MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skydhash | 2025-08-29 02:13:00+00:00
> You just need to do something similar "over there". So you know where to find the thing to copy and paste and then adjust. The AI can do it for you even faster especially if you already know what to tell it to copy. And in some cases all you need to know is that there's something to copy and not from where exactly and it'll be able to copy it very nicely for you.

The issue with this approach is the mental load of verifying that the it did the thing you asked for correctly. And that it did not mess something like a condition expression.

My belief is that most developers don't interact with their code more than character on the screens. Their editing process is clicking, selecting, and moving character by character. Which make their whole experience painful for anything that involves a bit of refactoring.

When you exploit things like search based navigation (project or file based), indexing (LSP or IDE intellisense), compilers/linters/test runners report (going directly to the line mentioned), semantic navigation and manipulation (keyboard based), and the knowledge of few extra tools like (git, curl, jq,...) you'll have a far pleasant experience with coding. Editing is effortless in that case. You think about a solution and it's done.

Coding is literally the most enjoyable part of the job for me. What's not enjoyable is the many WTFs when dealing with low quality code and having to coax specifications from teammates.
by refurb | 2025-08-29 02:13:21+00:00
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/even-chinas-14-bln-popul...

"Even China's population of 1.4 billion would not be enough to fill all the empty apartments littered across the country, a former official said on Saturday, in a rare public critique of the country's crisis-hit property market."

Now, housing gets old, people upgrade, so that supply will eventually be soaked up.

But the debt overhang on local governments and indivudal Chinese is the killer. They've built up several years of housing supply and now get to pay for it all while it stays empty for a few years - plus the value is dropping.

It's a massive drag on the economy as all that investment is locked up and unproductive.
by muldvarp | 2025-08-29 02:13:38+00:00
I think I haven't made my point clear enough:

Chess was once thought to require general intelligence. Then computing power became cheap enough that using raw compute made computers better than humans. Computers didn't play chess in a very human-like way and there were a few years where you could still beat a computer by playing to its weaknesses. Now you'll never beat a computer at chess ever again.

Similarly, many software engineers think that writing software requires general intelligence. Then computing power became cheap enough that training LLMs became possible. Sure, LLMs don't think in a very human-like way: There are some tasks that are trivial for humans and where LLMs struggle but LLMs also outcompete your average software engineer in many other tasks. It's still possible to win against an LLM in an intelligence-off by playing to its weaknesses.

It doesn't matter that computers don't have general intelligence when they use raw compute to crush you in chess. And it won't matter that computers don't have general intelligence when they use raw compute to crush you at programming.

The proof that software development requires general intelligence is on you. I think the stuff most software engineers do daily doesn't. And I think LLMs will get continously better at it.

I certainly don't feel comfortable betting my professional future on software development for the coming decades.
by waste_monk | 2025-08-29 02:14:00+00:00
It's simple, efficient, and saves space in memory. While not as big a deal these days where most systems have plentiful RAM, it's still useful on things like embedded devices.

Why waste a whole byte on a bool that has one bit of data, when you can pack the equivalent of eight bools into the same space as an uint8_t for free?
by beeflet | 2025-08-29 02:14:54+00:00
Investing is work. You have to spend time researching different opportunities, and even then there is still a risk involved.

If you made money by buying bitcoin a long time ago, you didn't get something for nothing. And if you sell it now, you can profit before the game of musical chairs collapses. So there is a limited window of arbitrage.

A little bit of work multiplied by a lot of risk and time.
by exidy | 2025-08-29 02:15:22+00:00
It was not the lockdowns, it was the good fortune of being an island nation coupled with a border control regime so strict it was later found to violate basic human rights.[0]

Australia went down a similar path to similar effect until the proverbial dyke burst and suddenly nobody cared about quarantine any more. The lesson here is that human nature being what it is, you can throw citizens overseas under the bus to appease the majority until they get tired of being locked in.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/new-zealand-high-...
by kazinator | 2025-08-29 02:16:19+00:00
I don't think that people multitask only because they have multiple unprioritized tasks.

You could well have everything prioritized, and be multitasking between your highest priority task and interruptions.

By acknowledging interruptions, you appear responsive, even if you don't start working on them.

You can't ignore all interruptions. How do you know your boss doesn't have something urgent that will preempt your current highest priority task?
by specialp | 2025-08-29 02:16:36+00:00
I run a site that is a primary source of information. We also have customers that subscribe and are very sensitive to heavy handed controls. Before cloudflare and after "AI" we had bots from all over just destroying our endpoints with bursts of mining traffic. While we would love to have more discoverability this is not that. Cloudflare is in a tough spot trying to arbitrate good traffic vs bad. From my experience they are doing this as good as one can.
by SilverElfin | 2025-08-29 02:18:27+00:00
> They’re not part of democracy

Donating money, enabling more free speech on X, DOGE (an efficiency exercise at least in its goals), etc all seem like a part of democracy to me.

