their composition and how they can linger on a single scene to create mood. All while having a dense plot.
by Stevvo | 2025-07-18 10:44:10+00:00
I'm curious if such a system could encourage soldiers to follow the laws of war. e.g. If soldiers were penalized for collateral damage, would they be more likely to act proportionally? In games players are penalized for negative actions such as team-killing. The article mentions captives give 10x more points than kills, which if effective is surely a positive for all parties involved.
by K0balt | 2025-07-18 10:44:11+00:00
If we assume that the motor is operating at 98 percent efficiency (improbable but not impossible at that power level) then that’s 11KW of heat to carry away. That is similar to an ICE engine of 18KW, which is light but not extreme at 13kg. Even at 94 percent I’d say it is going to be in the ballpark of cooling requirement to ICE, which we are now pretty good at keeping under control.

That’s pretty remarkable.
by culebron21 | 2025-07-18 10:44:12+00:00
Yes, but it's a problem in hiring.

A degree is still a good proxy for good worker, because it guarantees that:

1. The employee was able to work on the boring matter he was assigned, and often disliked 2. The employee internalized some social norms, unlikely to be a weirdo 3. The employee knows what he doesn't know, and what things exist in the industry

Once I made a lecture on higher education, showing that it has many functions besides the core skills that everybody talks about. And that there's no replacement to it on the horizon. After my talk, a guy comes up: "such great lecture, just my thoughts. Why do they need a degree for bank clerks? A technikum* would be enough." (I spoke of exactly the opposite. And the test to his idea would be: come to the bank manager, tell them they should hire people without a degree, listen where he tells you to go.)

* technikum in post-soviet countries is 1-2 year vocational education, lower kind of degree than college or university.
by 0manrho | 2025-07-18 10:44:46+00:00
They use the USB-C physical interface for their modules, but that doesn't mean they actually use the USB protocol on the backend. Not sure how they implement it to be honest, but it's at least entirely possible for example to run display-port only (With no USB involved at all) through a USB-C PHY (and dp isn't alone in being able to do that).
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-18 10:45:13+00:00
What do you expect to happen to money which is "saved"? They're not stuffing it in a mattress. Some business gets it and then spends it to buy inventory or do construction or whatever it is their business does. If it was actually stuffed in a mattress forever at scale then the government would have to contemporaneously print that amount of new money to prevent deflation from the contraction of the circulating money supply, and then somebody would be spending that.
by fakedang | 2025-07-18 10:46:46+00:00
As a counterexample, there's someone who vibe-coded a subscription adult website complete with payments and stuff, while having zero computer science experience while living in an RV. I can't find the link now, although last I saw on X, she was complaining about being blocked by trad finance after Bill Ackman's campaign.

So yeah, it's absolutely possible. From personal experience, I was able to implement a basic scan and go application complete with payment integrations without going through a single piece of documentation.

As long as you're ready to jostle for a bit in frustration with an AI, you can make something monetizable once you've identified an underserved market.
by matklad | 2025-07-18 10:46:59+00:00
(I work on TigerBeetle)

+100, context is the key thing, both TigerBeetle and rust-analyzer have strong culture of how the things are done, but the _specific_ culture is quite different, because they solve very different problems.

That being said, I _think_ you might be pattern-matching a bit against the usual dependencies good/dependencies bad argument, and the TFA is on a different level. Note the examples of dependencies used: POSIX, ECMA-48, the web platform. These are not libraries, these are systems interfaces!

Dependency on a library is not a big deal --- if it starts to bite, you can just rewrite the code! But dependency on that underlying thing that the library does is usually something that can't be changed, or extremely costly to change. Answering "No" to "is doing X in scope for my software?" is powerful

To refer to the sibling comment, if there's a team whose core business is writing matrix multiplication code, they _can_ use random library #24 for something else, but often, if you apply some software design, you might realize that the product surrounding matrix multiplication _shouldn't_ handle concern #24. It doesn't mean that concern #24 isn't handled by anything at all, rather that we try to find _better_ factoring of the overall system to compartmentalize essential dependencies.
by brainless | 2025-07-18 10:48:10+00:00
I have not thought about it, it is one of the things on my list. But my understanding was that developers copy code from Stack Overflow, as an example. It is not "my" code but I still am the author. Or lets say I ask my friend to add code and she/he simply passes over the code to me. I author it in my name.

