MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Balgair | 2025-08-20 13:44:56+00:00
There's this thing about lovecraftian ur gods.

You have to have these people that can speak these horrible languages, study for years unimpeded for likely no goal, can finance expeditions to the bottom of the ocean and fail again and again, sacrifice the right victims at the right times, etc. These people that will awaken Cthulhu have to be some of the most brilliant in human history (so says the lovecraftian mythos), and then they have to throw away all their brains and money and time to awaken the 'do not awaken under any circumstances' dark god of terror and soul consuming ambivalence.

Like, there isn't anyone out there that is that stupid. Totally breaks the immersion of the worldbuilding, right?

...right?
by XorNot | 2025-08-20 13:45:17+00:00
If he succeeds Europe is going to pick it up first - they're well positioned to do so. Chinese citizens know that they don't trust the Chinese government and industry overall, so Western high-tech medicine has cachet value (e.g. it's still a thing for Chinese Australians to buy up local infant formula and send it back home since the formula scandal).

Being stable with a trusted regulatory state is the name of the game there.
by scoopdewoop | 2025-08-20 13:45:23+00:00
I'm a week late, but I do appreciate you pointing out this real phenomenon of moving the goalpost. Language is really general, multimodal models even more-so. The idea that AGI should be way more anthropomorphic and omnipotent is really recent. New definitions almost disregard the possibility of stupid general intelligence, despite proof-by-existence living all around us.
by guzik | 2025-08-20 13:45:26+00:00
Ha, thank you for that! I actually didn't have prior experience in wearables. My background was in mobile app development. I co-founded a company during the app boom, and we built a lot of iOS and Android apps. The transition into health sensors happened pretty organically and I also felt there was nothing that let me measure my own data and make use of it, so I decided to create a wearabke + free SDK for that. There is a quite nice article of how it all started here: https://howtoware.com/aidlab (good reading for anyone wondering what the struggles are when running a wearable startup).
by Daedren | 2025-08-20 13:45:29+00:00
Yes, but why have all that effort in spinning a web server when I can just give a link to a place where I have embedded the chart? Or even embed it in whatever chat you have that presentation on? Don't need the binary anywhere, that's the strength of Mermaid

Until that D2 wasm port is officially released, I don't think it's even fair to call D2 competition to Mermaid, it's on a complete other level of useability. I'm glad to see that it's close to releasing.
by jakozaur | 2025-08-20 13:46:08+00:00
It doesn't look like a typical round for raising capital for investments. Instead:

1. Liquidity: Early investors could sell to late-stage investors, since they are not IPO. Their previous round looked like that.

2. Markup: The previous investors can increase their valuation by doing a round again. It also provides a paper valuation for acquiring new companies. That combined with preferred stock (always get 1x back) might be appealing and make some investors more generous on valuation.
by cameron_b | 2025-08-20 13:46:16+00:00
I understand the part where Intel is trying to get external customers interested in the output of their fab by exhibiting an implementation of an ARM processor.

In the past I understand that they did some custom implementation of Xeon cores for hyperscalers, but the meat and potatoes was the chip they designed.

Do we take this to mean that the current leadership assess the value proposition -of Intel- to be in the /making/ of the chips, akin to TSMC, and not in the /designing/ of them, as in all past seasons at Intel?

I suppose a key factor here is how far from reference this chip is. If they mean to innovate in ARM ISA territory, that's a development to ponder. But if this is a "we can also make those things" statement, I'm hearing bears in the woods.
by imtringued | 2025-08-20 13:46:26+00:00
They are useless because the compiler can simply lay out the code so that the most likely path doesn't trigger the branch and executes the code sequentially.

The pipeline has already loaded these instructions anyway, so continuing execution costs nothing. You then only need to predict the exceptional cases that do trigger the branch.

This means the only use case for branch prediction hints is for use cases where the most likely branch is changing at runtime. That is such a niche use case that it is never worth it. If you do need this, then you are better off investing into JIT instead of changing the ISA.
by throwaway2016a | 2025-08-20 13:46:54+00:00
This whole thread is giving blockchain in 2015 vibes. People were using all sorts of quotes and anecdotes to tell skeptics why they were wrong and in 10 years the entire financial system will be running on blockchain. A certain amount of skepticism and cautious optimism is healthy.

