MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by derbOac | 2025-08-22 14:27:26+00:00
Arguments like this have been around for decades. I think it's important to keep in mind — critical even.

At the same time, as I've been forced to wrestle with it more in my work, I've increasingly felt that it's sort of empty and unhelpful. "Crud" does happen in patterns, like a kind of statistical cosmic background radiation — it's not meaningless. Sometimes it's important to understand it, and treating it as such gets no one anywhere. Sometimes the associations are difficult to explain easily when you try to pick it apart, and other times I think they're key to understanding uncontrolled confounds that should be controlled for.

As much as this background association is present too, it's not always there. Sometimes things do have zero association.

Also, trying to come up with a "meaningful" effect size that's not zero is pretty arbitrary and subjective.

There's probably more productive ways of framing the phenomenon.
by wan23 | 2025-08-22 14:28:12+00:00
I use it to do all the things that I couldn't be bothered to do before. Generate documentation, dump and transform data for one off analyses, write comprehensive tests, create reports. I don't use it for writing real production code unless the task is very constrained with good test coverage, and when I do it's usually to fix small but tedious bugs that were never going to get prioritized otherwise.
by newpavlov | 2025-08-22 14:28:18+00:00
Deal with it. Async is my greatest disappointment in the otherwise mostly stellar language. And I will continue to argue strongly against it.

After Rust has raised the level of quality and expectations to such great level, async feels like 3 steps back with all those arguments "you are holding it wrong", footguns, and piles of hacks. And this sentiment is shared by many others. It's really disappointing to see how many resources are getting sunk into the flawed async model by both the language and the ecosystem developers.

>go build it then

I did build it and it's in the process of being adopted into a proprietary database (theoretically a prime use-case for async Rust). Sadly, because I don't have ways to change the language and the compiler, it has obvious limitations (and generally it can be called unsound, especially around thread locals). It works for our project only because we have a tightly controlled code base. In future I plan to create a custom "green-thread" fork of `std` to ease limitations a bit. Because of the limitations (and the proprietary nature of the project) it is unlikely to be published as an open source project.

Amusingly, during online discussions I've seen other unrelated people who done similar stuff.
by hvb2 | 2025-08-22 14:28:24+00:00
> I couldn't give a rat's ass if a manager doesn't apologize to me in a way that makes my eyes water, admitting his humanity in the process, if that manager doesn't insist on making the same mistake and getting in my way all the time.

But this is part of the point, while for you that might not matter, your manager cannot assume this. Other people DO care.

One of the ways your manager can mess us is by assuming you don't care about that...
by klodolph | 2025-08-22 14:28:52+00:00
This is one of those things that kind of bugs me about, say, OsStr / OsString in Rust. In theory, it’s a very nice, principled approach to strings (must be UTF-8) and filenames (arbitrary bytes, almost, on Linux & Mac). In practice, the ergonomics around OsStr are horrible. They are missing most of the API that normal strings have… it seems like manipulating them is an afterthought, and it was assumed that people would treat them as opaque (which is wrong).

Go’s more chaotic approach to allow strings to have non-Unicode contents is IMO more ergonomic. You validate that strings are UTF-8 at the place where you care that they are UTF-8. (So I’m agreeing.)
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-22 14:29:00+00:00
It's kinda funny that my experience is the opposite but then again I'm senior and working at a different scale.

I don't think my LLM-assisted programming is much faster than my unassisted programming but I think I write higher quality code.

What I find is that my assistant sometimes sees a simple solution that I miss. Going back and forth with an assistant I am likely to think things through in more detail than I would otherwise. I like to load projects I depend on into IntelliJ IDEA and use Junie to have a conversation with the code that helps me get a more thorough and complete understanding of it than I would get looking at it myself more quickly.

As a pro maintenance programmer there is always a certain amount of "let sleeping dogs lie", if something works but you don't understand it you may decide to leave it alone. With an assistant I feel empowered to put more effort into really understanding things that I can get away without understanding, fix minor problems I wouldn't have fixed otherwise, etc.

