MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by necovek | 2025-08-24 19:19:24+00:00
This was extra on top of whatever the average cost really is for employees who are not abusing the system.

So, if other engineers get their equipment for $6k (beefed-up laptop, 32" or 30" 5k widescreen screen, ergonomic chair, standing desk — in theory amortized over 3-10 years, but really, on the retention period which is usually <3 years in software), we are talking about an increase of $200 on that.

Maybe not peanuts, but the cost of administration to oversee spending and the cost to employees to provide proof and follow due process (in their hourly rate for time used) will quickly add up and usually negate any "savings" from stopping abuse altogether — since now everybody needs to shoulder the cost.

Any type of cap based on average means that those who needed something more special-cased (more powerful machine, more RAM vs CPU/storage, more expensive ergonomic setup due to their anatomy [eg. significantly taller than average]...) can't really get it anymore.

Obviously, having no cap and requiring manager approval is usually enough to get rid of almost all abuse, though it is sometimes important to be able to predict expenses throughout the year.
by mxmilkiib | 2025-08-24 19:19:25+00:00
neat system

tried it out on Mixxx; https://deepwiki.com/mixxxdj/mixxx

don't know how to zoom the diagrams on mobile tho, n they can easily almost disappear from view when panning around

the prompt box could do with a way to move it out of the way of the bottom couple of cm in portrait, or from covering more than a quarter of the screen in landscape orientation
by dcrazy | 2025-08-24 19:19:31+00:00
What price point did you buy at?

I paid a premium for my home height-adjustable desk because the frame and top are made in America, the veneer is much thicker than competitors, the motors and worm gears are reliable, and the same company makes coordinating office furniture.

The same company sells cheap imported desks too. Since my work area is next to the dining table in my open-plan apartment, I considered the better looks worth the extra money.
by ghaff | 2025-08-24 19:20:13+00:00
I've tried it and even built a stand for one at one point. Again, I usually have an old laptop on my dining room table. Maybe as I reconfigure my house after a kitchen fire and revert my dining room table from a work surface, I'll give it another try.

You actually give me an idea that I have an old iPad and a laptop stand I never use (probably a work thing I didn't think to return) and I may give it a try especially given I mostly use just a few sites.
by Jensson | 2025-08-24 19:20:24+00:00
Almost everyone, not everyone, majority of households in USA had a computer already by year 2000, and that is counting old people without kids who didn't keep up with trends.

So by the time smart phones hit almost everyone had a computer at home. If you are talking about the 90s that isn't relevant, the relevant part is how smart phones changed things, and at that time internet was already available to a large majority at home, smart phones just made it portable.
by ModernMech | 2025-08-24 19:20:34+00:00
> what am I missing here?

I guess what I don't understand is that failure is always expected because nothing is perfect, so why isn't the chance of failure modeled and accounted for? Obviously you fix bugs, but how many more bugs are in there you haven't fixed? To me, "we fix bugs" sounds the same as "we ship systems with unknown vulnerabilities".

What's the difference between a purportedly "secure" feature with unknown, unpatched bugs; and an admittedly insecure feature whose failure modes are accounted for through system design taking that insecurity into account, rather than pretending all is well until there's a problem that surfaces due to unknown exploits?
by RaftPeople | 2025-08-24 19:21:04+00:00
> This shows how immature the field of software engineering is. Imagine bridges or houses were built like that.

You're forgetting a key difference between software and the physical world.

The blessing and curse of software is that there are few constraints on the solution so it can take an enormous number of different forms and still be valid. There isn't gravity, friction or the various other things that constrain physical solutions.

And each of those almost limitless solutions has different trade-offs related to a large number of different variables. It takes many many years of seeing the different impacts of those design decisions across the different variables within the constraints of different domains and contexts.

It's truly a combinatorial problem with so many dimensions that no human is smart enough to just simulate the impact of design decisions in new and unfamiliar domains+context.

You could argue that there could be standard ways of doing things within specific domains+context, but the context is so varied between companies, and business priorities have so many differences that I don't think it's a solvable problem.