Also, people seem to be missing that "AI Assisted" coding and "Vibe Coding" are not the same thing.

Personally I think the issue with vibe coding is two fold:

1. It is not good at solving problems that are uncommon.

2. It is not deterministic.

Yes, AI can do quality control and testing now. But anyone who has done TDD can tell you that just the mere presence of tests does not itself mean the code is effective or solving the right problem.

Is it getting better? Yes. Do I trust any vibe coded apps built by people who don't know actual code and are treating it like a black box? Absolutely not.

And I say that as someone who has tried pretty much every IDE out there and uses AI assisted coding (on "agent" mode) heavily every single day.
by nickpinkston | 2025-08-20 13:47:14+00:00
Well said, and I really like the idea of shamelessness being in relation to earnestness and cynicism.

A lot of times the earnest promotion of an authentic belief can still come off as shameless, but the audience often still finds that mostly endearing if still cringe.

However, I feel like the "as a strategy" part of the title implies that it is not just shameless, but also mainly a cynical strategy - as in "having no shame about lying", not just " having no shame about my authentic special interest".
by mustaphah | 2025-08-20 13:48:23+00:00
TL;DR workflow phases:

- Brainstorm a PRD via guided prompts (prds/[name].md).

- Transform PRD into epics (epics/[epic-name]/epic.md).

- Decompose epic into tasks (epics/[epic-name]/[feature-name]/[task].md).

- Sync: push epics & tasks to GitHub Issues.

- Execute: Analyze which tasks can be run in parallel (different files, etc). Launch specialized agents per issue.
by pierrebai | 2025-08-20 13:48:37+00:00
OTOH, 99% of use cases don't care about performance and just want a portable implementation.

While it could be useful to have a "fast" variation that offers no guarantee at all, what you would end up with (because people are vain) is that too may people would use those instead "because perf", even though the actual usage is not performance critical, and have code that breaks whenever the compiler or platform changes.
by kbolino | 2025-08-20 13:48:54+00:00
Wait, why large asset sizes? Aren't we talking about "reduced texture sizes" etc.? To me, this also implies reduced video sizes, compressed audio, and so on. So the scenario as I understand it is that, broadly, no individual asset is that large, but all of them together exceed what can fit in RAM. In that case, there would be a working set of loaded assets which is smaller than all available assets, and consequently, there would be a need to load different assets on demand quickly. So yeah, latency would be more important than throughput, though of course you would still need halfway decent throughput (time-to-last-byte is a kind of latency, after all).
by nickpinkston | 2025-08-20 13:49:04+00:00
Yea, this "lack of seriousness" really gets under my skin, and I really hope there's a broad cultural backlash to it soon, as this being the permanent culture seems toxic and exhausting.

That said, this is about the messaging aspect. Trump say could lack seriousness of rhetoric, but still be seriously pursuing his self-interests.
by tdeck | 2025-08-20 13:49:06+00:00
It's also fun because every few decades there's a new fad in school penmanship so each generation learns a different cuesive and it's all a mess.

I had one teacher who wrote in cursive in University, and her penmanship seemed pretty good. But I always struggled to read it. We are just not used to seeing cursive writing on a daily basis.
by swannodette | 2025-08-20 13:49:16+00:00
I have 2 Sailor Pro Gear Slims 14K and one Sailor Pro Gear 21K. The later is the best writing experience. I'm not an ink maniac but I tried a few and I found that Sailor inks tend to dry reasonably quickly while still having a good flow. Midori paper and Tomoe River both perform very well. If I'm going to do a whole page of writing smearing from hand moisture can be a problem, especially w/ non-Sailor inks so in that case I use the "today" cards you can get for the Hobonichi.
by JCM9 | 2025-08-20 13:49:38+00:00
Whenever companies release glowing fluff PR about their amazing financials they key word in there is “non-GAAP.”

i.e. when we exclude a bunch of pesky costs and other expenses that are the reason we’re not doing so well, we’re actually doing really well!