One bit of advice is that as the context grows assistants seem to break bad. Often I ask Junie to write something, then give it some feedback about things it got wrong, and early in the session I'm blown away. You might think you should keep the session going so it will remember the history but actually it doesn't have the ability to realize some of the history is stale because it is about the way the code was before [1] and the result is eventually it starts going in loops. It makes sense then to start a new session and possibly feed it some documentation about the last session that tells it what it needs to know going forward.

[1] a huge problem with "the old AI", ordinary propositional logic sees the world from a "god's eye" point of view where everything happens at once, in our temporal world we need temporal if not bitemporal logic -- which is a whole can of worms. On top of that there is modal logic ("it is possible that X is true", "it is necessary that X is true") and modeling other people's belief "John thinks that Mary thinks that X is true") It's possible to create a logic which can solve specific problems but a general-purpose commonsense logic is still beyond state of the art.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-22 14:29:01+00:00
>AI isn't good enough yet to generate the same quality of software as human engineers

The software I have vibecoded for myself totally obliterates anything available on the market. Imagine a program that operates without any lag or hicupps. Opens and runs instantly. A program that can run without an internet connection, without making an account, without somehow being 12GB in size, without totally unintuitive UI, without having to pay $20/mo for static capabilities, without persistent bugs that are ignored for years, without any ability to customize anything.

I know you are incredulous reading this is, but hear me out

Bespoke narrow scope custom software is incredibly powerful, and well within the wheelhouse of LLMs. Modern software is written to be the 110-tool swiss army knife feature pack to capture as large of an audience as possible. But if I am just using 3 of those tools, an LLM can write a piece of software that is better for me in every single way. And that's exactly what my experience has been so far, and exactly the direction I see software moving in the future.
Show HN: Ginormous News, daily global news briefings from radio
by julianchr | 2025-08-22 14:29:27+00:00
Hey everyone! The idea behind Ginormous News is pretty simple. I have set up agents to listen to and analyze 20 different radio stations from around the world, and distill down the most globally significant stories into a free daily briefing.

I’ve been working on Ginormous News for the past few months out of a desire to be more informed about global events. I felt that I was being siloed into only seeing specific news stories due to my consumption of primarily English language media, and I decided to build something to help tackle this issue.

The system operates using Whisper for multilingual transcription and a combination of frontier LLMs. I make an effort to have the stories be as grounded as possible in original quotes from the broadcasts, in an effort to reduce hallucinations, and avoid errors due to the model’s lack of recent world state due to knowledge cutoff date.

These are the very early stages for this product, but I’ve been learning about events in the world I wouldn’t otherwise have heard about.

One question I am often asked is, why radio?

Radio is a particularly interesting medium for a few reasons.

For one, radio is extremely accessible. While news sites have become more and more restricted with paywalls and sign up demands, radio is broadcast globally, for free.

Second, compared to the endless feeds and SEO-boosting articles of today’s online news cycle, radio has comparatively little information output at any given moment. If you think about it, since the advent of radio, the effective mental bandwidth that it can use has been fixed. There are only so many tokens of information that can be fit into a 24 news stream that is comfortable to listen to as a humans.

Given the fewer tokens per minute, and the linear nature of radio’s storytelling, this means that the broadcasters must be talking about what is most important at any given moment. This means that it is a source of news that is much easier to process, and has much less noise to signal.

This was built out of a personal need, and as such, I am completely fine paying out of pocket to receive this level of detailed briefing every morning. Given that it is a negligible extra cost to share it out to additional users, I plan to keep this briefing free for all for the foreseeable future.

Take a look and let me know what you think!
by quotemstr | 2025-08-22 14:29:31+00:00
It would be one thing if Bluesky were a no-politics, effortpost-only zone. It's not that though. In actuality, Bluesky is an echo chamber just like 2010s-era Twitter, but somehow even more strident.

Academics who insisting on their colleagues moving to Bluesky aren't deleting noise. That's a pretext. What these academics are really doing is trying to use their social power to enforce singular answers to questions that divide the public. They're tacitly asserting that nobody can be a legitimate intellectual and disagree with them on social issues having nothing to do with their field.