The best we can do is have higher level patterns and approaches to specific types of problems that can guide people based on others experiences, but all of that still needs to be mixed and matched for the specific problem space.
by bena | 2025-08-24 19:21:20+00:00
This is probably one of those things where the risk is normally small, so small increases cause large changes in percentage.

For instance, if spontaneous abortion is normally 1% and smoking increases it to 2%, then that’s a 100% increase. Now, I don’t know the actual numbers, and smoking is just generally not good for one’s health, but I wouldn’t go as far to say things were stacked against you.
by nxobject | 2025-08-24 19:21:43+00:00
Oh wow, thanks for pointing me to Lesa Hoffman's work! Back in my day I learned from Fitzmaurice, Laird, and Ware, more geared towards the health sciences (i.e. clinical trial data etc.) which I wasn't too fond of. [1]

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/97811195134...
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-08-24 19:22:03+00:00
Yes, but I think a key part of learning is experimentation and the feedback loop of being wrong.

An agent, or doctor, may be reasoning over the problem they are presented with, combining past learning with additional sources of memorized or problem-specific data, but in that moment it's their personal expertise/learning that will determine how successful they are with this reasoning process and ability to apply the reference material to the matter at hand (cf the plumber, who with all the time in the world just doesn't have the learning to make good use of the reference books).

I think there is also a subtle problem, not often discussed, that to act successfully, the underlying learning in choosing how to act has to have come from personal experience. It's basically the difference between being book smart and having personal experience, but in the case of an LLM also applies to experience-based reasoning it may have been trained on. The problem is that when the LLM acts, what is in it's head (context/weights) isn't the same as what was in the head of the expert whose reasoning it may be trying to apply, so it may be trying to apply reasoning outside of the context that made it valid.

How you go from being book smart, and having heard other people's advice and reasoning, to being an expert yourself is by personal practice and learning - learning how to act based on what is in your own head.
by TranquilMarmot | 2025-08-24 19:22:18+00:00
> I can’t stomach even a trivial sum of money going to Yandex/Russia

This is the first I'm hearing of this, I love Kagi. Looks like Yandex represents about 2% of their costs. I assume the hangup here is that by Kagi giving money to Yandex, the Russian government gets some of that money, and that money is being used to fuel war machines?

By that logic any company that ends up giving money to a country that is participating in active wars is not okay. If you draw the line at Yandex, do you also draw it at Apple/Google/Microsoft or any other US-based company that pays taxes to the US government which has a long and *active* history of killing innocent people? Or products coming from China who is actively exterminating ethnic groups?

At some point it becomes easier to just stop using technology altogether because once you look deep enough at anything you will find ethical issues. Do you know where the precious metals in your phone, laptop, or TV came from? Where is the energy you use to power these devices coming from? What happens to those devices when they reach end of life and you don't use them anymore? By using technology in any capacity you are affecting poorer countries that bear the brunt of mining, e-waste, and climate change.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is - it's important to be cognizant of these things and reduce harm that you're doing wherever possible, but you can never be fully 100% ethical and still be a consumer of goods and services unless you do so at great inconvenience to yourself.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-24 19:22:19+00:00
I've done a lot of spreadsheets on this kind of solution, but on a slightly smaller scale: a single family home. While it will work for a while it is not enough to meaningfully offset the seasonal cycle which is the thing that needs solving. Storing energy for a few days up to two weeks is (relatively) easy, storing it cheaply for up to 6 months is very hard unless you are willing to invest massively offsetting much of your savings. The pile of rock required to heat an average home for a couple of weeks handily outweighs the house itself. And that's without a double conversion, it is used and stays as heat, the idea was to moderate the leakage upwards as a source of heat by blowing air in a controlled manner rather than to convert it again.

