MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kube-system | 2025-08-11 18:47:33+00:00
It's not a terrible idea, but not a great one either. The lights on the back of a vehicle don't simply serve as attention getting lights. They also exist as signals. Lighting all of them up might get attention, but at best it conveys no information, and at worst, it may confuse observers or obfuscate the signals that those lights are supposed to be conveying.
by williamstein | 2025-08-11 18:47:57+00:00
I strongly agree. LLM’s have eviscerated the core idea and motivation behind using the GPL, in a way I didn’t at all see coming. We’ve published a lot of very unique GPL code (eg in sagemath), which anybody can now easily “regenerate” as part of some other closed (or open) software using an LLM. They wouldn’t even know they are creating a derived work of our GPL code. I have had to come to terms with this...
by JohnBooty | 2025-08-11 18:47:59+00:00
Amen. I had a long and damaging relationship with somebody who did exactly what you describe. Used "boundaries" as an excuse for being a toxic human being, as many narcissists do.

A good test of the boundary-setter's true nature is whether or not they find alternative means of doing the thing or if they are just claiming "but muh boundaries!" to excuse their lack of being a decent human being.

If their "boundaries" prevent them from showing up at a funeral to provide a moment of comfort to the survivors of the deceased... well okay. There could be valid reasons. Suppose funerals tend to induce suicidal ideation in an individual. Certainly nobody would suggest that individual should risk a suicidal episode.

But, is the person finding an alternative way to show that care? Flowers, letters, a visit at some other time? Or are they just narcissisticly using it as an excuse to avoid spending time for the benefit of anybody other than themselves?
by CharlesW | 2025-08-11 18:48:02+00:00
> However, they will eventually get purchased by an AI company because the _product_ is great.

'Great' is in the eye of the beholder. For me, Cursor was one of the least-effective solutions of the many options (from Cursor and other AIDEs, to repo-centric web-based options like Jules, to CLI-based options like Claude Code) I evaluated a few months ago.
by zzo38computer | 2025-08-11 18:48:16+00:00
It did not entirely get better; some things may have improved and some things may have been made worse.

Private repositories is not a feature I use (if I want the files to be private, I will not send them to Microsoft or to someone else, unless they are the intended recipient).

I use GitHub Actions to automatically assign issues to myself,

I think they have changed the HTML in many worse ways; some functions require JavaScripts, etc. They also made mandatory 2FA, and setting it up does not work properly. (I can use the API to get around both issues, for now.)
by IshKebab | 2025-08-11 18:48:23+00:00
> Both effects together will push costs at the top level to $100k a year. Spending that magnitude of money on software is not without precedent, chip design licenses from Cadence or Synopsys are already $250k a year.

For how many developers? Chip design companies aren't paying Synopsys $250k/year per developer. Even when using formal tools which are ludicrously expensive, developers can share licenses.

In any case, the reason chip design companies pay EDA vendors these enormous sums is because there isn't really an alternative. Verilator exists, but ... there's a reason commercial EDA vendors can basically ignore it.

That isn't true for AI. Why on earth would you pay more than a full time developer salary on AI tokens when you could just hire another person instead. I definitely think AI improves productivity but it's like 10-20% maybe, not 100%.
Ask HN: How to Work Better with Teammates
by cutlilacs | 2025-08-11 18:48:26+00:00
This has occurred multiple times in my career. I was given a feature to co-lead with another dev, and I always wanted to be cooperative with them. Split the work fairly, try to come up with designs through collaboration. But everytime it seems that the person I'm paired up with does things that I view as toxic or uncollaborative. They would often try to take most of the important parts for themselves and try to leave me with the more mundane tasks. And some cases, they would just redo my work in their own style, without even a discussion on what I could change to more align with their expectations.

Even recently, someone I was paired with do complete a feature try to convince our manager that we should work separately on different designs and see which ones is better. I did argue back in this discussion stating that we shouldn't duplicate work without a good reason. My manager seemed to agree.

