MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by al_borland | 2025-08-17 19:55:42+00:00
> Vaughan was surprised to find it was often the technical staff, not marketing or sales, who dug in their heels. They were the “most resistant,” he said, voicing various concerns about what the AI couldn’t do, rather than focusing on what it could.

Because the technical staff are the ones the blame will fall on when the AI doesn’t live up to the hype, and they’ve seen these hype waves countless times.
by brudgers | 2025-08-17 19:56:09+00:00
Maybe buy a used large format printer?

Because if you can print whenever for relatively little money, you might be able to live without laminating and a used large format printer can pay for itself across not terribly many prints.

And even if you don’t save money in absolute dollars, you can still get a lot more stuff printed, do more proofing, and many other things.
by mrangle | 2025-08-17 19:56:15+00:00
Education is a unique product, which I'd argue warrants favorable loan terms. Ignoring the inability to declare bankruptcy.

Even in non-scam programs, there's sometimes a massive amount of unknowable hazard on the path to a degree. And whether or not the degree is attained, the debt is still due.

In terms of hazard, I don't mean grades. Assume perfect grades. Especially in graduate programs, interpersonal politics can permanently wreck students who then have no effective recourse.

Examples and intricacies of what I'm trying to imply, aside, consider that education is a unique product that costs a lot of money but, in the process of attaining the product, you aren't treated as a customer but as if your position is precarious. Grades aside. Whatever specifics you might imagine, as they would vary, assume that the system is set up to protect the school that is collecting money. Not the person paying it.

Coming back around to my ultimate point about loan terms and risk.
Show HN: Daily analysis of 9k GitHub repos using AI Coding Agents
by kotauchisunsun | 2025-08-17 19:56:28+00:00
I’ve been running a daily analysis of 9,000 GitHub repos across 30 programming languages, tracking how developers use AI coding agents.

Some interesting patterns: – TypeScript is consistently the top language paired with AI coding tools – Claude Code has actually overtaken GitHub Copilot in usage – Covers 16 agents across 30 languages

This is a personal project I built out of curiosity, updated daily: https://ai-coding.info/en

Curious what other signals people would want to see from the data.
by mrits | 2025-08-17 19:56:55+00:00
I ported an entire analytic solution from SQL Server to clickhouse in a few months. While the workarounds for updates aren't great it didn't come as a surprise since I've used other similar databases. The joining/null behavior is called out in the documentation so that wasn't a surprise either.

CH has been my favorite database since I discovered PostgreSQL 20 years ago. My view point is don't use postgres unless you can't use CH.
by kbolino | 2025-08-17 19:57:15+00:00
> The solution existed starting in the late 90s through the early 2010s [...] the cheater gets banned.

This attitude also reflects the naivete of the 1990s. You can't ban a person. You can ban an IP, you can ban "all known Tor exit nodes" or "all known VPNs" or "all known public cloud IPs", you can ban whole countries by IPgeo, you can ban anything somebody has to provide to log in (an email address, a phone number, a credit card number, etc.), but these can all be evaded. The only truly effective banning tools are private, invite-only servers or reputation/incentive systems where the cheater loses something really valuable that a ban evasion can't recover.
by jrflowers | 2025-08-17 19:57:29+00:00
> For every masterpiece made by a Japanese cabinet maker, imagine how many Ikea cabinets there are out there

Minimalist design isn’t the result of minimal effort. It actually takes quite a lot of time and skill to design a cabinet that can flat pack AND be assembled easily AND fit cost constraints AND fit manufacturing and shipping and storage constraints AND have mass market appeal.

IKEA stuff exists because of hundreds or thousands of people with expertise in their roles, not in spite of them.
by dimal | 2025-08-17 19:57:46+00:00
There’s always been this draw in software engineering to find the silver bullet that will allow you to turn off your brain and just vibe your way to a solution. It might be OOP or TDD or pair programming or BDD or any number of other “best practices”. This is just an unusual situation where someone really can turn off their brain and get a solution that compiles and solves the problem, and so for the type of person that doesn’t want to think, it feels like they found what they’re looking for. But there’s still no silver bullet for complexity. I guess there’s nothing to do but reject the PR and say “Explain this code to me, then I’ll review it.”
by smithclay | 2025-08-17 19:58:14+00:00
Hey, it's not well known but Anthropic actually publishes their own devcontainer feature layer for this (1). Many different CLI wrappers and tools are starting to imbed it (2) but is a nice DIY/open-source way to sandbox.

