MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Daub | 2025-08-29 06:55:44+00:00
Funny story. I have only one eye, and when in public I signify this by wearing a very obvious eye path. Even without the eye patch, my prosthetic eye looks nothing like my functioning eye (by choice).

I went to the optician a few weeks ago in order to get a new pair of glasses who performed the usual tests. She knew full well that I have only one eye, but when testing my functioning eye she handed me the eye occluder to place over my non-functioning eye. I asked her why she was doing this as it served no function but she clearly did not understand the question. It took nearly a full minute for me to explain to her how pointless using this occluder was. It was rewarding to see the veils of habit lift when she finally grokked my point.

As for the article... it seems like a valid application of technology. Relevant to my anecdote, some doctors/diagnosticians/scientists/scholars are too entrenched in habits... they only see what they expect to see. The accident that led to my loss of vision was impossible to miss, but its seriousness was initially overlooked by at least two professionals.
by k310 | 2025-08-29 06:57:02+00:00
My daughter has a psychology degree, and always recommends a therapist. So I won't speculate on how to gain self-confidence, or the value of gadgets to help in the near term. It does take time.

The office gag wasn't social. It was just fatigue. I guess there always were and will be situations where we need an exit. FWIW, I am retired and living alone in the boondocks, and have too few interactions, so consider the value of just being in the people world. I plan to move, to be closer to family and friends. Most are over 50 miles away. I might run into one of those hasty exits. Right now, my excuse would be "I have a long drive (I do) and want to get home before dark"

Of course, I've had many years to make excuses, most of which were/are valid. Oops, I've got to go to the pharmacy/hardware store before it closes!

Good luck.
by KronisLV | 2025-08-29 06:57:36+00:00
> Failing is considered a good thing in the USA. And the USA is much more entrepreneurial than the rest of the world.

I wonder how many devs have been sacked for going out of their way and making stuff nobody in business asked for, or perhaps that broke something along the way and ended up being a net negative: in the EU vs US and other parts of the world.

Might be loosely related to how much money the company has to burn and the nature of their work (e.g. probably not looked well upon in consulting where you have to convince clients to pay for whatever you've made), as well as how popular each type of work is in each part of the world.
by simoncion | 2025-08-29 06:57:39+00:00
XSLT are the "XSL Transformations".

As described in [0]

> XSLT ... is a language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents. ... XSLT is designed for use as part of XSL, which is a stylesheet language for XML.

If you don't know what "XML" is, go ask your favorite search engine.

If you want to know who uses XSLT, go review the existing discussion on the topic. In summary, it's a bunch of people that Google doesn't really care about (and almost certainly far more people than use WebUSB or WebMIDI [1] and the like).

[0] <https://www.w3.org/TR/1999/PR-xslt-19991008>

[1] Yes, really.
by greatgib | 2025-08-29 06:58:32+00:00
I'm surprised to discover that it was not already the case for a long time for tmpfs to be used for /tmp, and that change is nice.

But the auto-cleanup feature looks awful to me. Be it desktop or servers, machine with uptime of more than a year, I never saw the case of tmp being filled just by forgotten garbage. Only sometimes filled by unzipping a too big file or something like that. But it is on the spot.

It used to be the place where you could store cache or other things like that that will hold until next reboot. It looks so arbitrary and source of random unexpected bugs to have files being automatically deleted there after random time.

I don't know where this feature comes from, but when stupid risky things like this are coming, I would easily bet that it is again a systemd "I know best what is good for you" broken feature shoved through our throats...

And if coming from systemd, expect that one day it will accidentally delete important filed from you, something like following symlinks to your home dir or your nvme EFI partition...
by troupo | 2025-08-29 06:58:40+00:00
Your claim: "by reading the docs, and by autogenerating code samples and testing them against verifiers, and by paying a lot of people to write sample code for sample questions."

Your link: "Grade school math problems from a hardcoded dataset with hardcoded answers" [1]

It really is the same thing.

