MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrtksn | 2025-08-09 21:29:19+00:00
This expectation about AI taking away the software jobs is utterly ridiculous for me. What AI Will take away if eventually delivers on the promises is the existence of software development as business.

Don't forget that a software company is bunch of software engineers in coordination, if those software engineers can be placed with a graphics card or AI service provider they just go ahead and start your own software company and just use this services to undercut the software companies that no longer need software engineers.

If AI is actually able to code like a real software engineer then people that are not software engineers and were laid off from software companies should just get an AI subscription and take away the business from the company that they were fired from.

Maybe it's not that graduates are not able to get jobs because AI is replacing them but because the focus of the capital at this time is no longer on speculating over software projects, therefore on the companies that are actually making money are able to actually hire. Today if you want to work in a company that exist thanks to speculative capital and pays huge salaries like in the day when software was eating the world than you need to be in AI.
by mikewarot | 2025-08-09 21:29:53+00:00
>Have you, or anyone, ever lived with such a system?

Yes, I live with a few of them, actually, just not computer related.

The power delivery in my house is a capabilities based system. I can plug any old hand-made lamp from a garage sale in, and know it won't burn down my house by overloading the wires in the wall. Every outlet has a capability, and it's easy peasy to use.

Another capability based system I use is cash, the not so mighty US Dollar. If I want to hand you $10 for the above mentioned lamp at your garage sale, I don't risk also giving away the title to my house, or all of my bank balance, etc... the most I can lose is the $10 capability. (It's all about the Hamilton's Baby)

The system you describe, with all the needless questions, isn't capabilities, it's permission flags, and horrible. We ALL hate them.

As for usable capabilities, if Raymond Chen and his team at Microsoft chose to do so, they could implement a Win32 compatible set of powerboxes to replace/augment/shim the standard file open/save system supplied dialogs. This would then allow you to run standard Win32 GUI programs without further modifications to the code, or changing the way the programs work.

Someone more fluent in C/C++ than me could do the same with Genode for Linux GUI programs.

I have no idea what a capabilities based command line would look like. EROS and KeyKOS did it, though... perhaps it would be something like the command lines in mainframes.
by fcpguru | 2025-08-09 21:30:20+00:00
yt-dlp -f "bv*[vcodec^=avc1][ext=mp4]+ba[acodec^=mp4a][ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4][vcodec^=avc1]" \ --merge-output-format mp4 \ -o "%(title)s.mp4" \ "YOUTUBE_URL_HERE"

Thanks. I played around with your idea and got this. It’s still not 100% of videos. Only YouTube videos that have any H.264+AAC stream available (which is 99.9% of public YouTube today, even if the main/default version is VP9 or AV1).

But re encoding to solve this is not required. I stand corrected.
by musicale | 2025-08-09 21:30:35+00:00
Better faculty to student ratio (1:6 vs. 1:19). Closer proximity to actual Santa Clara (Silicon) Valley (and Google, NVIDIA, etc.) More NCAA championships and Olympic medals. Still leading in "big game" football series (though currently on a losing streak.) More Turing awards.

Not as many Nobel prizes - or elements on the periodic table - however. Berkeley (having many more undergrads) also has more alumni.

(But note for both schools that good researchers are not necessarily good undergraduate instructors.)
by stego-tech | 2025-08-09 21:30:42+00:00
Oh, I’m well aware of who favored bootcamp devs and cert collectors: MSPs and outsourcing firms.

If I were to put on my tinfoil hat though, I agree with your theory. These people often (in my personal experience) don’t know how to do anything not covered explicitly in the learning or testing material, leading to outsized dependencies on subscription or vendor portfolio products in lieu of independent or collaborative problem solving.
by jongjong | 2025-08-09 21:31:15+00:00
The stuff about the utility of machine-readable Web Service Description Language got me rolling my eyes.

WSDL is just pure nonsense. The idea that software would need to decide which API endpoints it needs on its own, is just profoundly misguided... Literally nobody and nothing ever reads the WSDL definitions; it's just poor man's documentation, at best.