1. https://github.com/anthropics/devcontainer-features 2. shameless plug, my own open-source CLI for doing this: https://github.com/smithclay/claudetainer
by dahart | 2025-08-17 19:58:19+00:00
It’s crazy easy to Google that claim, why not try that first? “Every person I know” is also known as type of ‘survivor bias’. Googling, I get multiple answers that 30%-40% of US citizens get any inheritance, which is a minority. Here’s one of them: https://www.bls.gov/osmr/research-papers/2011/pdf/ec110030.p...
by anonnon | 2025-08-17 19:59:09+00:00
My point was that student loan debtors are some of the least deserving of forgiveness, given that you have actual poor people struggling to make ends meet. At best you could make a case for the ones who never graduated or whose degree demonstrably hasn't improved their income or employability, or for making the loans dischargeable through bankruptcy.

But otherwise, it's just the college cohort voting themselves a handout they don't deserve, and it only deepens the degree divide: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/education/college-costs-working...
by compumike | 2025-08-17 19:59:21+00:00
PostgreSQL defaults to: "fsync = ON" and "synchronous_commit = ON".

ClickHouse defaults to: "fsync_after_insert = false".

A more fair comparison might at least do "SET synchronous_commit TO OFF" on the PostgreSQL side. (But for this UPDATE benchmark, I think the results would still largely be the same.)
by roxolotl | 2025-08-17 19:59:43+00:00
This is cool data but I’d love to see how this AI boom compares to the big data AI boom of 2015-2018 or so. There were a lot of places calling themselves AI for no reason. Lots of anxiety that no one but data scientists would have jobs in the future.

It’s hard to tell how total that was compared to today. Of course the amount of money involved is way higher so I’d expect it to not be as large but expanding the data set a bit could be interesting to see if there’s waves of comments or not.
by ranahanocka | 2025-08-17 20:00:10+00:00
Interesting idea. Our framework of having multiple different agents with different roles could play well with this. You could create an agent that checks for certain criteria, gives feedback to the coding agent. For example, you could build an agent that evaluates the toughness of the current 3D asset and suggests fixes. I like the idea of incorporating additional experts to solve different tasks!
by sfn42 | 2025-08-17 20:00:18+00:00
That's not really possible. You need fish and fishing mechanics, you can't just create a game where fishing happens to be possible without anyone having thought about it.

You would basically need a life simulator for that, with rules like fish exist, fish live in water, fish chase other organic things in the water, a worm attracts fish, the hook makes the fish stick if it bites, do you see what I'm saying? You can't just have all this stuff happening organically. It's possible to have systems where the possibilities are so vast that the dev can't consider all of them, like spore or path of exile or whatever, lots of games with lots of options for customization. But you can't just have a real world simulator, the real world is too complex to simulate, let alone in real time.
by metalcrow | 2025-08-17 20:02:51+00:00
> Since cheat authors will not be able to get their drivers signed by Microsoft

Why not? Presumably Microsoft will decline if you say outright "this is for cheating", but if you make a kernal driver that happens to have a feature for executing commands from user space for a benign reason, i don't think they would decline to sign it. There are a few million windows drivers, there are plenty of situations where a weirdly specific driver has a valid use case.
by dkh | 2025-08-17 20:03:45+00:00
Excellent! ArchiveTeam have always been impressive this way. Some years ago, I was working at a video platform that had just announced it would be shutting down fairly soon. I forget how, but one way or another I got connected with someone at ArchiveTeam who expressed their interest in archiving it all before it was too late. Believing this to be a good idea, I gave them a couple of tips about where some of our device-sniffing server endpoints were likely to give them a little trouble, and temporarily "donated" a couple EC2 instances to them to put towards their archiving tasks.