[1] https://openai.com/index/solving-math-word-problems/

--- start quote ---

GSM8K consists of 8.5K high quality grade school math word problems. Each problem takes between 2 and 8 steps to solve, and solutions primarily involve performing a sequence of elementary calculations using basic arithmetic operations (+ − × ÷) to reach the final answer.

--- end quote ---
by bigfudge | 2025-08-29 06:58:47+00:00
> That is quite the defeatist attitude. Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable, though inaction and giving up certainly helps that along.

This feels like kicking someone when they’re down! Given the current state of corporate and political America, it doesn’t look likely there will be any pressure for anything but enshittification to me. Telling people at the coal face to stay cheerful seems unlikely to help. What mechanism do you see for not giving up to actually change the experience of people in 10 ish years time?
by bubblyworld | 2025-08-29 06:59:53+00:00
> What I mean by that is non-us workers are great if you give them a specific task, even a really hard task. But if you give them a nebulous problem, or worse, a business outcome, they tend to perform much more poorly.

I mean come on, how do you expect people to interpret this paragraph? I can only assume you are trolling, so I'm done here.
by bolobo | 2025-08-29 07:01:28+00:00
> Every developer is using LLM

Citation needed. In my circles, Senior engineer are not using them a lot, or in very specific use cases. My company is blocking LLMs use apart from a few pilots (which I am part of, and while claude code is cool, its effectiveness on a 10-year old distributed codebase is pretty low).

You can't make sweeping statements like this, software engineering is a large field.

And I use claude code for my personal projects, I think it's really cool. But the code quality is still not there.
by elcritch | 2025-08-29 07:02:28+00:00
There are plenty of practical real world usages from companies shipping video games, one of the first and most featureful eth2 servers, websocket servers powering millions of requests at Reddit, etc. Apparently some use in HFT as well now.

True the LSP is pretty bad, but Cursor makes up for a lot of that for me. Atlas dependency manager is great. Valgrind and TSan work perfectly. Gdb sorta works now. LLMS solve the docs issue.

The ecosystem is smaller, but I've been able to use it to successfully create tools for an IoT project with Nim running on an embedded esp32, a multi-threaded api server on linux processing images, and a web SPA with Karax in a couple of weeks of programming work. Oh and calling into Python for some datascience.
by goku12 | 2025-08-29 07:02:46+00:00
> On the desktop though they are a bit too stable.

You're obviously correct here. But perhaps there are users who prefer stable packages on the desktop too. Corporate users most likely (yes, there are such users too). It helps with their security strategy and a development environment similar to their server.

To be very honest, I think the stable security-oriented approach is better than that of a rapid update distro. You should probably use an overlay package manager like flatpak, mise (for dev tools) or even Nix/Guix for anything modern. Preferably something with minimal installs and good sandboxing features. Please let us know if anybody has better suggestions to offer.
Show HN: Pseudo Profound AI Bullshit Generator
by lukebyrnescot | 2025-08-29 07:02:49+00:00
Yesterday I read Pennycook etc al.'s paper on pseudo-profound bullshit, and realized that's what I hate most about the current AI culture. Meaningless but important sounding bullshit that's said only to make the speaker sound smart.

So then I made this little web app to randomly generate AI bullshit. Your next pitch deck awaits.

Pennycook's paper: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decisio...
by trimethylpurine | 2025-08-29 07:03:16+00:00
Americans hate the current tech sector. Google and Microsoft are among the most hated companies in the US. International reach and adherence to European legal pressure has forced European laws loosely on Americans in the form of blocked sites and "accept cookie" banners.

I'd guess that most Americans don't care much if Europe perceives a strong posture. That's not a very American ideology. Many Americans would ask if Spain is in the UK. That's not an exaggeration. Americans couldn't care less about what Europe thinks.
by lillecarl | 2025-08-29 07:03:23+00:00
TuneD doesn't have throughput or latency requirements, it should just tell the kernel what to do, perfect for python. If it's installed with the system python it'll share pages well with other Python applications.