LLMs only reinforce the idea that WSDL is a dumb idea because it turns out that even the machines don't care for your 'machine-friendly' format and actually prefer human-friendly formats.

Once you have an MPC tool working with a specific JSON API, it will keep working unless the server makes breaking changes to the API while in production which is terrible practice. But anyway, if you use a server, it means you trust the server. Client-side validation is dumb; like people who need to put tape over their mouths because they don't trust themselves to follow through on their diet plans.
by prerok | 2025-08-09 21:31:15+00:00
So, I just looked it up, thinking I might have overlooked something but, at least according to wikipedia, REST does not prescribe the format of the data transferred. So, I don't understand why you are comparing REST to xml, yaml, json or whatever.

Now, YAML has quite a few shortcomings compared to JSON (if you don't believe me, look at its handling of the string no, discussed on HN), so, at least to me, it's obvious why JSON won.

SOAP, don't get me started on that, it's worth less than XML, protobuf is more efficient but less portable, etc.
by fma | 2025-08-09 21:31:37+00:00
There's going to be so much vibe coding to clean up, that I'm gonna have a fever and the only prescription is, more vibe coding! (throwback to SNL More Cowbells skit...)

On a serious note, can't wait to see what salaries I command as a senior dev in a few years...when junior dev pipeline dried up and other older seniors left the industry.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-09 21:32:58+00:00
> volatile currency and less investment in treasury securities is what a decline in a reserve currency looks like, isn't it?

Not particularly.

Modern currencies segregate their transacting and store-of-value components. Dollar hegemony was established on the basis of store of value strength. It is now maintained through transactional superiority. The historic default was for an exporter to America to have comfort they could keep their excess dollars in Treasuries over the long term. Today, there are a broader set of options for safe assets, depending on one’s views. (There are more securitised assets, period, today than there were in the 1960s.)

Treasuries being defaulted on could undermine the dollar’s reserve status. Treasuries just becoming more volatile, probably not—the relevant buyers hold to maturity.
by Ygg2 | 2025-08-09 21:33:26+00:00
Yeah, it's not binary; it's just a step function. /s

No, it's as close to binary as you can get. Is your only source of Undefined Behavior FFI specially marked functions and/or packages? Have you checked data races for violating thread safety invariants? If yes - You're safe.

Allow a bit of unsafety into the system, like Go, and the unsafety can creep into your ecosystem. See https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2025/07/24/memory-safety.html

Is Go in mostly safer than C++? Maybe. But you can never prove that about either of them. So while you may pretend one is safer than the other, it's a bit like picking which boat is taking on more water.

Can you prove Rust code is safe? Well there is the simple way - no unsafe. But what about unsafe blocks? Yes, you can prove it for them as well. If the unsafe code block is it will note safety invariants and why are they preserved by unsafe block. Can this be practically done? Depends on the crate, but with enough effort, yes.
by BrenBarn | 2025-08-09 21:33:42+00:00
Unless that "big" percentage is an outright majority of the citizenry --- not a majority of congressional districts, not a majority of electoral college votes, not a majority of the votes in the last election, but an outright majority of the actual desires of all citizens --- then the system is broken. I'm pretty sure that is not the case; it's at least debatable. But the problem is that we've bought into a system that says that doesn't matter.
GradeLab – AI That Grades Handwritten Exams with 98% Accuracy
by ftaxat | 2025-08-09 21:33:55+00:00
We built GradeLab, an AI-powered platform that grades handwritten exam papers with 98% accuracy — in seconds, not days.

Why we made it: Traditional grading is slow, exhausting, and inconsistent, especially for large batches. Teachers often spend hours (or weeks) grading, limiting their ability to focus on teaching and student engagement. We wanted to change that.

Check it out at: https://gradelab.io
by unionpivo | 2025-08-09 21:34:18+00:00
We are getting fucked by USA because we do not feel strong enough without them.

Everybody is blaming Ursula for the deal with Trump, like it was her decision. The individual countries politicians made the call, she is just a convenient scape goat (Probably precisely why her position was created for, to push things politicians know will be unpopular). Politicians (leaders of EU states) have and do have all the power to give her the marching orders.

