MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CRConrad | 2025-08-09 13:38:09+00:00
Yeah, that bullshit has been debunked all over the net for quite a while now; there are lots of us old farts who write exactly like that, and none of us is an “AI”. Idunno, maybe on aggregate we're so prolific that the material they're training the LLMs on contains a disprodportionate amount of our style or something.

Anyway, your talk about the author “undermining his own credibility” for writing like many humans just because some simplistic fake “intelligences” also write like those humans is totally wrong. The solution is not for people to have to change their writing style, but for you gullibles to stop thinking this is “a tell” — because it isn't.
by czottmann | 2025-08-09 13:38:26+00:00
I've seen that video. I've also watched his complete disregard for other people (DOGE, anyone), seen his ideas of "free speech", witnessed Mechahitler, and Twitter being turned into the fascist club house.

That fucking salute was one thing. He knows what he's doing or trying to do. Many people in Europe are appalled by what they see. So they stopped buying his shit. Fair game, this being goddamn free market capitalism and all.
by hyghjiyhu | 2025-08-09 13:38:28+00:00
You are absolutely right that a rented GPU is not local, but even so it brings you many of the benefits of a local model. Rented hardware is a commodity, if one provider goes down there will be another. Or in the worst case you can decide to buy your own hardware. This ensures you will have continuity and control. You know exactly what model you are using and will be able to keep using it tomorrow too. You can ask it whatever you want.
by Findecanor | 2025-08-09 13:38:57+00:00
> This is because the cable is 2 sided so it can't assume polarity

To clarify (and to tell my own tale on the topic):

The power pins on both sides should be connected in both a plug and in a socket. However, when it comes to the USB 2.0 data pins only the socket end must be double-sided (short A6 to B6 and A7 to B7).

Back when "Type C" was new, I wanted to build a project with it, so I got one of the first socket breakout boards available. I built a mechanical keyboard out of aluminium with a slot milled to fit that breakout board. After everything was painted and soldered did I plug it in and it did not work ... It took me a while of troubleshooting before I retried it with the cable plugged in the other orientation. The breakout board had connected only A6/A7. B6/B7 were not available.
by xorcist | 2025-08-09 13:38:57+00:00
That doesn't make any sense to me. Why would you merge more often if it takes less time to create a new branch?

What types of merges are we talking about? Surely it must be where you merge in changes from a main branch to your local branch, which in the case of long-lived branches will be the more common merge. Creating new branches isn't even part of that workflow.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-09 13:39:21+00:00
> How do you even build a search index today

You can start with seeds like common crawl, and go from there. You can also get DNS records from various providers. Then there's SSL cert logs that you can crawl. Plenty of sources, if you have funding (search by itself without ads sponsoring it might be a net loss, except some niche uses like kagi?)
by alpinisme | 2025-08-09 13:40:17+00:00
The problem this is meant to solve is that sometimes a human thinking about the logic of the program can see it is impossible to reach some code (ie it is statically certain) but the language syntax and type system alone would not see the impossibility. So you can help the compiler along.

It is not meant for asserting dynamic “unreachability” (which is more like an assertion than a proof).
by jbeard4 | 2025-08-09 13:40:24+00:00
> Over the years, nearly everything on the vehicle has been replaced or repaired, and Campbell says the only original part is likely the body, and even that has had work done on it.

It’s the Tercel of Theseus: if every part has been replaced, is it still the same car?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
by zahlman | 2025-08-09 13:40:58+00:00
> If you are ___, and no one else there is, that may be a serious problem. This is age, sex, religion, politics, number of kids and ages, pets, what they do/don’t do socially, emotion, humor, tech stack, clothing, what vehicles they drive, style of workplace, and everything else that either you won’t like or they won’t like about you. Diversity is a sham if you’re the only one different, though I know that some may not ever realistically find a place to fully fit in.