So I really hope these guys will succeed where I can't even get it to work on paper, sometimes scale really is a requirement to make something work and this could very well be one of those.
by jamesblonde | 2025-08-24 19:22:53+00:00
This triggered me in the article

'There are a few startups these days peddling a newfangled technology called “incremental view maintenance” or “differential dataflow”. '

Incremental view maintenance can change recomputation cost of view updates from O(N) to O(1). DBSP is based on z-sets, a generalization of relational algebra. The paper won best paper at SIGMOD. There is a startup, Feldera, commercializing it.

This is just ignorance to dismiss as 'new fangled'.
by necovek | 2025-08-24 19:22:59+00:00
A better look at it is to say that they started allowing working from home.

I've worked fully remotely in a couple of global remote-first company since 2006 for a decade-plus — it was my choice how I wanted to set up my working conditions, with company paying for a "laptop refresh" every 3 years which I did not have to use on a laptop.
by chaostheory | 2025-08-24 19:23:16+00:00
About 6 ft X 8 ft give or take

Meta Quest 3. Quest 2 and 3s work but there’s no point in getting a headset with a fresnel lens anymore.

Why Quest? It’s standalone wireless. i.e. you don’t need a separate PC or console and wires are not conducive to working out and moving
by bfgeek | 2025-08-24 19:23:23+00:00
My biggest pet peeve is designers using high end apple displays.

You've average consumer is using a ultra cheap LCD panel that has no where near the contrast ratio that you are designing your mocks on, all of your subtle tints get saturated out.

This is similar to good audio engineers back in the day wiring up a dirt cheap car speaker to mix albums.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-08-24 19:23:34+00:00
See also the Fox confirmation [1]:

> Up to 1,700 National Guardsmen are set to mobilize in 19 states in the coming weeks to assist the Department of Homeland Security with President Donald Trump’s nationwide crackdown on illegal immigration and crime, Pentagon officials confirmed to Fox News.

> Documents obtained by Fox News show planning for activations in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming – with status effective from August through mid-November. Texas is projected to host the most significant Guard presence.

It should be noted this comes after the National Guard deployed to DC had been ordered to begin carrying lethal weapons in the nation's capital[2]:

> At the direction of the Secretary of Defense, JTF-DC members supporting the mission to lower the crime rate in our Nation’s capital will soon be on mission with their service-issued weapons, consistent with their mission and training

[1] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/national-guard-mobilizing-1...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hegseth-authorizes-nati...
by kelnos | 2025-08-24 19:23:36+00:00
I agree with you on that from the perspective of a senior developer. Far too many times people would come and interrupt me for something that they could have figured out themselves. Sure, it might have been something that I knew offhand and could tell them in 15 seconds, but would take them 2 minutes to research. But it was so very very frustrating to me.

I would get that with junior folks for deeper questions, even, stuff that would take 15-30 minutes to go over with them. I started asking them questions up-front, to try to determine what research and steps they'd taken on their own before asking me. I would generally be pretty gentle with my "go away" patter: "ok, so through the questions I've asked you, I think you should have a few avenues of research that you can pursue on your own; if you're still stuck after that, let me know". But the repeat offenders who just didn't seem to get it... sigh. It was also clear to me from how some of my questions were answered, that often I wasn't suggesting anything they didn't already know; they just didn't feel like doing the research on their own, and wanted someone else to tell them how to do their jobs. So exhausting.
by ModernMech | 2025-08-24 19:23:42+00:00
LLMs have the same value proposition as no-code or low-code tools, and they also have the same failure cases. With pre-AI no-code tools, they also lowered walls but they didn't remove the barriers. The experience was a lot like we're seeing from the "vibe coders", like this post here:

"what's the point of vibecoding if at the end of the day I still have to pay a dev to look at the code anyway... I can't vibe my way through debugging, I can't ship anything that actually matters." [1]

That was the experience a lot of people had using no/low code tools, where you could make progress, but as soon as you hit a problem you are done, because overcoming it will require skills the no/low code don't teach or really support.