Non-GAAP has its place, but if used to say the company is doing well (vs like actual accounting) that’s usually not a good sign. Real healthy companies don’t need to hide behind non-GAAP.
by jonhohle | 2025-08-20 13:50:14+00:00
I’m currently looking at some slow python scripts and libraries that take about 30% of the total build time to generate 20 linker scripts for a project that builds 1,300 C files. Every dev, every build, every CI run is waiting on slow python. So the devs that wrote the tool are happy, but everyone else is slowing dying waiting around for this thing to finish. Relevant [0]

0 - https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html
by aososidjbd | 2025-08-20 13:50:35+00:00
This has been my experience with coworkers who are big vibe coders as well. Another “sorry, big PR coming in that needs a review” and I’m gonna lose it. 50 comments later and they still don’t change.

When using agents like this, you only see a speedup because you’re offloading the time you’d spend thinking / understanding the code. If you can review code faster than you can write it, you’re cutting corners on your code reviews. Which is normally fine with humans (this is why we pay them), but not AI. Most people just code review for nitpicks anyways (rename a variable, add some white space, use map reduce instead of for each) instead of taking time to understand the change (you’ll be looking a lots of code and docs that aren’t present in the diff).

That is, unless you type really slowly - which I’ve recently discovered is actually a bottle neck for some professionals (slow typing, syntax issues, constantly checking docs, etc). I’ll add I experience this too when learning a new language and AI is immensely helpful.
by fzwang | 2025-08-20 13:51:15+00:00
All kids have the instinct to learn, but it's not a set-and-forget dynamic where you can just leave them with a computer/gadget. Their interests and curiousity feed off of those around them. Having access to "true play" and playmates are critical [1]. For example, you can introduce them to Scratch [2], make a small game together, and let them propose new games to make. Get their friends involved too.

But's not going to be spontaneous until you create the right environment, which includes not just physical things like books/etc, but the social support structures. It takes a lot of work and care.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15843125-free-to-learn

[2] https://scratch.mit.edu/
by gilbetron | 2025-08-20 13:51:38+00:00
> Professional photographers viewed the first low-resolution digital cameras as flimsy gadgets, only for them to completely decimate the film industry.

You oversimplify everything, but this is completely wrong. 320P cameras were useless to pro photographers, but as soon as the capabilities got near to what film could provide, they eagerly switched. Kodak was destroyed, but there wasn't much of a place to pivot to. "Masters of a complex, chemical domain" to "Yet another camera company" isn't a real pivot.

I'm bullish on AI, and think "vibe" coding was/is a cool experiment so don't agree with the premise that it is in the worst idea, but strongly disagree with your simplistic take on how tech is adopted. There are countless ideas that "experts" were right to ignore, ideas sitting in the trash can of history.
by gchamonlive | 2025-08-20 13:51:52+00:00
Just be aware of the "Makefile effect"[1] which can easily devolve into the Makefile also being "over there", far from the application, just because it's actually a patchwork of copy-paste targets stitched together.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42663231
by dagmx | 2025-08-20 13:52:25+00:00
The fabs need external customers not just intel to be profitable.

The custom designs for hyperscalars don’t count as external customers, they’re just part of Intels own production set.

And since nobody but AMD or VIA can make x86, it has to be ARM or other ISAs instead.

The article title is a bit clickbait since ARM is the eventuality of having external customers. The real key point is that they have made chips that aren’t their own at all.
by j_w | 2025-08-20 13:52:39+00:00
The AUR really is night and day compared to other package managers. Official packages get updates FAST, user packages typically not much slower.

Issues with new versions get immediate solutions on the forums, so breaking changes hardly impact you if you just check the front page of the forums when they do happen.

Arch has the reputation of being the hardcore distro, but really its so user friendly to manage after the initial setup (and I think they have an "easy" setup process if you don't want to manually configure everything now).
by postalcoder | 2025-08-20 13:52:39+00:00
We kind of have a hall of fame: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

I've been scraping /bestcomments[0] since May for https://hcker.news and here are the top users golf ranked by # of best comments.