This is impossible to satisfy below a certain company size. And beyond the things that can't realistically be hidden, I would prefer not to know a lot of that about my coworkers, and would prefer them not to know those things about me.
by hoppp | 2025-08-09 13:43:13+00:00
This is how I do it. Instead of writing a large amount, I just make it generate one function at a time.

I dont want it to replace me, I replace reading the docs and googling or repetitive tasks.

Its a hit or miss sometimes but I get to review every snippet.

If I would generate alot of code at once like for a full project I would get brainfuck reviewing it.

I keep my normal development flow and iterate, no waterfall
by jerf | 2025-08-09 13:44:23+00:00
My rule of thumb that has been surprisingly robust over several uses of it is that if you gzip a JSON format you can expect it to shrink by a factor of about 15.

That is not the hallmark of a space-efficient file format.

Between repeated string keys and frequently repeated string values, that are often quite large due to being "human readable", it adds up fast.

"I was also contemplating the mentioned formats for another project, but they are hardly usable when you need to store binary data, such as images, compressed data, or simply arbitrary data."

One trick you can use is to prefix a file with some JSON or other readable value, then dump the binary afterwards. The JSON can have offsets into the binary as necessary for identifying things or labeling whether or not it is compressed or whatever. This often largely mitigates the inefficiency concerns because if you've got a big pile of binary data the JSON bloat by percent tends to be much smaller than the payload; if it isn't, then of course I don't recommend this.
by rr808 | 2025-08-09 13:44:45+00:00
Legacy is better than people think. The undergrad academics at T10 universities really aren't anything special. People want to go because of the connections with wealthy & well-connected students, but then complain when wealthy well-connected students get a easier ride. You fill Harvard of Stanford with only people with 1600 SATs will turn them into places you dont really want to go to.
by pxeger1 | 2025-08-09 13:45:03+00:00
> interviews should: be applicable. reflect the actual job duties

No, it doesn't matter that much what task the candidate is doing in the interview. It matters what the interviewer is looking at. I'm sure plenty of interviewers don't understand this, and I think this is often missed when people debate about Leetcode interviews - including in this article.

> most interview questions have very little to do with day-to-day responsibilities

You're missing what the interview questions are. Yes, one part of the interview is "here is a puzzle, can you solve it?", but many of the other questions should be things like "explain why this doesn't work", "why did you start with this approach?" and "are you sure that is the best name for that function?"

Leetcode interviews are perfectly "applicable", as long as the interviewer is using them as a convenient frame to see how you think, communicate, and write/read/edit code and isn't trying purely to assess your skill at quickly solving leetcode puzzles.

> cannot distinguish a senior programmer from a marketer using chatGPT

This is empirically false, because companies haven't suddenly lost all their hiring signal since ChatGPT came out. But if a company has this problem, they suck at interviewing.

(I admit the style of interviewing I'm describing has its own problems, and in particular doesn't address what I think is the biggest issue: the fact you're partly testing people's ability to (appear to) perform under acute pressure.)
by windexh8er | 2025-08-09 13:45:03+00:00
I don't believe everything in my world is as efficient as it could be. But I genuinely think about the costs involved [0]. When doing automations that are perfectly handled by deterministic systems why would I put the outcomes of those in the hands of a non-deterministic one? And at that cost differential?

We know a few things: LLMs are not efficient, LLMs are consuming more water than traditional compute, we know the providers know but they haven't shared any tangible metrics, and the build process involves, also, an exceptional amount of time, wattage and water.

For me it's: if you have access to a supercomputer do you use it to tell you a joke or work on a life saving medicine?

We didn't have these tools 5 years ago. 5 years ago you dealt with said "drudgery". On the other hand you then say it can't do "most things I do". It seems as though the lines of fatalism and paradox are in full force for a lot of the arguments around AI.

I think the real kicker for me this week (and it changes week-over-week, which is at least entertaining) is when Paul Graham told his Twitter feed [1] a "hotshot" programmer is writing 10k LOC that are not "bug-filled crap" in 12 hours. That's 14 LOC per minute. Compared to industry norms of 50-150 LOC per 8 hour day. Apparently,this "hot-shot" is not "naive", though, implying that it's most definitely legit.