LLMs are only different because the interface is more accessible. But all the same problems are still there. AI is not a panacea.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1mudy12/th...
by Ygg2 | 2025-08-24 19:23:47+00:00
> The goal of ANY software engineer worth their salt should be minimizing errors and defects in their end product. > > ...to the extent possible within their project budget.

Sure, but when other engineers discover that shit caused us many defects (e.g., asbestos as a fire insulator), they don't turn around and say, "Well, asbestos sure did cause a lot of cancer, but Cellulose Fibre doesn't shield us from neutron radiation. So it won't be preventing all cancers. Ergo, we are going back to asbestos."

And then you have team Asbestos and team Lead paint quarrelling who has more uses.

That's my biggest problem. The cyclic, Fad Driven Development that permeates software engineering.

> Pretty sure it could (at least) equally well be reached by learning to write Ada.

Not really. Ada isn't that memory safe. It mostly relies on runtime checking [1]. You need to use formal proofs with Ada SPARK to actually get memory safety on par with Rust.

> Pretty sure it could (at least) equally well be reached by learning to write Ada.

See above. You need Ada with Spark. At that point you get two files for each method like .c/.h, one with method definition and one with proof. For example:

// increment.ads - the proof procedure Increment (X : in out Integer) with Global => null, Depends => (X => X), Pre => X < Integer'Last, Post => X = X'Old + 1; // increment.adb - the program procedure Increment (X : in out Integer) is begin X := X + 1; end Increment;

But you're way past what you call programming, and are now entering proof theory.

[1] https://ajxs.me/blog/How_Does_Adas_Memory_Safety_Compare_Aga...
by WalterBright | 2025-08-24 19:23:58+00:00
With compiler development work, a low end machine will do just fine, as long as it has a LARGE monitor. (Mine is 3840x2160, and I bought a satellite monitor to extend it.)

P.S. you can buy a satellite monitor often for $10 from the thrift store. The one I bought was $10.

I don't buy used keyboards because they are dirty and impossible to clean.
by sczi | 2025-08-24 19:25:20+00:00
Oooh now that is interesting. What I by mean stuff I don't even know that I don't know :)

Yes mine doesn't handle that, it is the same as jupyter there. Smalltalk is supposed to be best at interactive development, I wonder if it will update the old closures. I don't know it to try, but I do know Common Lisp which is also supposed to be quite good, and fwiw it behaves the same, new closures have the new code, but the old ones are not updated:

(use-package :serapeum) (defun adder (x) (flet ((inner (y) (/ x y))) #'inner)) (defparameter *adders* (dict)) (defun add (x y) (ensure (@ *adders* x) (adder x)) (funcall (@ *adders* x) y)) (add 3 6) ; => 1/2 (add 3 9) ; => 1/3 ;; change / to + in inner (add 4 9) ; => 13 (add 3 10) ; => 3/10
by rustystump | 2025-08-24 19:25:24+00:00
This is because LLMs are not good enough. Seriously, the bottle neck is still code, art, sound, etc.

There are a bunch of games made using heavy gen ai but it is usually for art and dialogue. Most players can tell quickly and drop the game. Games are fundamentally creative things and most interesting art work was not done in 5s with a prompt.
by kelnos | 2025-08-24 19:27:36+00:00
It depends on the question and situation, though. If someone comes and asks, "hey I need access to the Foo database", and your answer is, "you need to talk to the ops team about that; there's a form on Jira for that", and that fact clearly documented and easily discoverable on the internal wiki (or whatever), then this is just a case of a lazy person who wants someone else to solve their problems for them.