I'm not going to waste my time on people who can't tolerate divergent perspectives. X has plenty of tools to help people prune distractions from their timelines. This isn't a signal to noise ratio thing so much as a contamination taboo. Frazer would be proud. The problem these academics have with X isn't that it's noisy channel, but actually that it lets the wrong people participate.

These academics think they have a monopoly on knowledge production, but they don't. Close-mindedness bleeds from the social to the professional domain with terrifying speed. Censorship is anathema to discovery. When academics try to use ostracism to build echo chambers like Bluesky, they're only accelerating the ongoing divorce of academia and scholarship.
by gf000 | 2025-08-22 14:29:34+00:00
Java's GCs are a generation ahead, though, in both throughput-oriented and latency-sensitive workloads [1]. Though Go's GC did/does get a few improvements and it is much better than it was a few years ago.

[1] ZGC has basically decoupled the heap size from the pause time, at that point you get longer pauses from the OS scheduler than from GC.
by Fanofilm | 2025-08-22 14:29:47+00:00
Step 6: The facebook / Instragram / X equivalents then lose their ad revenue. They then may capitulate to keep the ad revenue.

See BlueSky just rolled out Terms ToS that the automated UN Safety (censorship) laws they will accept. This is an automated pipeline for the "censorship demand data notice" can be applied in an automated why. It is plumbing for automating censorship. See "DSA" part of those laws and how BlueSky's ToS is responding.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-08-22 14:29:53+00:00
I didn't say anything about back-progagation, but if you want to talk about that then it depends on how "analogous" you want to consider ...

It seems very widely accepted that the neocortex is a prediction machine that learns by updating itself based on sensory detection of top-down prediction failures, and with multiple layers (cortical patches) of pattern learning and prediction, there necessarily has to be some "propagation" of prediction error feedback from one layer to another, so that all layers can learn.

Now, does the brain learn in a way directly equivalent to backprop in terms of using exact error gradients or a single error function? No - presumably not, it more likely works in layered fashion with each higher level providing error feedback to the layer below, with that feedback likely just being what was expected vs what was detected (i.e. not a gradient - essentially just a difference). Of course gradients are more efficient in terms of selecting varying update step sizes, but directional would work fine too. It would also not be surprising if evolution has stumbled upon something similar to Bayesian updates in terms of how to optimally incrementally update beliefs (predictions) based on conflicting evidence.

So, that's an informed guess of how our brain is learning - up to you whether you want to regard that as analogous to backprop or not.
by Panzer04 | 2025-08-22 14:30:26+00:00
Are you joking?

You bought 30 64GB SSDs from 2010 in 2021?

You realise 3k buys you much faster, much higher capacity modern SSDs with the same longevity characteristics? Hell, if it really matters there's still some optane floating around, with 100k cycle endurance ratings and much, much better performance.
by woodruffw | 2025-08-22 14:30:39+00:00
ruff is not compiled into uv; it's bootstrapped from an independent build, much like how `cargo fmt` is bootstrapped from a separate toolchain component (rustfmt). You can see how that works in the PR[1]. Importantly, that means that you don't experience any build-, install-, or run-time burden if you don't use this subcommand.

[1]: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/pull/15017
by beAbU | 2025-08-22 14:30:48+00:00
Where I'm from we call a HOA a body corporate, and every home owner in the scheme has a % ownership in the BC. The title deed includes the ownership share. So if the house ownership is transferred, so is the share in the BC.

Size of the share is determined usually by the dwelling floor area divided by the sum total of all dwellings in the scheme.

So if you sell your house after decades of contributions, and then the BC is dissolved, then too bad, you sold your share in a going concern and lost your say in it's affairs.