Since the servers were mine, I could see what was happening, and I was very impressed. Within I want to say two minutes, the instances had been fully provisioned and were actively archiving videos as fast as was possible, fully saturating the connection, with each instance knowing to only grab videos the other instances had not already gotten. Basically they have always struck me as not only having a solid mission, but also being ultra-efficient in how they carry it out.
by dlcarrier | 2025-08-17 20:04:07+00:00
I was more so mocking the security theater in the GDPR, but now I see your frustration with how activism works in EU policy making.

Because of the circumstances under which the USA was federated, we have done pretty strong systems in place to prevent local activism from having a national impact.

It doesn't prevent the federal government itself from surveiling the population (e.g. the Patriot act and everything descending from it) but at least if something is legal in a state, companies in that state can generally transact with residents of any state. (for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquette_National_Bank_of_Min....)
by trevor-e | 2025-08-17 20:04:36+00:00
Personally I like the UI for https://conductor.build/ a lot more than this, although I'll have to give it a try.

I see a lot of commenters asking why a GUI is necessary. When you're running several agents in parallel it becomes very handy compared to the terminal. I can easily see the status of each which I haven't found a good equivalent for when using terminal tabs. Also it handles automatically creating git worktrees for each agent which is great.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-17 20:05:15+00:00
Missed the part about writing interpreters in Assembly?

Most folks nowadays wouldn't even think that is an option, hence the comparison with a product several decades later doing that instead of C kind of approach.

Back to ARM v1, maybe the design did take into account how to improve the developer's life of those writing in Assembly, which was critical for implementation of the whole userspace, meaning BBC Basic.
by neom | 2025-08-17 20:05:49+00:00
Here is the pre-print: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5070304

This part is interesting to me:

"We believe that continuous exposure to decision support systems like AI may lead to the natural human tendency to over-rely on their recommendations, leading to clinicians becoming less motivated, less focused, and less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance."
by wongarsu | 2025-08-17 20:05:54+00:00
I would say that they have certain qualities that I would like to see in real-life therapist (and real-life friends and partners). Those are a big appeal.

But no, I wouldn't say LLMs are great at being therapists/friends in general. That's part of the danger: a bad therapist can be much better than no therapist at all, or it can be much worse.
by sitkack | 2025-08-17 20:05:56+00:00
Jon Gjengset (jonhoo) Who is famously fastidious did a stream on live coding where he did something similar in terms of control. Worth of a watch if that is a style you want to explore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL7Au1tzNxE

I don't have the energy to do that for most things I am writing these days which are small PoC where the vibe is fine.

I suspect as you do more, you will create dev guides and testing guides that can encapsulate more of that direction so you won't need to micromanage it.

If you used Gemini CLI, you picked the coding agent with the worst output. So if you got something that worked to your liking, you should try Claude.
by amai | 2025-08-17 20:06:15+00:00
Sprinting and HIIT helps with ADHD like drugs and has healthy side effects

"I tell people that going for a run is like taking a little bit of Prozac and a little bit of Ritalin because, like the drugs, exercise elevates these neurotransmitters."

https://www.additudemag.com/exercise-learning-adhd-brain/amp...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9017792/

Give it a try.
by latexr | 2025-08-17 20:06:23+00:00
> Like during the dawn of web 2.0 we had lots of aggregators and forums instead of "Reddit and others."

So, in other words, this is the exact opposite? “Lost of aggregators and forums” meant diversity. Lots of small players doing their own thing. What we have now is a handful of big players, and then tons of small players accessing those services with a different coat of paint. It’s like if the web you mention consisted of lots of people doing alternative interfaces to access Facebook and Reddit.
by nobodyandproud | 2025-08-17 20:06:28+00:00
Crude and wrong.

It’s not a concession, when it contradicts your position.

You believe Palestinians aren’t accountable because most of them didn’t vote.

I just showed you that not only is Hamas still popular, more militant orgs with zero tolerance for two-state are far more popular.