[0] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ai-energy-carbon-emissio... [1] https://x.com/paulg/status/1953289830982664236
Show HN: Twisted Tangle: A Free 3D Puzzle Game to Untangle Knots Online
by liualexander112 | 2025-08-09 13:45:20+00:00
Twisted Tangle is an innovative online puzzle game that challenges players to untangle 3D knots using unique pin mechanics. Designed for all skill levels, the game offers stunning 3D graphics, varied pin types, and epic boss levels. Players can enjoy new puzzles every week, optimize their moves for high scores, and access all content for free without downloads. Fully optimized for mobile, tablet, and desktop play, Twisted Tangle provides an accessible and engaging brain-training experience for both kids and adults.
by ozgrakkurt | 2025-08-09 13:45:51+00:00
This perspective that many people take on memory-safety of Rust seems really "interesting".

Unfortunately for all fanatics, language really doesn't matter that much.

I have been using KDE for years now and it works perfectly good for me. It has no issues/crashes, it has many features in terms of desktop environment and also many programs that come with it like music player, video player, text editor, terminal etc. and they all work perfectly well for me. Almost all of this is written in C++. No need to mention the classic linux/chromium etc. etc which are all written in c++/c.

I use Ghostty which is written in zig, it is amazingly polished and works super well as well.

I have built and used a lot of software written in Rust as well and they worked really well too.

At some point you have to admit, what matters is the people writing software, the amount of effort that goes into it etc. it is not the langauge.

As far as memory-safety goes, it really isn't close to being the most important thing unless you are writing security critical stuff. Even then just using Rust isn't as good as you might think, I uncountered a decent amount of segfaults, random crashes etc. using very popular Rust libraries as well. In the end just need to put in the effort.

I'm not saying language doesn't matter but it isn't even close to being the most important thing.
by ozgung | 2025-08-09 13:46:46+00:00
Everyone calls them Interviews but they are not really interviews. They are exams.

Oral exams, live coding exams, system architecture exams, take-home exams, behavioral examinations, code review exams, extended essay writing exams, case study exams, sample work trials.

You can't be a real professional if you have to take exams in every job change.

In serious professions, people take exams early in their careers for being certified. Sometimes they take additional exams to renew their certificates. And that's all.

They don't take exams from random people in random companies that know nothing about evaluating knowledge. They take official, standardized exams prepared by professional testers/educators.

Engineering jobs can't be standardized. Engineering and required skills and knowledge is too broad for that.

An interview is not an exam. It's a meeting. The interviewer asks questions to learn about the candidate. The interviewer may ask some questions to learn about the company and the position. That's all. That's the universal definition of a job interview. All the other things are additional tests and exams.

Do they need to do those exams for better selection? Probably not. Their "hiring process"es are not backed by any science. Then why are they doing that? They have to filter somehow. If there are 1 to 100s ratio of candidates for each position, they need to filter hard. Exams are the standard method for ranking and filtering.

But we are professional engineers, not students.
by mc32 | 2025-08-09 13:47:28+00:00
I think legacy admissions is only supported by the elites —be they leftists or rightists. Normal leftists and normal rightists don’t support legacy admissions (pay to play). I think the vast majority of people would support fair admissions (GPA + something else that signals academic aptitude).

Most people would detest the extracurricular noise that some institutions use because often only people with money can afford their kids doing those things and two they are bullshit things. By most people I mean potential students such as those that in great numbers end up in state schools or community colleges.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-08-09 13:48:15+00:00
Actually your original point was:

>Eh. Without getting anywhere near the merits of this particular fracas, the federal government has gotten deeply involved in critiquing the management of companies like Lockheed and Boeing, both for national security reasons and because of the importance of those companies to the economy. Easy to see Intel fitting into that mold in 2025.

Which was you saying "this Intel thing is NBD and basically the same as a bunch of past things presidents have done."