> Similarly, look at the various ways that people who, yes, were democratically elected are trying to restrict voting and gerrymander districts. Again, that’s Republicans using the fact that they were at one point able to win fair elections to make future elections less fair so they can stay in power.

Do you think these actions taken to stay in power are limited to one party?
by felipeerias | 2025-08-29 02:18:57+00:00
The "Pro" variant of GTP-5 is probably the best model around and most people are not even aware that it exists. One reason is that as models get more capable, they also get a lot more expensive to run so this "Pro" is only available at the $200/month pro plan.

At the same time, more capable models are also a lot more expensive to train.

The key point is that the relationship between all these magnitudes is not linear, so the economics of the whole thing start to look wobbly.

Soon we will probably arrive at a point where these huge training runs must stop, because the performance improvement does not match the huge cost increase, and because the resulting model would be so expensive to run that the market for it would be too small.
by nativeit | 2025-08-29 02:19:14+00:00
This exact notion is why I named my business "Native I.T." back in 2015 when I became disillusioned with the state of I.T. subcontracting and the emerging "gig economy". I've always been better at service than sales, so here's hoping I can leverage my strength with this particular niche. I can certainly say that I share the sentiments, and find most everyone I know does as well.
by gwbas1c | 2025-08-29 02:19:17+00:00
The teller who called me basically gave me awful service.

I visited the bank a few days earlier because they sent me a debit card that I didn't want. (I wanted to switch it to an ATM card because it's harder to commit fraud with them.)

The teller basically didn't listen to me and tried to push services on me for 15-20 minutes. Eventually he realized I was getting extremely frustrated and helped me do what I needed to do.

The call from the teller a few days later was extremely unexpected, and I was justifiably curt. I said something like, "I don't want any new banking services, there's no reason for you to call me."
by nighthawk454 | 2025-08-29 02:19:33+00:00
I think a lot of it is things have shifted away from the raw language. Less and less you’re dealing with Python, and more an assortment of libraries or frameworks. Pandas, numpy, torch, fastapi, …, and a dozen others.

Packaging has been a nightmare. PyPI has had its challenges. Dependency management is vastly improved thanks to uv - recently, and with a graveyard of tools in its wake.

The modern Python script feels more like loosely combining a temperamental set of today’s latest library apis, and then dealing with the fallout. Sometimes parallels the Node experience.

I think an actual Python project - using only something remotely modern like 3.2+ standard library and maybe requests - is probably just as clean, resilient, and reliable as it ever was.

A lot of these things are and/or have been improving tremendously. But think to your point the language (or really the ecosystem) is scaling and evolving a ton and there’s growing pains.
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-08-29 02:19:45+00:00
> I know like 10-15 different languages, and CSS is by far the hardest to read and understand.

CSS is hard to know, even if you know 15 languages.

I can understand many programming languages and write in a subset of many of their features, but I wouldn't claim to know them. That would require a monumental amount of day to day effort, in my opinion (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_explanatory_depth).

To me, the best way to understand CSS is to evaluate it after rendering, and I have been writing it for decades.
by cm2187 | 2025-08-29 02:20:13+00:00
And being "superior" doesn't necessarily mean extraordinary coding skills. The vast majority of code to be written doesn't require that. What it requires however is a combination of common sense and good understanding of the underlying business. This is in short supply in many of the locations the jobs are being offshored to. But let's be honest, it was also on short supply in the corporate IT departments being offshored, though not quite to the same degree.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-08-29 02:20:22+00:00
If you're looking for a project, I think this is something that an LLM, even a dumb local one, would be pretty good at. Give it a list of 50 articles you like, 50 you hate (or however many fit into the context window), and let it read the full text of each post and assign a 1-5 score. Then sort and/or filter by that.

In theory, this is actually a very textbook ML supervised learning problem, and stuffing an already-trained LLM's context window with a small handful of samples like I suggested is a gross hack. But it might be the easier option.
by inkyoto | 2025-08-29 02:20:58+00:00
> Our job in the very lucky liberal West is to keep what our forefathers won, and then push it further to show why our values are worth the sacrifice in copying

It was the liberal West who helped China build the Great Firewall – Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Nortel, Siemens and others.

As long as a lucrative commercial opportunity was there, they seized upon it shoving the liberal values up the orifice where the sun does not shine.
by onecommentman | 2025-08-29 02:21:02+00:00
Young men face modern challenges and under some measures some are flagging. ‘Twas ever thus.

However, there is little objective information or few objective studies to support the author’s pathologizing explanation (loneliness) on why some are flagging more today or more than others. But fortunately the US kids are alright, much to the chagrin of the author.