We are getting fuck on a lot of things because we feel the need to rely on USA. With better/bigger militaries ourselves, USA will have les leverage.
by wglb | 2025-08-09 21:34:26+00:00
I didn't mean this in a flippant way, and in fact have been experimenting with telling gimini "examine this code for SQL injections" and "examine this code for cryptographic flaws". Early results are very encouraging. I've been testing this approach on some open source libraries such as sqlalchemy.

I suspect that you will get better results than telling it to make no mistakes at the beginning.
by yojo | 2025-08-09 21:34:42+00:00
I took a Math 1A class (intro to calc) at Cal where the prof turned his back on class at the start of the hour, then proceeded to mumble incoherently for 60 minutes while filling a chalkboard with equations. He’d turn back around at the end of the hour. Many students brought pillows. I learned literally nothing in lecture.

This professor wasn’t demanding, he was just making zero effort to actually teach.

Great researchers are not necessarily great teachers, especially for intro courses. Anecdotally, I think this is a common issue at “prestigious” schools.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-08-09 21:34:44+00:00
If your goal is to make sure anyone who wants a livable wage can get one, you can’t just decide you don’t care about the things that produce them. There’s a number of areas in California that already suffer from a lack of businesses; you may be more familiar with this phenomenon by the labor-focused name we usually use for it, “high unemployment”.
by mikert89 | 2025-08-09 21:34:59+00:00
The problem with this is it creates a caste system that gets locked in based on how you did on math tests when you were 14. There is certainly predictive power, but people get into these schools for all sorts of reasons.

Also, there are unforeseen consequences. Take venture capital, its actually relatively easy for a harvard grad to raise money, the reason being:

- everyone is trying to get an early piece of a company from the next bill gates/mark zuckerberg

- they fund every harvard grad since returns on a win like that are 10,000X.

-> consequence is almost all early stage capital gets allocated to ivy grads

-> most companies owned by ivy grads

-> caste system

the hope is that ai eliminates this vetting process by giving leverage to everyone
by bayindirh | 2025-08-09 21:35:13+00:00
This was discussed a ton in debian-devel. First, the tmpfs doesn't take much space already, and /tmp became a folder where persistence should not be expected over the years.

The problem with /tmp was many people and apps used it as an inter-user communication medium and expected persistency there, so it created both security problems and wasted disk space over time.

Since not many packaged apps used the /tmp like that and used the folder the way it should be used, the change was made.

I'm running Debian testing on one of my systems, and the change created no ill effects whatsoever. Not eating SSD write cycles can be considered a plus, even.

However, as I also noted in the relevant thread, the approach might have a couple of downsides in some scenarios.

If you have the time and the desire, discussion starts at https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2024/05/msg00014.html
by Someone1234 | 2025-08-09 21:35:35+00:00
Yep, it is often repeated bad advice that was originally aimed at healthy weight adults and athletes and then misunderstood by people attempting to lose body fat. It is incorrectly repeated on hundreds of exercise sites and articles. Cite:

> Protein intake should range between 1.0-1.5 grams/kg of adjusted body weight. To calculate adjusted body weight, first calculate excess weight: Excess weight = current weight — ideal body weight (IBW). Adjusted body weight = IBW + 0.25 of excess body weight. This amount generally accounts for 20% to 30% of total caloric intake.

So a slightly more complex way of calculating roughly the same thing. I'd argue that for most people getting your ideal weight is a good enough approximation, and that using your overweight/obese body fat in your protein calculation is wrong by a lot no matter which calculation you use.

https://www.ajmc.com/view/chapter-2-clinical-nutrition-guide...
by telotortium | 2025-08-09 21:35:35+00:00
> How about for schools that had racial segregation within living memory?