Until you forced me to research, I wouldn’t have known that the younger Palestinians were even more violent than the public is lead to believe.
by neomantra | 2025-08-17 20:06:32+00:00
I’ve been exploring modes of MCP development of a Screentime MCP server. In the loops, I ask it to look at my app and browsing behavior and summarize it. Obviously very sensitive, private information.

Claude generated SQL and navigated the data and created a narrative of my poor behavior patterns including anxiety-ridden all-night hacking sessions.

I then asked it if it considered time zones … “oh you’re absolutely right! I assumed UTC” And it would spit another convincing narrative.

“Could my app-switching anxiety you see be me building in vscode and testing in ghostty?” Etc

In this case I’m controlling the prompt and tool description and willfully challenging the LLM. I shudder to think that a desperate person gets bad advice from these sorts of context failures.
by cluckindan | 2025-08-17 20:07:23+00:00
We haven’t stopped extracting materials or producing goods. In fact, there are about 7 billion more people now than in 1800, dawn of the industrial age. We are hundreds if not thousands of times more productive in terms of work than in the pre-industrial age.

However, most of our so-called ownership begins in a fiat currency that is essentially a company token.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
by jetrink | 2025-08-17 20:07:30+00:00
I understand the point he's making: New cars are much safer than old cars, and the average person is driving a car that is 12 years old, while new cars are bought primarily by the wealthy. However, that seems like a natural consequence of two things that are very good for everyone. First, cars are lasting much longer than they used to, which lowers the lifetime cost of ownership. Second, cars have gotten much safer in the last fifteen years. As long as these trends continue, the safety gap will exist, but I think everyone would still prefer cars keep getting safer and more reliable.
by rscho | 2025-08-17 20:08:10+00:00
Yes, although even for modern medicine curative and preventative strategies are very distinct. Sure, they'll give you pills to compensate for a problem you already have. But there are few meds that protect you against stuff you'll maybe catch in the future. Vaccines and antibiotics are obvious examples, but I'm not aware of many others. The rest of preventative strategies overwhelmingly consists in correcting deficits or excesses (calories, vitamins, sleep, exercise etc.)
by odie5533 | 2025-08-17 20:08:42+00:00
I'm talking knowing what the shape of the response and shape of the data going in ahead of time and being consistent. SQL is like a black box in and out. I mainly use Python. For that, it's nice to have things like Dataclasses for DTOs or Pydantic models or some sort of DTO class that has known field names and known types. When you use raw SQL, you lose all that or have to roll it yourself. And at that point, you're most of the way to an ORM or at least the data mapping portion of SQLAlchemy.
by streptomycin | 2025-08-17 20:09:02+00:00
https://www.alphaquery.com/stock/PEG/fundamentals/annual/pro... does not look like the profit margin has increased over the past 5 years.

Also their stock underperformed the S&P 500 over the past 5 years.

I'm not really a finance guy so probably I'm looking at it wrong, but that seems like some pretty bad price gouging.
by mdaniel | 2025-08-17 20:09:03+00:00
Even without changing one byte of the actual binary they could get pretty far by just evicting all the test files for those packages they're including. And, related to that, it seems that dist-info/RECORD ends up at 1,050,544 because the onnx folks decided it was important that they cryptographically sign all those test data files they're choosing to ship :-/
by nine_k | 2025-08-17 20:10:15+00:00
It certainly complicates things a bit, but the roofs are independent, so several small teams can independently work in parallel. So yes, it's sort of linear.

Building a large solar installation may scale a bit sub-linearly, if you can e.g. order things in bulk at better prices, and have some electric assemblies done at a factory, more efficiently.
by westurner | 2025-08-17 20:11:21+00:00
Having read parts of e.g. the "Refactoring" and "Patterns of Enterprise Architecture" books and ThoughtWorks and Fowler web pages and blog posts, and "The Clean Coder", and about distributed computing algorithms; I've been working with a limited set of refactoring terms in my prompts like "factor out", "factor up", "extract an interface/superclass from".

TIL according to Wikipedia, the more correct terms are "pull up" and "push down".