1st, simonw, 28 2nd, Aurornis, 17 3rd, paxys, 14 4th, tptacek, 12 T5, duxup, 9 T5, godelski, 9 T5, hn_throwaway_99, 9 T6, JimDabell, 7 T6, JumpCrisscross, 7 T6, neilv, 7 T7, andy99, 6 T7, crazygringo, 6 T7, gruez, 6 T7, habosa, 6 T7, kentonv, 6 T7, kragen, 6 T7, stego-tech, 6 T7, userbinator, 6 T8, afavour, 5 T8, Animats, 5 T8, ChrisMarshallNY, 5 T8, codingdave, 5 T8, dang, 5 T8, donatj, 5 T8, lxgr, 5 T8, perihelions, 5

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments
by xelxebar | 2025-08-20 13:52:42+00:00
That's pretty reductive of horseshoe crabs. Foraging bipeds have evolved many times, equally good at human things.

Metallurgy? Spaceflight? Particle physics? Those are clearly unnaturally contrived reference classes. Why can't humans HorseshoeCrabTermA (i.e. scan the ocean floor upside down at a 30 degree for optimal benthic foraging and conspecific mingling?) Why hasn't HorseshoeCrabTermB (lunar-synchronized mass spawning timed with satellite male mating patterns)? Why can't other animals properly molt and feed with gnathobase ginding like horseshoe crabs do?

Don't get me wrong, I love chrome on cars and rockets and human intellectual curiosity. No other species has invented Python 2.7, but so what?
by agentcoops | 2025-08-20 13:52:57+00:00
I fell into a rabbit hole when I was looking for coverage of a recent relatively technical biological result and the most prominent Google results were from 'evolutionnews.org' aka 'scienceandculture.com', run by the 'Center for Science and Culture.' Imagine my surprise to find this is all run by a 'Discovery Institute' with tens of millions in funding dedicated to pushing 'intelligent design' and behind the campaign to have anti-evolution views taught in public high school science courses.

Not of course to say these outfits are behind the decline in science reporting, but it's a real tragedy how difficult it is to find actual and competent scientific journalism today, a tragedy that makes the job of such charlatans all the easier. I'm glad that Quanta Magazine seems to be doing well enough, which certainly isn't perfect but I've read some good articles from them.
by tmvphil | 2025-08-20 13:53:38+00:00
Sorry, I'm going to be critical:

"We follow a strict 5-phase discipline" - So we're doing waterfall again? Does this seem appealing to anyone? The problem is you always get the requirements and spec wrong, and then AI slavishly delivers something that meets spec but doesn't meet the need.

What happens when you get to the end of your process and you are unhappy with the result? Do you throw it out and rewrite the requirements and start from scratch? Do you try to edit the requirements spec and implementation in a coordinated way? Do you throw out the spec and just vibe code? Do you just accept the bad output and try to build a new fix with a new set of requirements on top of it?

(Also the llm authored readme is hard to read for me. Everything is a bullet point or emoji and it is not structured in a way that makes it clear what it is. I didn't even know what a PRD meant until halfway through)
by semitones | 2025-08-20 13:53:50+00:00
LLMs are a godsend when it comes to developing things that fit into one of the tens of thousands (or however many) of templates they have memorized. For instance, a lot of modern B2B software development involves updating CRUD interfaces and APIs to data. If you already have 50 or so CRUD functions in an existing layered architecture implemented, asking an LLM to implement the 51st, given a spec, is a _huge_ time-saver. Of course, you still need to use your human brain to verify before hand that there aren't special edge cases that need to be considered. Sometimes, you can explain the edge cases to the LLM and it will do a perfect job of figuring them out (assuming you do a good job of explaining it, and it's not too complicated). And if there aren't any real edge cases to worry about, then the LLM can one-shot a perfect PR (assuming you did the work to give it the context).

Of course, there are many many other kinds of development - when developing novel low-level systems for complicated requirements, you're going to get much poorer results from an LLM, because the project won't as neatly fit in to one of the "templates" that it has memorized, and the LLM's reasoning capabilities are not yet sophisticated enough to handle arbitrary novelty.
by pointlessone | 2025-08-20 13:54:26+00:00
I can’t say I like OP’s vision. My main objection is that this vision is terminally online. I want to be able to run the whole build locally (for when my internet is down, or I’m on a plane, or on a remote island in a cave, etc.). The local build and CI should only differ in that local build is triggered manually and results are reported in the terminal (or IDE) and CI build is triggered by a push and reported on the PR (or other web page, or API endpoint, etc. ). It should be the same but for the entry and exit. Tasks, queues, DAGs, etc. it’s all nice but ultimately are implementation details. Even make has DAGs, tasks, and parallel execution. Unless the build can run locally it’s as if there’s no build. Differences between local build and CI, be it because of environment, tasks setup, caching, whatever makes CI painful. It’s precisely because you have a build system for local builds and a separate CI setup that the world contains 10% more misery than it should.