And x86 not being power efficient is hardly true for the modern AMD mobile chips, it's not quite the "iPad" experience but it's very good. Comparing to Apple is unfair IMHO since M* is essentially an iPhone CPU with a souped up power budget, many years of optimization across both hardware, kernel and userspace that we don't have.
by scorpioxy | 2025-08-29 07:04:45+00:00
Installed trixie a few days ago and test driving it and it's been going very well. Coming from Ubuntu so it wasn't a big change but initially I went with Ubuntu many years ago due to its reputation in making Debian a more user-friendly distribution. I can say that my experience with trixie was quite friendly. This may have been the case for a few releases but I was invested in the Ubuntu platform so didn't see the need to switch.

Was bummed to see firefox at version 128 as I've been missing features from the more recent versions. I don't know how I'm going to address that yet as I prefer not to add external apt sources, if I can. This is on a desktop system so somewhat recent versions of software is desirable.

What do other people do for desktop systems? Go with testing/unstable or just another distro for desktops?
by Tade0 | 2025-08-29 07:05:01+00:00
As an outsider I think Americans still have the upper hand in, for lack of a better term, work ethic.

A lot of that stems from a lack of job security. Stuff like suddenly being locked out of your work email/slack or being escorted out of company premises is largely unheard of in the rest of the world.

As a point of comparison: I'm a contractor based in a popular outsourcing destination. My contract is extended well over a month before it expires and I would need to do something particularly harmful to be let go just like that, as our client values continuity of services and will hold the agency accountable should that suffer.

Over here if a job listing mentions "US client" it typically means considerably more work for considerably more pay. Some go for that, others opt for more relaxed roles. I can't imagine having US jobs as the only option.
by jajko | 2025-08-29 07:06:06+00:00
We all had similar experience(s). But if you have been around long enough you will experience also highly competent and sometimes outright brilliant folks who run circles around most of us. A bit less common in India than say eastern Europe, but thats about it.

Anyway highly competent and experienced folks will always thrive regardless of environment. Its the quiet rest that should be worried from multiple angles.
Ask HN: Pakistani Resident Denied by Mercury
by alexander2002 | 2025-08-29 07:06:07+00:00
Hi,I am pakistani origin founder and incorporated my llc in Delaware through stripe llc for muxo.ai. Any Pakistani origin/resident friendly mercury alternatives as I don't want to have my account blocked in future. I can relocate to saudi as I have an iqama but that would a hassle.
Show HN: I built an AI poker coach to stop being a fish at Texas Hold'em
by alexfefun1 | 2025-08-29 07:06:30+00:00
Hey HN!

I recently got hooked on Texas Hold'em, but let's just say my bankroll has been on a steady downward trajectory. After losing one too many buy-ins to players who actually knew what they were doing, I decided to build something to help myself (and maybe others) stop being the fish at the table. Over the past 3 days, I put together an AI-powered poker training platform. Here's what it does: - Play against AI opponents with different playing styles (from tight-aggressive to loose-passive) - Get real-time coaching and hand analysis from an AI that actually understands GTO concepts - Review your mistakes with detailed breakdowns of where you went wrong - Track your progress over time The AI opponents aren't just random - they actually adapt to your playing style, exploit your weaknesses, and even go on tilt sometimes (just like real players). The coach can analyze your hand history and point out leaks in your game, like when you're calling too wide from early position or missing value bets on the river. Tech stack: Next.js, TypeScript, DeepSeek/Gemini APIs for the AI brains, and Tailwind for styling. The whole thing runs in your browser. I've already noticed improvements in my own game (finally stopped calling 3-bets with K9 offsuit!), but I'd love to get feedback from the community. What features would make this more useful? Any poker pros here who can tell me what I'm missing? You can try it here: https://unfish.app/
by matthewmacleod | 2025-08-29 07:07:08+00:00
Of course it is, because that would be an aggressively stupid thing to do. Like boycotting syntax highlighting, spellckecking, VCS integration or a dozen other features that are th whole pint of IDEs.