But sure, if internal documentation is garbage and it's difficult to find information or understand who needs to be asked to get something done, then yep, manager is gonna get hit with these sorts of requests all the time, and just has to deal with it. Part of the job.
by the__alchemist | 2025-08-24 19:28:04+00:00
I think it was a Radeon 3600x, state of the art 6-7 years ago. Replaced with 9950x. I was surprised by how big of a difference the CPU update had on frame rates. (GPU: 4080)

I also do a lot of rust compiling (Which you hinted at), and molecular dynamics sims leveraging a mix of CUDA/GPU, and thread pools + SIMD.
by margalabargala | 2025-08-24 19:28:20+00:00
Yeah, I think that's wise. The presentation of the single largest non-age-related killer in the western world as something that needs to be protected, for safety's sake, means we're sufficiently far apart on things like the value of a human life that productive discussions are difficult without someone getting frustrated and devolving into listing the sort of person the other is.
by techpineapple | 2025-08-24 19:28:31+00:00
I read this, and while I want to agree with the premise, part of the literal point of the trolley problem is time. While you’re sitting around talking about ways to slow down the Trolley, the trolley will roll people over!

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of good. If you have an idea, throw it out there, better yet, jump on the damn Trolley and try to fix it. But don’t cover the hand of the guy on the lever and ask, “can we talk about this first?”
by mistrial9 | 2025-08-24 19:28:41+00:00
the core might be - the difference between an LLM context window, and an agent's orders in a text. LLM itself is a core engine, running in an environment of some kind (instruct vs others?). Agents on the other hand, are descendants of the old Marvin Minsky stuff in a way.. it has objectives and capacities, at a glance. LLMs are connected to modern agents because input text is read to start the agent.. inner loops are intermediate outputs of LLM, in language. There is no "internal code" to this set of agents, it is speaking in code and text to the next part of the internal process.

There are probably big oversights or errors in that short explanation. The LLM engine, the runner of the engine, and the specifics of some environment, make a lot of overlap and all of it is quite complicated.

hth
by ModernMech | 2025-08-24 19:28:42+00:00
Exactly true. I've had the experience of implementing a programming language in two different languages. The first time it took half a year. The second time it was done in a month, because it was really only a matter of translating all of the code from one c-style imperative language to another, and swapping out the important library code and function calls.

Maybe AI can take that process from a month down to 3 days, and that's great and all, a 10x improvement! But you don't go from 6 months to 3 days without doing the 6 months first.
by nozzlegear | 2025-08-24 19:29:02+00:00
Living in northwest Iowa – which is one of the biggest wind energy producing states in the US! – there has been resistance against wind turbines at the local level for my entire life. It's not at all uncommon to see yard signs with slogans like "Say no to turbines" and "Preserve our scenic countryside"¹.

These have always been present – I remember seeing them even as a kid, but they were just symbolic protest² and you'd only see them out on farms that had turbines in view. What's different now is that you'll see these signs in towns, and the people who have these signs in their yard are also winning county supervisor/councilor seats that they use to regulate wind to death. Temporary "pauses" are put on permit requests that get tabled while they "study" new rules endlessly; road and shadow setbacks are being increased; turbine height caps are introduced at levels that prevent the current machines from being upgraded; noise limits, lighting mandates, even county-wide caps on turbine numbers.

I think the trend is still positive in favor of wind in Iowa, but at the local level, there is a concerted effort to bog it down in red tape and kill it.

¹ Never mind that the scenic countryside is actually just amber waves of industrial corn and hog manure lagoons.

² As much as I can recall, I wasn't exactly in tune with local politics as a child.
by jrockway | 2025-08-24 19:29:06+00:00
Contrarian here. I wish all product managers were forced to work on a much slower machine, so that "make this shit fast" becomes the highest priority issue in the backlog.

Nobody is writing slow code specifically to screw over users with old devices. They're doing it because it's the easiest way to get through their backlog of Other Things. As an example, it is a priority for a lot of competitive games, and they perform really well on everything from the latest 5090 to a pretty-old laptop integrated graphics GPU. It's done not because they only hired rockstar performance experts, but because it was a product priority.
by kelnos | 2025-08-24 19:29:08+00:00
I think it's unfortunately very common for people to come here into the comments without having read the article.

I'll admit I do that sometimes, mainly to get an impression as to whether or not the article is worth reading in the first place, but sometimes I'll end up getting drawn into the discussion here, having not read the article at all.

But I can't imagine posting a toplevel comment without reading the article.