Now I'm wondering if this is just a me issue, perhaps I'm doing something wrong? In my view, I'm really trying on building something together, but everyone else seems to be competitive and constantly doing things that rub me the wrong way.

Anyone else have experience with this? Any advice or guidance would be much appreciated.
by thesuitonym | 2025-08-11 18:48:26+00:00
I don't use a to do file, but I do keep notes in (mostly) a single text file, and I just have them on a server exposed to the internet. When I need to read/write something I SSH to the box and use Vim to update the note.

I wouldn't recommend this if you didn't already have a server set up for other reasons, but it might be a useful option for some commenters here.
by rayiner | 2025-08-11 18:48:39+00:00
The point on p. 39 about immigration is important for everyone to understand:

> Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government.

According to an Economist article addressing data collected by Denmark, each non-western immigrants produce a negative financial benefit over their lifetimes, and immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, are a net cost on the government at every age: https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-effects-of-immigration-in-...
by MarkusWandel | 2025-08-11 18:48:46+00:00
This was rural though, with the cell tower serving a small town, population 600, and folks on the highway and in the nearby backcountry. As far as we could tell it really was 128kbps. But definitely not enough for the modern (then - this is already 7-8 years ago) web.

We ran out the (then) measly data allotment of the day (500MB) on purpose on the last day of the billing period to try this.
by yndoendo | 2025-08-11 18:48:50+00:00
I would add, some politicians are on your side on select matters, most are not.

Sad thing is people ignore a politician's actions and keep applying Yes or No to their marketing statements. They use social engineering wording just to get votes and then they will ignore that standing to support their own action of legislation crafting and voting.

By block and limiting access to information, such as Wikipedia, they are advocating for a dumb populous. Irony is that in order to have a strong national security, an educated populous is needed. They are the ones see beyond the easily deployed social engineering tactics and are better at filtering out misinformation.
by yieldcrv | 2025-08-11 18:48:53+00:00
I think what this model actually showed is a cyclical aspect of tokens as a commodity

It is based on supply and demand of GPUs, the demand currently outstrips supply, while the 'frontier models' are also much more computationally efficient than last year's models in some ways - using far fewer computational resources to do the same thing

so now that everyone wants to use frontier models in "agentic mode" with reasoning eating up a ton more tokens before sticking with a result, the demand is outpacing supply but it is possible it equalizes yet again, before the cycle begins anew
by kevinsync | 2025-08-11 18:50:05+00:00
I can't tell how widespread any of is, to be honest.. mostly because it's anecdata, and impossible to determine if what I'm seeing is just ragebait, or shallow dunks by reply-guys in comment sections, or particularly-loud voices on social media that aren't representative of the majority opinion, etc

That said, the amount of sort-of-thoughtless, I'm-just-repeating-something-I-heard-but-don't-really-understand outrage towards AI that I'm seeing appears to be increasing -- "how many bottles of water did that slop image waste??", "Clanker"-adjacent memes and commentary (include self-driving + robots in this category), people ranting about broligarchs stealing art, music, movies, books to train their models (oddly often while also performatively parroting party lines about how Spotify rips artists off), all the way to refusing to interact with people on dating apps if they have anything AI in their profiles hahaha (file "AI" alongside men holding fish in their pics, and "crypto" lol)

It's all chronically-online nonsense that may well just be perception that's artificially amplified by "the algorithm".

Me, I have no fundamental issue with any of it -- LLMs, like anything else, aren't categorically good or bad. They can be used positively and negatively. Everything we use and consume has hidden downsides and unsavory circumstances.
by root_axis | 2025-08-11 18:50:21+00:00
> In a year or so, the open source models will become good enough (in both quality and speed) to run locally.