If you don’t want to use LLM coding assistants – or if you can’t, or it’s not a technology suitable for your work – nobody cares. It’s totally fine. You don’t need to get performatively enraged about it.
by JdeBP | 2025-08-29 07:08:53+00:00
The other amusing thing is the spanner in the icon, with the narrow jaws and mouth that is not angled. There are Apple pundits who insist that spanners do not look like that, and that Apple Has Got It Wrong. Of course, spanners can and do look like that.

It is probably lucky for RedHat that it does not have similar pundits. (-:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45021826
by kgwgk | 2025-08-29 07:09:16+00:00
> I think this interpretation is more intuitive because it doesn't make any assumptions about how you get your information.

Do you mean “interpretation” or “alternative problem”.

Because if it’s an “interpretation” of the original problem you’re indeed making assumptions to fill the unspecified information.

If you mean that it’s an alternative problem which has a definite solution I agree. It’s a different problem and its relevance to the original one is to illustrate that additional assumptions were required.
by DyslexicAtheist | 2025-08-29 07:09:52+00:00
> Truly adventurous users may take their chances with the unstable ("sid") release.

been running "unstable" since 2007 as my daily driver, work-horse, dev-machine, ... Not once faced a "problem" I couldn't recover from. Not once a restore from backup of the main OS due to something the upgrade or OS had caused, no booting from a rescue-image. For something that comes without warranty and has "unstable" in it's name, it's pretty solid.

Apples and oranges of course, but it holds up also well compared to Windows (which tbf, has gotten more stable since Win98), or even compared to MacOS that also crashes at times even after version MacOS 9.x (which was when MacOS became usable in the sense of "stability").
by scorpioxy | 2025-08-29 07:10:24+00:00
In my experience, corporate users have moved on to using containers(or VMs) for their development environments.

It's a tricky thing to solve. One the one hand, you don't want your system to stop working due to an update but also want to keep the software you use updated, both in terms of security and functionality.

Mark Shuttleworth talked about this many years ago before snaps were introduced as a solution to this. The idea at the time was that a rolling release distro is too much of a hassle to maintain and even the 6-month cycle was getting to be too much. So he talked about having a stable core with a long release cycle and rolling releases for software that need to be frequently updated, both desktop and server software. The idea was great but the details of the execution left a bitter taste for many users.
by g42gregory | 2025-08-29 07:10:28+00:00
I respectfully disagree. Google does this by design, as a system designed to provide all legally available information to you. LLMs also do this by design, as a system designed to utilize legal information available to them (coming from the same web as Google's). A criminal can do bad things with a car, a knife, a gun, a kitchen chair and a pencil. Let's not blame the kitchen chair!
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-08-29 07:10:38+00:00
I'd argue that this awareness is a good thing; it means you're measuring, analyzing, etc all the code.

Best practices in software development for forever have been to verify everything; CI, code reviews, unit tests, linters, etc. I'd argue that with LLM generated code, a software developer's job and/or that of an organization as a whole has shifted even more towards reviewing and verification.

If quality is taking a hit you need to stop; how important is quality to you? How do you define quality in your organization? And what steps do you take to ensure and improve quality before merging LLM generated code? Remember that you're still the boss and there is no excuse for merging substandard code.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-08-29 07:11:15+00:00
> grey headed old men. They're the only ones that can afford them.

Yes, the economics have changed. And so has scalability.

For today's young adults, vehicle cost and total cost of ownership have made ownership of private vehicles another "shining artifact of the past." [0]

But you know what else? Populated cities have dense traffic. Racing with full acceleration to reach the next intersection's red light is obviously futile.

People are more worried about having a roof and four walls.

[0] to quote L. Cohen
by saurik | 2025-08-29 07:11:44+00:00
I might be misreading what you are saying but it still sounds like exactly the opposite? (As in, that exposure to blue light is linked with myopia, not that blocking blue light is linked with myopia.)