That's the original false equivalency I called you out on. And which you now disagree with apparently, because now you think the Intel thing is potential malfeasance? I don't think you really know what your position is anymore.
by hoppp | 2025-08-09 13:48:22+00:00
Sometimes its faster I write it, sometimes its not.

I prompt like: give me go structs for this json "pasted json" and write 2 functions to save it and load it from "nosql db I use"

That basically speeds up writing glue code

The business logic I write myself

Its faster to do the business logic myself than review what the Ai did.
by twobitshifter | 2025-08-09 13:48:48+00:00
This is a good attempt at a thought experiment but it doesn’t bear out at all in the evidence.

You need a fixed number of people to run a restaurant, there’s only so many positions to be filled. You aren’t hiring on extra people and spending a certain amount on labor, they’ll just pocket any excess.

You can invest in automation but today that’s at a cost higher than paying a living wage and with lower service quality.
by PinkSheep | 2025-08-09 13:48:52+00:00
I urge you to try and set your display to 25 Hz. I don't quite feel it yet at 30 Hz, although the latter is more widely available as an option.

It all depends on what we do consider "good enough". 200ms total page render time would be "blazing fast" for me already. I've just clicked around Github (supposed to be globally fast, can we agree?) and the SPA page changes are 1-1.5s to complete.

To continue my example above, your computer peripherals are probably good enough. Have you considered what it would be like with a garbage-tier mouse? Similarly, maybe you wouldn't notice the difference to a better mouse. I do, because a standard office mouse is not the pace I'm moving at. (No, I'm not some the Flash, I am just fast and precise with my mouse.)

If anything, this gives us a glimpse of what's possible. The latency benchmark[1] of text editors has given us something to think about. In the past decade (already?!) that article was probably the sole reason for drawing public attention to this topic[2] . For example, JetBrains have since put considerable work into improving their IDEs (IntelliJ IDEA etc). They had called it "zero latency" mode.

[1]: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ [2]: small study from 2023 https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3626705.3627784
by skydhash | 2025-08-09 13:49:02+00:00
My most valuable specs, when coding sans agent, is either a UI sketch, some transition diagrams for logic flows, or a few bullet points of business rules. Then coding becomes just a Zen activity. I can get most of it done in one go vibing to my favorite tunes. Then comes the tweaking phase where everything left unspecified get specified.

I still don't feel the need for an agent. The writings of the loose specs is either done offline on paper, through rounds of discussions with stakeholders, and/or with a lot of reading. When I'm hit with an error while coding, that's usually a signal that I don't know something and should probably stop to learn about it.

When it comes to tweaking, fast feedback is king. I know where the knobs are and checking the adjustment should be quick. So it's mostly tests, linting, or live editing environment.
by matt_s | 2025-08-09 13:50:11+00:00
Learning n8n a little more for some automated tasks on a hobby project. Maybe try re-learning sketchup to diagram some home improvement/woodworking projects.

Probably overthink buying a mini PC to run Ubuntu on to do homelab like things, like running n8n or other docker images on like plex. Then probably abandon the idea and watch something off a streaming service, lol.
by ljosifov | 2025-08-09 13:50:42+00:00
In the same boat. I love running things localhost. It's been great fun, and I learned tons I didn't know before. I know remote models API-s are a must for any serious work where tons is to be done, produced fr. Still it warms my heart every time llama-server runs on, and serves my aging mbp. Recent MoEs run great on macs with loads of v/ram, and the power efficiency is scarcely believable.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-08-09 13:50:51+00:00
The Republican gerrymander of Ohio is egregious. The Ohio Supreme Court has repeatedly found against their maps but the ruling party refuses to change them.

A few years ago there was a citizen’s initiative to create an impartial redistricting body, but OHSecState rewrote the ballot text so that it sounded like the opposite: an attempt to enshrine gerrymandering in the Ohio Constitution.

Truly absurd behavior, real scofflaws.
by OJFord | 2025-08-09 13:50:54+00:00
There are high-end brands that spec products to a high standard and have them made (to that standard) in China. But I agree, GP is confusing high-price with high-end.