Maybe if you’re a Boomer, although even by the time they were going to university, racial discrimination was rapidly being replaced by affirmative action. This is the 2020s - even though some problems from that era still haven’t been solved, brute forcing the solutions from back then won’t make them any better and has already produced a major backlash.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-09 21:35:43+00:00
But it does look like that. You just don't have the patience to and persistence of vision to see it. You keep making it sound like the camera is making up the image. It's not. It's what is there. The auroras are not static like you are making it out to be. None of this photography is showing unnatural imagery. Why is this confusing?
by smsm42 | 2025-08-09 21:36:36+00:00
So we're moving from "it never happened, it's crazy!" to "of course it's happened before, but it's different this time, so I just falsely pretended the time before didn't happen"? Of course each case is different. But Presidents interfered in economy of private enterprise for a while - including criticizing CEOs, firing CEOs, and many other intrusive acts - especially after (and including) FDR, and pretending nobody before Trump ever did it is either ignorant or disingenuous. If you don't like what Trump is doing, great, explain why, but don't falsely claim things like that didn't happen before. They did.
by cossatot | 2025-08-09 21:36:52+00:00
Because it's for your kid's bed. At 3 AM the previous night, they peed the bed, so you got the other one out and put it on, throwing this one in the laundry room. Then, today you washed it but the one on the bed already is still in good shape.

Or, you have sheets of a few different colors, each paired to a comforter with a different weight that is changed seasonally, or biweekly, depending on the preferences of you and your bedmate.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-08-09 21:36:58+00:00
Couldn't disagree more. Learning the basic building blocks of programming (which is stuff that LLMs can do at a high level when dealing with small, self-contained problems) is critical because understanding the low-level details is so important when you're applying systems-level thinking.

I've interviewed more that a few "software architects" who couldn't put together a for loop, and these folks were largely just BS artists and PowerPoint generators.
by hellcow | 2025-08-09 21:37:10+00:00
This right here. We should demand not to subsidize the richest companies in the world. The Walmart family can afford to pay their employees a living wage. Instead you and I pay for that in taxes, while they extract billions in profit and value from their business.

If anything we should be subsidizing small businesses to give a more level playing field against companies with global economies of scale.
by dgs_sgd | 2025-08-09 21:37:25+00:00
Yep, I think these two things can be true at the same time:

1. Admitting a certain amount of students based on legacy status is not necessarily a bad thing

2. A University should not be eligible for taxpayer funds if they have admissions like (1) or similar holistic criteria.

In a society as diverse as America I think 2 is a fair line to draw. And the universities with large and powerful alumni networks where legacy admissions are most relevant have the least "need" for public funds. They have huge endowments.
by analog31 | 2025-08-09 21:37:36+00:00
I think a century from now, we'll look back on privatized higher education the way we look back on privatized health care: Something that evolved by a series of compromises, that society depends on, but that is perpetuating inequality while also gouging us and not making us healthier.

Ironically, the appeal of an "elite" university depends on the public image of the student body. The university has to manage that image through its admissions process. Any open criteria for "merit" will quickly turn the student body into a monocultural freak show. This would in turn diminish the public image of the university -- the exact thing that the students were hoping to benefit from.
by scrollaway | 2025-08-09 21:37:38+00:00
No, it's sometimes just extremely easy to recognize people who have no idea what they're talking about when they make certain claims.

Just like I can recognize a clueless frontend developer when they say "React is basically just a newer jquery". Recognizing clueless engineers when they talk about AI can be pretty easy.

It's a sector that is both old and new: AI has been around forever, but even people who worked in the sector years ago are taken aback by what is suddenly possible, the workflows that are happening... hell, I've even seen cases where it's the very people who have been following GenAI forever that have a bias towards believing it's incapable of what it can do.

For context, I lead an AI R&D lab in Europe (https://ingram.tech/). I've seen some shit.
Show HN: GPU Profiling That's Useful in 60 Seconds
by technoabsurdist | 2025-08-09 21:37:39+00:00
Hey HN! We're building a profiler for ML inference that actually shows what's happening at the hardware level without having to manually parse through flame graphs, or set up nsys and ncu.

The problem: Current ML profilers either dump too much data (torch.profiler) or abstract away the details you need. You can't see why your model is actually slow - is it memory bandwidth? Kernel launch overhead? Cache misses?