My guess is this “pathologizing” gambit is an attempt to minimally engage young men (who, say, the Democrats need to win over) without actually addressing their concerns, treating them as adults or really listening to them in any meaningful way. “They’re too sick and lonely, poor babies, to see how degraded they are. We don’t need to listen to them. We know better. We can fix them, if they just do and think as we say.” Straight from every cult playbook.

Young men (in the US) are in less crisis than the author believes, and their pain points are currently more effectively and intelligently identified and effectively addressed by the “Trump contingent” than anyone else, especially the current leadership of the Democratic Party.

Aren’t there any Third Way Democrats on Hacker News?
by recursivecaveat | 2025-08-29 02:22:12+00:00
Yeah, the choice to gloss over the point "our tests are not relevant" was a deliberate one. If it was in a paper you'd have big fancy graphs of the tests and you'd have to do your own work to compare the x axis against a mention of the actual scale in question in another paragraph. It's not as if they started with "Warning: even the 600X smaller bits we tested can damage the wing" and microsoft just kind of spontaneously grew a bunch of random stuff above the fold. It's a kind of chickenshit communication which you can do in any medium. The point they ought to be making is not dense or technical, it is so simple a child could understand.
by ajross | 2025-08-29 02:22:37+00:00
> yes, i use programs/apps, but attack surface and threat models aren't binary, so it's still better to make things more secure

But again, the point is that market decisions aren't microeconomic. The world where everyone uses noscript by default is a world where no one builds web apps anymore (because the platform sucks by default) and everyone uses native apps from whoever the dominant vendor happens to be. And that's worse (much worse, by basically every metric, including privacy and security) and not better.

Your logic only works if you're a parasite: you can use noscript to "protect" yourself only if most people don't.
by grafmax | 2025-08-29 02:23:02+00:00
> But China proved you can pair authoritarian politics with a market economy. It offers a bargain we thought impossible: prosperity without freedom

It seems like politicians in liberal democracies are giving up on democracy and turning to authoritarianism instead.

But since 2008 it’s become clear to many people that these liberal democracies are actually governments owned by the upper class.

It’s not that politicians are turning away from democracy. They are throwing the mask off. What they envy is the ability to exercise power without disguising it.

That’s not going to cure our problems. It’s actually the narrow self-interested decisions of the upper class that have landed us in this state of decline.
by 77pt77 | 2025-08-29 02:23:36+00:00
https://billing.chunkserve.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=0

https://my.servitro.com/cart.php?a=view

https://manager.ouiheberg.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=0

1GB or even 512MB and 10GB of storage is very easy and completely doable to use for a VPN + HTTPS server

Traffic is super cheap nowadays.

Your real issue will be IP reputation.

https://lowendtalk.com/categories/offers

Is a good source.
by quag | 2025-08-29 02:24:08+00:00
It sounds like you've got something specific in mind when you say, "modeling". The term modeling is used in a lot of different situations to mean different things. For example, it could mean to make a 3d model in Blender, it could mean to pose for someone to paint you or to take a photo, with databases it's used to mean modeling the data, with statistics it's used to mean finding a way to simply represent and reason about the data (create a model of it).

The things you've listed out make me guess you want to write 2d or 3d image rendering software. Is that right?

If that's the case, there's no substitute for trying to recreate certain algorithms or curves using a language or tool that you're comfortable with. It'll help you build an intuition about how the mathematical object behaves and what problems it solves (and doesn't). All of these approaches were created to solve problems, understanding the theory of it doesn't quite get you there. If you don't have a good place to try out functions, I recommend https://thebookofshaders.com/05/ , https://www.desmos.com/calculator , or https://www.geogebra.org/calculator .

A good place to start is linear interpolation (lerp). It seems dead simple, but it's used extensively to blend two things together (say positions or colors) and the other things you listed are mostly fancier things built on top of linear interpolation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_interpolation

For bezier curves and surfaces here are some links I've collected over the years: https://ciechanow.ski/curves-and-surfaces/ https://pomax.github.io/bezierinfo/ https://blog.pkh.me/p/33-deconstructing-be%CC%81zier-curves.... http://www.joshbarczak.com/blog/?p=730 https://kynd.github.io/p5sketches/drawings.html https://raphlinus.github.io/graphics/curves/2019/12/23/flatt...

A final note: a lot of graphics math involves algebra. Algebra can be fun, but it also can be frustrating and tedious, particularly when you're working through something large and make a silly mistake and the result doesn't work. I suggest using sympy to rearrange equations or do substitutions and so on. It can seem like overkill but as soon as you save a few hours debugging it's worth it. It also does differentiation and integration for you along with simplifying equations.

https://docs.sympy.org/latest/tutorials/intro-tutorial/intro...
by 77pt77 | 2025-08-29 02:24:35+00:00
> cost is flexible but probably 20-30$ per month minimum in hosting

Like I've written here.