How should they learn terms for refactoring today? Should they too train to code and refactor and track customer expectations without LLMs? There's probably an opportunity to create a good refactoring exercise; with and without LLMs and IDEs and git diff.

System Prompt, System Message, User, User Prompt, Agent, Subagent, Prompt Template, Preamble, Instructions, Prompt Prefix, Few-Shot examples; which thing do we add this to:

First, summarize Code Refactoring terms in a glossary.

Code refactoring: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_refactoring

"Ask HN: CS papers for software architecture and design?" (2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15778396

"Ask HN: Learning about distributed systems?" (2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23932271

Would methods for software quality teams like documentation and tests prevent this cognitive catch-up on so much code with how much explanation at once?

Generate comprehensive unit tests for this. Generate docstrings and add comments to this.

If you build software with genai from just a short prompt, it is likely that the output will be inadequate in regards to the unstated customer specifications and that then there will need to be revisions. Eventually, it is likely that a rewrite or a clone of the then legacy version of the project will be more efficient and maintainable. Will we be attached to the idea of refactoring the code or to refactoring the prompts and running it again with the latest model too?

Retyping is an opportunity to rewrite! ("Punch the keys" -- Finding Forrester)

Are the prompts worth more than the generated code now?

simonw/llm by default saves all prompt inputs and outputs in a sqlite database. Copilot has /save and gemini-cli has /export, but they don't yet autosave or flush before attempting to modify code given the prompt output?

Catch up as a human coder, Catch up the next LLM chat context with the prior chat prompt sequences (and manual modifications, which aren't but probably should be auto-committed distinctly from the LLM response's modifications)
by internetter | 2025-08-17 20:11:21+00:00
Yes. If I want a job without a prior relationship there’s plenty of sites for that like indeed. I’m only interested in job offers from people who have read and valued my work.

Edit: and clearly this is the case because it’s not “Google bot”, it’s a robot pretending to be human like “Amy Bushwack from google” but really it’s a bot
by hk__2 | 2025-08-17 20:11:24+00:00
The wording is bit akward given that Claudia is a female given name: you can "see Claudia in action", "get started with Claudia", run things "in Claudia". At least Claude is an agent, so it makes sense to give it a human name (which btw is neutral: in France you have both men and women called "Claude").
by DSingularity | 2025-08-17 20:11:47+00:00
I don’t think you realize how this works in practice.

In theory it will be for highest need. In practice various parties will find ways to make sure every applicant meets the bar.

In theory it’s temporary. In practice majority will find ways to stay.

It will a sudden exodus of 100.000 Gazans to the US. Israel wins as they will probably in the end kill 10-20% of the population (we know that they’ve killed 5% but many organizations estimate that at least as many are under the ruins and there are excess deaths to count too eg those starved because of Israel’s blockade), they will maim 10-20-%, and finally find ways to expel most of the remaining to various countries.
by godelski | 2025-08-17 20:12:05+00:00
Do believe there's a important distinction between a duck and not a duck?

I'm assuming you do, since apples aren't oranges and ducks aren't robots no matter what conspiracy theorists joke or say. You can't eat an animatronic duck. It doesn't lay eggs, no matter how much another duck tries to mate with it.

> then the non-duck is sufficiently duck-like for the difference to not matter.

Here's where things fall apart. This is not actually true. It is about your measurements, not about the actual duck-iness of the thing we're applying the duck test to. I know this sounds funny, but let's just say we're using only sight and sound. Does my duck get destroyed when flying through a magnetic field? A biological duck won't but an animatronic duck will. Now let's say your blind (you can't see magnetic fields), can something pass the duck test for you but it will obviously not be a duck for someone who can see? This is obviously true[0]. I'm sure we can find a bird that you'd think is a duck but isn't.

So it matters, do you care if something is a duck or not? And in what way? There's no single duck measurement, there's a whole suite of tests that need to be combined carefully and thoughtfully depending on how you answer the previous questions.

Obviously this is extra important when we aren't exactly sure what a duck is...

(Also, see Turing Test)

[0] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/547e053ae4b04768d...