Arguably you benefitted from the contributions from someone who came before you, and now someone will benefit from yours.
by pxtail | 2025-08-22 14:31:19+00:00
I think what's going on is a paradigm shift to treat code as completely throwaway piece, not meticulously analyzed, inspected and manually reviewed but completely replaceable without caring too much about internals - if outputs are correct for set of inputs, perf is ok then its passed as "good enough". This approach is still evolving but some developers are already picking it up, and since students and new developers are learning to work like this then future for new generation of coders in inevitable - new position is coming to life: vibe coding engineer
by jonhohle | 2025-08-22 14:31:28+00:00
The first time I came across his channel I felt similarly, but coupled with the dry humor, passive aggressive offhand comments, and intentionally long pauses waiting for the joke to land, I began to feel like it went with the tone of the content. I wasn’t sure at first, but he seems very self aware.

The whole thing reminds of some 80s PBS and Wes Anderson mashup in the best way.
by dpeckett | 2025-08-22 14:31:32+00:00
For TCP streams syscall overhead isn't a big issue really, you can easily transfer large chunks of data in each write(). If you have TCP segmentation offload available you'll have no serious issues pushing 100gbit/s. Also if you are sending static content don't forget sendfile().

UDP is a whole another kettle of fish, get's very complicated to go above 10gbit/s or so. This is a big part of why QUIC really struggles to scale well for fat pipes [1]. sendmmsg/recvmmsg + UDP GRO/GSO will probably get you to ~30gbit/s but beyond that is a real headache. The issue is that UDP is not stream focused so you're making a ton of little writes and the kernel networking stack as of today does a pretty bad job with these workloads.

FWIW even the fastest QUIC implementations cap out at <10gbit/s today [2].

Had a good fight writing a ~20gbit userspace UDP VPN recently. Ended up having to bypass the kernels networking stack using AF_XDP [3].

I'm available for hire btw, if you've got an interesting networking project feel free to reach out.

1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.09423

2. https://microsoft.github.io/msquic/

3. https://github.com/apoxy-dev/icx/blob/main/tunnel/tunnel.go
by chpatrick | 2025-08-22 14:31:34+00:00
That's just a mathematical fact.

You have a big opaque box with a slot where you can put text in and you can see text come out. The text that comes out follows some statistical distribution (obviously), and isn't always the same.

Can you decide just from that if there's an LLM or a human sitting inside the box? No. So you can't make conclusions about whether the box as a system is intelligent just because it outputs characters in a stochastic manner according to some distribution.
by mschuster91 | 2025-08-22 14:31:37+00:00
> To get such a majority, even "the others" would have to be bothered by <something> so much, that they would be willing to go out and vote

Forcing mandatory attendance for HOA votes won't work out, that's the thing. Too many cases of remote landlords, properties stuck in inheritance limbo, or even First Amendment issues (can you be compelled to make speech, aka participate in a vote?). Requiring a "70% of all owner shares" would flat out kill most HOAs, and requiring a "70% of present owner shares" perpetuates the status quo of giving disproportionate amounts of power to the usual suspects.
by Citizen8396 | 2025-08-22 14:31:49+00:00
I suggest a more apt name: "Useful Idiot"

Best case scenario you're participating in abusive web scraping. Worst case your connection will be used by foreign adversaries to attack US critical infrastructure. [1][2][3]

[1] https://censys.com/blog/2025-state-of-the-internet-digging-i...

[2] https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/cybercrime...

[3] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/state-hackers...
by zahlman | 2025-08-22 14:31:51+00:00
Would Linux similarly be better if we wrote e.g. "cu list" instead of "ls", "cu change" instead of "cd", etc.? (The "cu" stands for "coreutils", of course.) Because it seems to me like the same arguments apply. I was already thinking of uv as a "project manager" and I understand that intended scope, and even respect the undertaking. My point is that I don't believe that labeling all the tasks under that scope like this actually improves the UX.

Maybe I'm wrong about that. But I don't know that it can actually be A/B tested fairly, given network effects (people teaching each other or proselytizing to each other about the new way).
by k_roy | 2025-08-22 14:32:02+00:00
That's really my problem with these kind of critiques.

EVERY language has certain pitfalls like this. Back when I wrote PHP for 20+ years I had a Google doc full of every stupid PHP pitfall I came across.