"Good enough" for what is the question. You can already run them locally, the problem is that they aren't really practical for the use-cases we see with SOTA models, which are just now becoming passable as semi-reliable autonomous agents. There is no hope of running anything like today's SOTA models locally in the next decade.
by jrowen | 2025-08-11 18:50:45+00:00
What perspective are you coming from where that is a crazy amount? If it works for one it will become a part of their daily life. Seems pretty reasonable to me. Most pairs of pants cost at least that much unless you're of the "I only shop at Costco/Target" mindset.

I'm sure you could get a knockoff or DIY and save a few bucks but I appreciate the thought that's gone into their designs.
by Animats | 2025-08-11 18:50:54+00:00
The future is probably a society with more robots than humans.

We can see this happening now at Amazon. Amazon is a good case to watch, because their operations replace humans with robots on close to a one to one basis. Right now, Amazon has about 1.5 million human employees, and 1 million robots. Amazon reached peak humans in 2022, with around 1.6 million employees. Then human employees began to decline slightly. Robots continue to increase. Here's an old chart from 2017, when Amazon had increased all the way to 45,000 robots and some people were worried.[1] Now, it's 20x that.

How a society of mostly robots will work is not clear, but it's coming anyway.

[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/7428/45000-robots-form-part-o...
by ebiester | 2025-08-11 18:51:33+00:00
Everyone is fighting for their view of the world right now and for those of us who do not have any investment in the success of one of the models, it feels like pure speculation at this point.

I don't think there's a human on this planet who can even predict the state of the industry in 3 years. In my entire time in the industry, I have always felt like I had a good line of sight three years away. Even when the iphone came on the scene, it felt like a generational increase rather than a revolution.

We just have no idea. We don't know the extent of how it can improve. We don't know if we are still on exponential improvement or the end of the S curve. We don't know what investment is going to be like. We don't know if there is autonomy in the future. We don't know if it's going to look more like the advancement of autonomous vehicles where everyone thought we were just a year or two away from full autonomy - or at least people bought the hype cycle.

Any anyone who says they know has something to sell you.
by gustavohalm | 2025-08-11 18:51:40+00:00
Hey YC,

I’m building a product called Vertaic — the idea is to create a Data OS where users can connect their data sources (Databases, CSVs, Google Sheets, etc.) and instantly generate dashboards, charts, and even have interactive conversations with their data.

It’s free to try (you might see a modal pop up — just close it) and I’d love for anyone to test it out and share feedback or ideas. It’s free because it’s still in development.

I started building this out of frustration with Power BI — I wanted something that would make it much easier and faster to visualize my data and build dashboards.
by 827a | 2025-08-11 18:51:58+00:00
I think there's a lot of really interesting (and profitable) AI products out there. And: there's so many more that can be built. We're only scratching the surface of what the industry has already invented can do. Not in an "AGI Inevitable" capacity; what we have, today, with more context engineering, better user interfaces, better products with deeper AI-first thinking, etc.

My point was more-so that FAANG isn't even scratching the surface; they're punching it bloody with their fists while yelling "look at all this AI we have, see dad we can't be disrupted we're the disrupters we're the disrupters".

It reminds me a lot of Xbox over the past six years, so much so that I think Xbox is a canary for how many business units in these companies will look in five more years.
by WorldMaker | 2025-08-11 18:52:47+00:00
The OP seems to be asking for the Python order of the import statement because it allows for simpler auto-completion when typing it:

from math import square_root as sqrt, abs as absolute from math import * as not_math

In a format like this, your language service can open up `math` immediately after the `from math` and start auto-completing the various types inside math on the other side of the `import`.

Whereas the `import abs from math` often means you type `import` have no auto-complete for what comes next, maybe type ` from math` then cursor back to after the import to get auto-completion hints.

It's very similar to the arguments about how the SQL syntax is backwards for good auto-complete and a lot of people prefer things like PRQL or C# LINQ that take an approach like `from someTable where color = 'Red' select name` (rather than `select name from someTable where color = 'Red'`).
Ask HN: What makes a good take-home coding assignment?
by hubraumhugo | 2025-08-11 18:52:52+00:00
We have a take-home assignment in our hiring process as we prefer that over any leetcode questions to assess the craftsmanship skills of a candidate.