VPS in EU with 2GB RAM, 40 GB disk and >1TB a month of traffic go for $10 PER YEAR!

https://billing.chunkserve.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=0

https://my.servitro.com/cart.php?a=view

https://manager.ouiheberg.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=0
by jacquesm | 2025-08-29 02:25:37+00:00
Yes, you're right, this is so much better. /s

To be fair though: Biden should have stepped down halfway his term and handed the reins to Harris. That would have gotten the USA used to a woman as president and it might have saved a lot of misery. But we are where we are. Whoever voted for this grifter owns it wholly. Of course they'll all pretend they never had those yardsigns in the first place.
by merek | 2025-08-29 02:26:02+00:00
> I never told them what my business does or what I'd use the money for.

This stuck out to me. I'm in the process of opening a bank account in Singapore for a newly registered company, and boy is it difficult.

Hour-long KYC interview. Details of what the business does. Anything remotely controversial could be a red flag. They want to hear about boring B2B services. They want to see evidence of customer communications or contracts, so they can see you're a legit business and not a shell company. This is very difficult for a company that hasn't started operating yet. Why would I start operating without banking? How can I show business activity before commencing operating?

By comparison, I've opened business accounts in both AU and the US without hassle.
by andirk | 2025-08-29 02:26:29+00:00
Bitcoin and crypto in general has risks like any other investment, just a lot more of them. SHA-256 attack means everything's doomed though right? And 51% attack with the size of the network is some absolutely insane amount of GPU power right? My biggest concern is if there is a growing lack of interest. I have thought that ever since USD 10k, though, which is kind of what this "drought" is suggesting.
by Nevermark | 2025-08-29 02:27:47+00:00
Neural implants are going to open up even wider possibilities dramatically.

Given how fast things are changing, one can imagine that digital visual feed implants, providing conscious control of wide spectrum sensitivity, won't be so far off.

Beyond tetrachromacy, think "Kilochromacy". Whatever that would be like! (A few short neural link, and cognitive amplification, generations in.)
by lmm | 2025-08-29 02:28:11+00:00
There's a big difference between surpassing the US and dominating the world. To the US, not being able to at least plausibly claim to be Top Nation is an threat to your core psychological identity; to most of us it's Tuesday.

The downsides of Chinese authoritarianism are very real. I wouldn't want to live there. But the west is increasingly unable to deliver on things that are lower down on the hierarchy of needs. Crime and personal safety, infrastructure maintenance, homes within commuting distance of jobs. It's not so much that we need to dream bigger as that we need to stop sawing off our own legs with the basics.

Plus when decades of "democracy" can't deliver things the majority wants - like reduced immigration - people will rightly ask what good it is to anyone.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-29 02:28:53+00:00
Your average worker is getting raked over the coals, so those doing well should not be compared to them because the organized have better pay and benefits. No union, no power to improve your pay, working conditions, and labor protections.

https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/labor-unions...

https://www.epi.org/publication/eroded-collective-bargaining...

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
by AndyKelley | 2025-08-29 02:29:03+00:00
Apple.com advertising a Mac Mini:

> Built for Apple Intelligence.

> 16-core Neural Engine

These Xcode release notes:

> Claude in Xcode is now available in the Intelligence settings panel, allowing users to seamlessly add their existing paid Claude account to Xcode and start using Claude Sonnet 4

All that dedicated silicon taking up space on their SoC and yet you still have to input your credit card in order to use their IDE. Come on...
by dsmmcken | 2025-08-29 02:29:11+00:00
Two of those wishlists css features already exist as specs:

> n-th child variable

See sibiling-index() and sibling-count() https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/sibling-ind...

> Reusable blocks

See @function and @mixin draft spec, https://drafts.csswg.org/css-mixins-1/ and https://css-tricks.com/functions-in-css/

Both are available in chrome already.
by quantified | 2025-08-29 02:29:51+00:00
The elites were not conned. They knew this is where it was going. We all did. They just want the money.

Their silence and inaction is all you need to see. There are far more of these elites than there are of Trump and his administration should they care to act. He governs by the consent of the governed. Until he's got troops and ICE police everywhere, and is in the major boardrooms. Then consent is not as relevant. But it sounds like the capital class is fine with Trump taking stakes and demanding revenue slices.
by raincole | 2025-08-29 02:30:00+00:00
I think most programmers in the US simply don't realize how much they earn compared to the rest of the world.

I'm not talking about rural Chinese villages whose name you can't pronounce. Or the stereotypical Indian call centers. I'm talking about highly educated programmers who can communicate fluently in English, in cities like Beijing or Munich. If people in SV know how (relatively) little their counterparts make in these places, they'd be much more opposed to remote work.

And that was before LLM. Today practically the entire planet can write passable English.