That said, thermometry is pretty easy and well understood and you don't need crazy accuracy for cooking, so 'low-end' is fine really, just don't pay high-price for it.
by yieldcrv | 2025-08-09 13:51:36+00:00
Exactly, that Austrian woman that tried to get rid of all her wealth found out that its impossible because even if she’s at £0 she knows too many people that will support her ideas, drive too much publicity to her causes, and food, shelter, board seats, academia, and everything else is always accessible. The path doesn’t have to be forged.

Universities were always finishing schools for the elite, for like 1,000 years its been that way, and the best ones in the US are here for that since before the country was incorporated, here since almost half a millennia ago!

The last 80 odd years of dealing with the lower class and proletariat at all is a footnote and will be an experiment of folly deep in a university archive for the next 1,000 years as they merely revert to the mean.

Every problem that universities have go away when they go back to their roots. Its the corporate and public sector that tied access to having a degree from these places, that’s not the university’s problem.

And to your point, correct, if the proletariat were only surrounded by themselves they would not want to be there.
by bumbledraven | 2025-08-09 13:54:02+00:00
> You fill Harvard of Stanford with only people with 1600 SATs will turn them into places you dont really want to go to.

Isn’t that basically Caltech? They had a 3% acceptance rate in 2023, the lowest in the nation. https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-accepta...
by weinzierl | 2025-08-09 13:54:28+00:00
For more context:

Qwant has taken major investment from Axel Springer (Bild, Die Welt) and the day will come when the publisher wants something back for its investment.

At least on the outset Ecosia seemed to resist to be drawn into traditional media and their interests quite well until now, but them working together with Qwant is not a good sign.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43318151
by imiric | 2025-08-09 13:54:38+00:00
You mean this[1]?

It's not open source, has no license, runs on Windows only, and requires an activation code to use.

Also, the privacy policy on their website is missing[2].

Anyone remotely concerned about privacy wouldn't come near this thing.

Ah, you're the author, no wonder you're shilling for it.

[1]: https://github.com/Mainframework/HugstonOne

[2]: https://hugston.com/privacy
by axi0m | 2025-08-09 13:55:02+00:00
You're talking about a neophyte trying to accomplish an engineering job. So yes, in such case, LLMs dramatically change the game, at least for entry-level tasks. Nowadays, anyone can litteraly pretend to be good/average in any field.

The article relates about actual, experienced engineers trying to get even better. That's a completely different matter.
by _wire_ | 2025-08-09 13:55:06+00:00
CakePHP?

As to why anyone thinks this is fun when PHP lacks so much of the expressive power of Ruby that makes Rails delightful...

As to speed, I am recalling an experience in 2010 where Rails running on a $30,000 4U 8-core Sun Solaris box ran 6x slower than a $600 4-core Intel CentOS PC from Best Buy. The surprise turned into anger when the Sun box would spontaneously turn off every night with a spontaneous "Case open fault" that turned out to be a firmware defect, where Sun refused to allow access to the update that corrected the defect without paying for a service contract that cost more than the PC.

Ah, the good old days of true iron.
by lelanthran | 2025-08-09 13:55:13+00:00
> Windows and Mac and X11 users do not praise KiCAD for its ability to absolutely position the cursor.

What does praising have to do with it? After all, I use my television remote mainly to control the volume, but I have never praised the ability to control the volume.

> When you design a new API, "the old API had a function that does this" is not a valid justification.

That is not the justification I, and others, gave; it's essentially a strawman that pops up in every single Wayland conversation.

The justification is "Windows, Mac and X11 allow this feature."

At that point, the onus is on the Wayland devs to justify why they are removing a feature found in every mainstream desktop OS.

> It doesn't matter if Windows, macOS, X11, Haiku, BeOS, SkyOS and TempleOS all provide this functionality, that's not a good justification, that is just argumentum ad populum.

Well ... yes? What's wrong with that? What's wrong with the argument "All the competitors provide this"?