It should be challenging, fair, and appropriately time boxed (e.g. 5 hours). What are some good expamples of reasonable take-home assignments you've seen?

Roles we're using this for are backend and frontend.
by dnh44 | 2025-08-11 18:52:56+00:00
>Why create prompts by LLM at all? Presumably you have to start with inputting what you want to happen, so why pass it through two LLMs instead of one?

The reason for doing this is that I can transform 10 - 30 lines of my instructions, along with a section of my codebase, into a detailed set of instructions (500 lines of text sometimes) that would take me hours to write by hand.

Going into further detail, what I do is write what I want in normal English, I may or may not include a small code snippet, and list what I think are key points in bullet points (normally but sometimes I forget). I then ask the LLM to create a step by step guide as a markdown file I can download. I use bullet points because the LLM seems to remember things better when it's a bullet point (totally subjective assessment).

Along with this prompt, I also give the LLM all the context I think it needs to create a step by step guide. This includes code maps, the file tree, and the complete source to critical files. This part of the prompt is usually between 2000 to 6000 lines.

Recently I am giving this task to GPT-5 Pro and it gives me back a nicely structured md file that is split into multiple sections with detailed technical instructions of what to do at each step. This file is normally 200 - 500 lines long. I skim it and prune it, then pass it to Claude Code. Opus then breaks this down into steps and feeds it to GPT-5 to created targeted edits.

>The important bit - how did they get Opus to write the prompt without them writing all those things in the meta-prompt - is missing.

My original prompt for the interaction in my original post was:

I want to create an event driven architecture with combine, which will broadcast a GameTick to anywhere that is listening.

/// Represents the state of the game at a specific turn or "tick".

/// This data is expected to be received from the server in the future.

public struct GameTick {

/// The current, sequential turn number of the game. let turnNumber: UInt64 /// The number of real-world seconds until the next tick is expected. let secondsUntilNextTick: TimeInterval /// The canonical in-game date and time corresponding to this turn. let inGameDateTime: Date

}

This way any service that may receive a state change on a tick can individually subscribe to this broadcase. Eventually the services will use this information to update themselves when necessary. For now I only want GameService and PlayerService to subscribe. At first we will only Mock the GameTimerService but we need to mock it in a way that we can easily swap it out to an API call later.

Create a step-by-step plan to implement this feature. Put your plan in a markdown file.

>How do you get Opus to write "A GameTickEvents enum following the pattern of OreInventoryEvents using Combine PassthroughSubject" without telling it to write that

GPT-5 Pro wrote that instruction in the 500 line markdown file based on my original prompt above in italics.
by _Algernon_ | 2025-08-11 18:52:58+00:00
Add to that 3) Verifiable to a lay person that the system truly has those properties, with no possibility of suddenly being altered to no longer have those properties without it exceedingly obvious.

This whole concept runs into similar issues as digital voting systems. You don't need to just be anonymous, but it must be verifiably and obviously so — even to a lay person (read your grandma with dementia who has never touched a computer in her life). It must be impossible to make changes to the system that remove these properties without users immediately notice.

The only reason why paper identification has close to anonymous properties is the fallibility of human memory. You won't make a computer with those properties.
by austin-cheney | 2025-08-11 18:53:37+00:00
There is nothing new here and the math on this is pretty simple. AI greatly increases automation, but its output is not trusted. All research so far shows AI assisted development is a zero sum game regarding time and productivity because time saved by AI is reinvested back into more thorough code reviews than were otherwise required.

Ultimately, this will become a people problem more than a financial problem. People that lack the confidence to code without AI will cost less to hire and dramatically more to employ, no differently than people reliant on large frameworks. All historical data indicates employers will happily eat that extra cost if it means candidates are easier to identify and select because hiring and firing remain among the most serious considerations for technology selection.