And they were always almost a combination of something silly in the language, and horrible design by the developer, or trying to take a shortcut and losing the plot.
by clickety_clack | 2025-08-22 14:32:05+00:00
Ugh. I worked with a PM who used AI to generate PRDs. Pretty often, we’d get to a spot where we were like “what do you mean by this” and he’d respond that he didn’t know, the AI wrote it. It’s like he just stopped trying to actually communicate an idea, and replaced it with performative document creation. The effect was to basically push his job of understanding requirements down to me, and I didn’t really want to interact with someone who couldn’t be bothered figuring out his own thoughts before trying to put me to work implementing them so I left the team.
by chimeracoder | 2025-08-22 14:32:25+00:00
> Has Go become the new PHP? Every now and then I see an article complaining about Go's shortcomings.

These sorts of articles have been commonplace even before Go released 1.0 in 2013. In fact, most (if not all) of these complaints could have been written identically back then. The only thing missing from this post that could make me believe it truly was written in 2013 would be a complaint about Go not having generics, which were added a few years ago.

People on HN have been complaining about Go since Go was a weird side-project tucked away at Google that even Google itself didn't care about and didn't bother to dedicate any resources to. Meanwhile, people still keep using it and finding it useful.
by StableAlkyne | 2025-08-22 14:32:33+00:00
> no one left behind == no one allowed ahead

It's like this in the US (or rather, it was 20 years ago. But I suspect it is now worse anyway)

Teachers in my county were heavily discouraged from failing anyone, because pass rate became a target instead of a metric. They couldn't even give a 0 for an assignment that was never turned in without multiple meetings with the student and approval from an administrator.

The net result was classes always proceeded at the rate of the slowest kid in class. Good for the slow kids (that cared), universally bad for everyone else who didn't want to be bored out of their minds. The divide was super apparent between the normal level and honors level classes.

I don't know what the right answer is, but there was an insane amount of effort spent on kids who didn't care, whose parents didn't care, who hadn't cared since elementary school, and always ended up dropping out as soon as they hit 18. No differentiation between them, and the ones who really did give a shit and were just a little slow (usually because of a bad home life).

It's hard to avoid leaving someone behind when they've already left themselves behind.
by anthonylevine | 2025-08-22 14:32:45+00:00
> Per the original post, it's a tool that will waste massive amounts of your time on slop.

I'm gonna need you to know that just because some random dev who wrote a blog said something doesn't make it true. You know that, right?

> Don't pretend that there are no negative consequences to the proliferation of AI tools.

Wait, what? Who said otherwise?

I love how you compare this tool to a Tesla's Autopilot mode, then get called out on it, and are like "Are you saying these tools are perfect" lol.
by mellosouls | 2025-08-22 14:33:19+00:00
I did a quick fact-check on your post here by googling quillette twitter cancel

These are among the first articles that come up and note that none of them are Nazis, just people bucking the weird dictats of what was allowed to be said at the time.

Twitter's Trans-Activist Decree

https://quillette.com/2018/11/28/twitters-trans-activist-dec...

Ending Discrimination by Twitter

https://quillette.com/2022/11/28/ending-discrimination-on-tw...

Why I'm Suing Twitter

https://quillette.com/2019/02/26/why-im-suing-twitter/

Think Cancel Culture Doesn’t Exist? My Own ‘Lived Experience’ Says Otherwise

https://quillette.com/2020/07/30/think-cancel-culture-doesnt...
by const_cast | 2025-08-22 14:33:19+00:00
This is true, but what I've come to realize is companies only prioritize the short term, no matter what, no exceptions. They take everything on as debt.

They don't care about losing customers 10 years later because they're optimizing for next quarter. But they do that every quarter.

Does this eventually blow up? Uh, yeah, big time. Look at GE, Intel, Xerox, IBM, you name it.

But you can get shockingly far only thinking about tomorrow over and over again. Sometimes, like, 100 years far. Well by then we're all dead anyway so who cares.