Our approach: We're reverse engineering GPU execution to trace from Python ops down to PTX instructions. One decorator gives you the full execution graph with actual bottlenecks highlighted.

Technical details: - Traces Python → CUDA kernels → PTX with timing breakdowns - Shows memory access patterns and bandwidth utilization - Kernel occupancy and scheduling analysis - Works with PyTorch/JAX, TensorFlow coming

We used this to optimize Llama inference and found bottlenecks we couldn't see before - got 50%+ speedup: https://www.herdora.com/blog/the-overlooked-gpu

Free beta with 10 hours of profiling: https://keysandcaches.com Github: https://github.com/Herdora/kandc Docs: https://www.keysandcaches.com/docs

Curious what inference bottlenecks others are hitting that current tools can't diagnose. What's your experience with existing profilers? Would be very useful to hear thoughts from the community :)
by gnabgib | 2025-08-09 21:37:46+00:00
Related:

Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing (61 points, 13 days ago, 17 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44700558

Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash (19+11 points, 2 months ago, 3+3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44251089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44251667
by rkelapure | 2025-08-09 21:37:51+00:00
Learn from my mistakes. Leverage these design patterns for your hashtag#vibe coding.

1. Truman Show Pattern 2. Call The Oracle Pattern 3. Spotlight Pattern 4. Lego Pattern 5. Bouncer Pattern 6. Tribal Knowledge Pattern 7. Groundhog Day Pattern 8. GPS Coordinates Pattern 9. Inception Pattern 10. Goldilocks Zone Pattern 11. Iron Man Pattern 12. Mission Control Pattern 13. Hot Hand Pattern (bonus from Steve Yegge )
by beeflet | 2025-08-09 21:38:07+00:00
>which upgradable memory module format could be used with the same speed and bandwidth as the soldered in solution

CAMM perhaps? The modular memory is important, because they are selling them to two different markets: gamers that want a small powerful desktop, and people running LLMs at home. The modularity of the RAM allows you to convert the former into the latter at a later date, so it seems pretty critical to me.

For this reason alone, I am going to buy a used epyc server instead of one of these desktop things. I will be able to equip it with a greater amount of RAM as I see fit and run a greater range of models (albeit at lower speed). The ability to run larger models slowly at a later date is more important than the ability for me to run smaller models faster now. So I am an example of a consumer who does not like framework's tradeoff.

You would think that they would at least offer some type of service where they take it into the factory and refit it with new ram chips. Perhaps they could just buy used low-ram boards at a later date and use them to make refurbished high-ram boards.

Another solution is to make it so that it supports both soldered and unsoldered ram (but at a lower frequency). Gaming is frequency-limited but does not require much ram, but a lot of workloads like AI are bandwidth limited. Hell, if you're going to have some high-frequency RAM irreplacibly soldered to the motherboard, it might as well be a chiplet!
by ugh123 | 2025-08-09 21:38:53+00:00
Man, thats a confusing setup for what this is, of which "Workbench" is a reduced desktop environment on some (custom?) linux distribution. All of which runs on the Caligra "developer terminal" (viewable on the home page https://caligra.com/ ) which, from the single top-down photo they provide, looks like a slightly more modern Commodore 64.
by prinny_ | 2025-08-09 21:38:54+00:00
The top comments are focusing on what "know" means in the context of an LLM but I think that while it's an interesting discussion it misses the point. Even if we agree that an LLM can "know" things, the tech has been heavily advertised as nothing less that transformative. If it can't help itself from inventing non existent answers or count the number of "r"s in the word blueberry (a test I tried myself the other day on my phone's chat-gpt app, it said "three") it's not transformative.
by cnst | 2025-08-09 21:39:04+00:00
This has actually always been the case (Dan Luu's article from 2015 comes to mind), but, previously, it required doing a bit of actual math, and doing a bit of reading:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10758278 (2015 danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs)

This Windsurf employee #2 revelation of the 99% loss in value for employee stock, is simply a confirmation of an existing practice, just more visible and easier to reason about.