Candidates, currently thought of 10x, that are productive without these helpers will continue to remain no more or less elusive than they are now. That means employers must choose between higher risks with higher selection costs for the potentially higher return on investment knowing that ROE is only realized if these high performance candidates are allowed to execute with high productivity. Employers will gladly eat increased expenses if they can qualify lower risks to candidate selection.
by koakuma-chan | 2025-08-11 18:53:57+00:00
> So I think the problem is that you are looking for a well-marked path. There are so many people who have unmet needs, and they don't advertise it as an internship on a job board.

I agree with you 100%. One thing I am unsure about though, and which I believe is very important, is, how much should I ask for? I had an experience where somebody reached out to me through relatives to make a website, so I quoted them $1000, but they just never responded. I believe two primary ways of pricing are per hour and per project, but there are issues with both. If you choose to price per hour, the client doesn't know in advance exactly how much your services will cost, and I believe the client has no way to verify that you actually spent those hours working on their project? And the number of hours you spend largely depends on how you choose to approach the problem, so I would expect people to feel reluctant towards this kind of model. On the other hand, if you price per project, you might end up doing way more work than you expected at first, and isn't it also very common for client needs to change all the time? How did you approach this? Thanks.
by jtwoodhouse | 2025-08-11 18:53:57+00:00
Two things are true here. The em dash shouldn’t automatically be a sign of AI writing. That said, they’re also been quite overused in recent years, which is probably causing them to be overrepresented in models.

You shouldn’t have that many asides to squeeze in, and you don’t need a em dash to make a sentence punchy. All tricks lose their power if you come to depend on them too much.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-08-11 18:54:09+00:00
Out of curiosity, is there a way we can request a mod to manually unflag this? I see comments in this thread have been killed, so I'm not sure why this is still flagged 3 hours later when it seems clearly relevant to HN?

A military deploying to the capital of the richest country on earth where most tech giants reside is important for tech.
by zeld4 | 2025-08-11 18:54:14+00:00
give me $50k raise and I need only $10k/yr.

seriously, I don't see the AI outcome worth that much yet.

On the current level of ai tools, the attention you need to manage 10+ async tasks are over limit for most human.

In 10 years maybe, but $100k probably worths much less by then.
by mik3y | 2025-08-11 18:54:28+00:00
Yes, seeing periodic 5xx errors (though eventually succeeds).

Interestingly `bun upgrade` catches "GitHubIsDown" as a specific case:

$ bun upgrade Bun v1.2.20 is out! You're on v1.2.18 Downloading [38003/21788202] Bun upgrade failed with error: GitHubIsDown Please upgrade manually: curl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bash

(Appears to have been triggered by a 503 for https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/releases/download/bun-v1.2.20...)
by chasil | 2025-08-11 18:54:34+00:00
NTRU Prime was written by Dan Bernstein, who also had a strong hand in the creation of ed25519 elliptic curve keys, and the chacha20-poly1305 AEAD cipher.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37520065

https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2016-March/0...

The first version of NTRU Prime in an SSH server was implemented in TinySSH and later adopted by OpenSSH. Bernstein provided new guidance, and OpenSSH developed an updated algorithm that TinySSH implemented in return.

The NIST approval process was fraught, and Bernstein ended up filing a lawsuit over treatment that he received. I don't know how that has progressed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32360533

While Kyber may have been the winning algorithm, there will be great preference in the community for Bernstein's NTRU Prime.
by TSiege | 2025-08-11 18:54:50+00:00
I think this is up to the user. I actually found tab so annoying that it was a big reason I quit cursor and cancelled my sub. I couldn't think straight with it constantly suggesting things to put in after every key stroke and caused a few annoying bugs for me.

I find pure claude and neovim to be a great pair. I set up custom vim commands to make sharing file paths, line numbers, and code super easy. that way I can move quickly through code for manual developing as well as have claude right there with the context it needs quickly.