So basically either the whole CI pipeline is just a single command invoking my build system or the CI pipeline can be ran locally. Any other arrangement is self-inflicted suffering.
by dgfitz | 2025-08-20 13:54:50+00:00
You invoke CMake/qmake/configure/whatever from the bash script.

I hate committing makefiles directly if it can be helped.

You can still call make in the script after generating the makefile, and even pass the make target as an argument to the bash script if you want. That being said, if you’re passing more than 2-3 arguments to the build.sh you’re probably doing it wrong.
by os2warpman | 2025-08-20 13:54:57+00:00
There is a near-infinite variety of phones. People claim that they want them but really they don't.

I know this because I used to try to help. I used to think that, for whatever reason, people just didn't know about all of the options out there.

I was wrong.

"I want a smaller phone" here's a smaller phone "yeah but I don't like that one".

"I want a thicker phone with a huge battery" here's a thicker phone with a huge battery "yeah but I don't like that one".

"I want a dumber phone" here's a dumber phone "yeah but I don't like that one".

"I want a privacy-focused phone" here's a privacy-focused phone "yeah but I don't like that one".

People will make up an infinite variety of excuses why a product that meets their chief stated requirement isn't for them.

"Oh the camera is only 24.9999 megapixels instead of 25. Oh that's 9mm thick I really can only do 8.9mm at maximum. Oh that's only IP68 rated I want IP69. Oh that screen is 5.4 inches-- TOO BIG-- I want a 5.25 inch screen."

The best was when someone wanted a rugged phone with long battery life and they rejected an option because its ARM cores ran at like 525MHz less than the latest shiny Samsung joint so they bought the skinny non-rugged non-gigundo-battery Samsung instead. They didn't understand that the only distance between the two would be in benchmarks, and only by small margins, and that to human perception there would be no difference.

What I think they want, instead of a phone that meets their requirements, is a POPULAR phone that they consider to be an aspiration goal or status symbol to be specifically designed to meet their personal requirements and that everyone else should have those same requirements too.
by j_w | 2025-08-20 13:55:00+00:00
Since I've started daily driving Arch on my personal machine I've had two instances that I can recall of a breaking change, both related to an NVIDIA driver update relying on some package that for whatever reason couldn't be bundled with the NVIDIA driver package. On the front page of the forums the fix was immediately available.

The reputation that things are always breaking just doesn't have merit anymore.
by mrsilencedogood | 2025-08-20 13:55:34+00:00
"intern or college-hire"

It's well known that these fresh employees are not going to contribute to velocity of a team for at least a year. They're investments. I've seen levelling docs specifically call this out.

"It's prone to spiraling off into the weeds, makes silly mistakes, occasionally mangles whole repos (commit early, and often), and needs very crisp instruction and guidance"

This describes a team of juniors. If it's describing an entire team, then everyone above mid-level needs to be fired.

I will say that I think "the bottom of the market getting eviscerated" is going to apply to software devs too. There is now very little point in hiring someone who already only produces slop as their best output. The main people who need to be afraid of AI in the next 5 years is probably offshore and near-shore people, and perma-juniors who have done the "1 year of experience 10 times" thing.
by lotyrin | 2025-08-20 13:55:57+00:00
Linguistics should seek to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. The field should, primarily, seek to describe language as used. Prescriptions can be useful and should be made if they improve a language's ability to provide clarity (please mind the theirs and toos, and sometimes an Oxford comma would clarify your sentence) but they should be held to be mere suggestions and not authoritative mandates.

The idea that there is only one correct way to use a language and that it is determined in academic circles and should be enforced on the masses is inherently based in illegitimate authority and social exclusion and is not a social force for good.