The "barely" part may be important and I would like to know what others are doing.
by panstromek | 2025-07-18 10:48:32+00:00
I find both the article and the title a bit too simplistic for the topic. This is the classic "build vs buy" problem and I think it's one of the hardest problems in softare development and maybe engineering in general.

I've been bitten by both sides of the decision many times and apart from trivial cases (like `is-even`), it's hard to come up with universal rule of thumb to decide this, especially for cases where it matters.
by somat | 2025-07-18 10:48:54+00:00
If it is all 5 volts, it will not do much. But perhaps that screwball PD stuff would get you in trouble. The OTG stuff, just concerns who is the usb host. Where the otg cable instructs a normally client device to act as a usb host, Where the holy grail was to find that magical OTG cable that would let me charge the phone while it was acting as host. Hmmm... on reflection, this would be any dock right?

And a rant, for free: Holy smokes, I think OTG may be the second most braindead marketing dribble sort of acronym to come out of tech, right behind wifi(wireless... fidelity? what does that even mean?)
by tigroferoce | 2025-07-18 10:49:13+00:00
There are dialects, but they are more similar to different languages rather than different pronunciations. For instance dialect of Piedmont, my region, are somehow similar to French, because of geography and history.

It's common for people of one area to not understand dialects from a very different area, but the language is one, and you pronounce all the letters (almost, there are some exceptions, but they follow a rule), and if you were to write the dialect you'd write anything you say.

There are many variations on the cadence and on how some words are used, but generally speaking the language is the same everywhere. But then, of course, Italy is a small Country and only a few millions people speak Italian.

I wasn't hinting that one language is better than others, just that it comes very natural to us to read that alphabet. Once you map in your head some signs to some sounds it's almost all there (provided that you know enough English to infer which words are written for enough time to learn the missing signs).
by account42 | 2025-07-18 10:50:06+00:00
> whereas a dependency absolves me of that

Except it doesn't. Users don't care if the reason something is broken on their platform is your own code or a dependency.

IME platform abstractions often tend to be a trap because they can only abstract 90% without making compromised whereas if you do it yourself you can pierce the abstraction for the remaining 10% and get the best result on all platforms.
by pcthrowaway | 2025-07-18 10:50:10+00:00
I haven't seen any criticism of deportations from Democrats because "who's gonna mow my lawn". I'm sure it happens, but I haven't seen it.

I've seen an endless feed of Democrats and people further left concerned about the human rights abuses happening right now with ICE and deportations

Bold of you to assume any of these people have a lawn to mow.
by swores | 2025-07-18 10:50:42+00:00
Considering the first mile would need to have been faster than 23mph for your 41mph to give an average of 30... your answer is either completely wrong, or is "if we pretend that the numbers are completely different to what they are then my answer is right", either way it just seems pointlessly wrong rather than pretty fun. But I guess good for you if you enjoyed working out that answer.
by tpm | 2025-07-18 10:51:07+00:00
1. There are brands offering 100% natural perfumes. 2. I don't think it's reasonable to just say "phthalates, which are endocrine disruptors". Which ones exactly, how much? IFRA says diethylphthalate is safe to use in fragrances[0], where is the research showing otherwise?

[0] https://www.sunseye.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/IFRA-posi...
by brainless | 2025-07-18 10:51:58+00:00
This is an excellent point and one that I am chasing. I do not want software (at least ones I produce) to be inferior than what I would hand code. LLMs give me huge velocity but I am still learning where to put guardrails so it keeps quality to what I would do myself.

Now the critical point: what if my own quality is inferior to many others. I think we will have this issue a lot since LLMs can generated code at 10x speeds. The quality will be what the human operator sets. Or, maybe, more and more tools will adapt best practices as guardrails and do not give humans much option to steer away from them.