FWIW, I assume I am simply misunderstanding your use of "linked to" (which I thought is only ever used to establish a correlation, not an anti-correlation; like, "new study shows red meat linked to hear disease" would be awkward wording if one meant "prevents").
by stevenhuang | 2025-08-29 07:11:58+00:00
So I've used Zephyr. The thing you're doing wrong is expecting LLMs to scaffold you a bunch of files from a relatively niche domain. Zephyr is also a mess of complexity with poor documentation. You should ask it to consult official docs and ask it to use existing tools (west etc) and board defs to do the scaffolding.
by rhubarbtree | 2025-08-29 07:12:04+00:00
> Software Engineering is unusual in that it works with deterministic machines. Maybe LLMs mark the point where we join our engineering peers in a world on non-determinism.

Recently some people have compared LLMs to compilers and the resulting source code to object code. This is a false analogy, because compilation is (almost always) a semantics preserving transformation. LLMs are given a natural language spec (prompt) that by definition is underspecified. And so they cannot be semantics preserving, as the semantics of their input is ambiguous.

The programmer is left with two options: (1) understanding the resulting code, repairing and rewriting it, or (2) ignoring the code and performing validation by testing.

Both of these approaches are assistive. At least in its current form, AI can only accelerate a programmer, not replace them. Lovable and similar tools rely on very informal testing, which is why they can be used by non-programmers, but they have very little chance of producing robust software of any complexity. I’ve seen people creating working web apps, but I am confident I could find plenty of strange bugs just by testing edge cases or stressing non functional qualities. The bigger issue is the bugs I can’t find because they’re not bugs a human programmer would create.

Option (1) is problematic because LLMs tend not to produce clean code designed to be human readable. A lot of the efforts coders are making is to break down tasks and try to guide the LLMs to produce good code. I have yet to see this work for anything novel and complex. For non trivial systems, reasoning and architecture are required. The hope is that a programmer can write specs well enough that LLMs can “fill in the gaps”. But whether this is a net positive once considering the work involved is still an open question. I’ve yet to see any first hand evidence that there’s a productivity gain here. It’s early days.

Option(2) is also difficult because there is a crucial factor missing in AI coding, the “generality of intent” as a human user. This is a problem, because the non-trivial bugs an AI produces are unlikely to be similar to those from a human. Those bugs are usually a failure of reasoning, but LLMs don’t reason in the same sense that humans do, so testing in the same way may not be possible. Your intuitions for where bugs lie are no longer applicable. The likely result is worse code produced more quickly, and that trade-off needs exploring.

At the moment I think AI is useful for (a) discussions around design, libraries, debugging, (b) autocomplete, (c) agent analysis of existing code where partial answers are ok and false positives acceptable (eg finding some but not all bugs). Agent coding doesn’t seem ready for production to me, not until we have much better tooling to prevent some of these problems, or AI becomes capable of proper reasoning.
by bkor | 2025-08-29 07:12:05+00:00
> Update 1: Apparently, GNOME bureaucracy is holding up the processing the application of a new maintainer for over a month now.

Could you explain this? You link to a closed bugreport where a new maintainer stepped up. A previously experienced developer said it'll take several months at least to get up to speed.

That a new person needs to be vouched for a critical library is pretty critical. There's been several examples where a malicious developer took over a critical project.
by pegasus | 2025-08-29 07:12:18+00:00
I see, you were playing "Picasso hater" to OP's "AI hater". Well played, in this case, but you could have just written what you just have above, it would have prevented some confusion and misdirection. Yes, OP is unreasonable and arrogant and thus ends up going totally overboard, even though there is some truth in his complaints (pinpointing better what that is would be a worthwhile conversation to have). In my book, being a hater is not something to flaunt, but rather something to look into. Deep enough understanding inevitably softens that hate if not all the way into appreciation, at least into tolerance. It's the same with Picasso's work: once the missing historical, emotional and artistic context is perceived, the value of the work will become self-evident as well.