MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by slightwinder | 2025-08-01 10:20:02+00:00
Single scripts are easier coded and can be more loosely, as you don't have to look out for sneaky memory-leaks and other problems which might emerge in long-running tasks. There is also no need to build and maintain a bespoke framework for managing your multiple jobs. This avoids mental debt for the devs. If you have many jobs, from multiple devs, it's the more pragmatic solution.
by injidup | 2025-08-01 10:20:22+00:00
I knocked up a VSCode plugin in a few hours that extracted a JSON file from a zip file generated by the clang C++ static analyzer, parsed it into the VSCode problems and diagnostic view and provided quick fixes for simple things. All of this without hardly knowing or caring about java script or how the NPM tool chains work. Just kept taking screen shots of VSCode and saying what I wanted to go where and what the behaviour should be. When I was happy with certain aspects such as code parsing and patching I got it to write unit tests to lock in certain behaviours. If anyone tells you LLM's are just garbage generators they are not using the tools correctly.
by serial_dev | 2025-08-01 10:20:51+00:00
This has not been my experience. Many times I ask explicitly what I want, and the tools fail to deliver. Of course, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, plenty of times they are helpful and can really deliver 10x improvements. The key is recognizing the patterns when these tools can deliver and when they can’t. Don’t forget to reevaluate every couple of weeks, as the tools improve all the time.
by klabb3 | 2025-08-01 10:21:02+00:00
Clothes (today) are fungible. Some products are, like prototype experiences. Those are so uncommon that developers who got to do green field coding were making their peers jealous. This is because most software lasts for a long time. So long, in fact, that prototypes ”turning into” production systems for many years is a meme. If you look at the value built in large companies today, it’s not code, but predominantly data. If we didn’t have to care about data from legacy systems, we’d be a lot faster too.

Is there a market for such fast rotating code? Yes. And that market will probably grow, due to it getting flooded with cheap labor and attention – I’m sure people will find new use cases as well. But, crucially, this is not the market we have. You can bet all you want on AI, but in all likelihood the market needs will largely remain the same.
by MartijnBraam | 2025-08-01 10:21:53+00:00
That's a lot of software setup for something that can easily be done in hardware. I've been over engineering things for years now.

For my mic I have also an sm57 feeding into a dbx286 hardware mic preamp and dynamics. Then feeding that into my audio interface for calls that also gives me a knob to mix in my mic into my headphone signal. This all gives me zero latency monitoring off all the gates and compression. Then for the output signal I have a seperate audio interface I use with all the web calling applications that sends the audio of all other people in the call to o another compressor that levels out their volumes. Then that is sent through a tc electronic multiband compressor unit to fix the really dull mics some people have. This is then mixed with the stereo output of all other applications on my audio interface again.

This way I have consistent audio no matter what OS I'm booted into at that moment.
by nialse | 2025-08-01 10:22:10+00:00
Agreed that innovation comes from many places including academia. However, graduates are a byproduct of academia, not its produce. Academia needs enrich itself with sufficiently educated (and "adequately" motivated) future personell. It is not a vocational activity, it is a self-serving sieve, selecting for the traits needed for working in academia. If you ever wondered why university courses often contain elements which are not that useful for doing actual work post graduation, you might have the answer right there.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-08-01 10:22:44+00:00
What you say is important of course, and it's what makes me less than sure in my assessment. It was after all more of a mental exercise in appreciating just how vast an area of space this relatively tiny quantity of objects is spread across.

To give one further perspective example here: a single large bulk container ship can carry up to 8,500 car-sized units.

This means that even if every single one of the maybe 15,000 satellites in orbit were the size of a car (most of them are much smaller actually), all together, they'd fill no more than the storage spaces of two bulk container ships with lots of room to spare at that.

This, spread over a multi-layered area as vast as our orbital space, means that even with their constantly moving at incredible speeds, and all the junk out there scattered between the satellites themselves, there's an enormous amount of emptiness between it all mitigating against impacts being very likely or frequent at all.

After all, of the 8,070 or so Starlink satellites in orbit right now, there's little mention of more than a few having been knocked out by debris in orbit. It seems that solar storms are their much bigger worry and cause of mishaps.

As the saying goes, space is huge, sometimes more than our brains can easily comprehend. This applies even in the comparatively tiny orbital regions of it that we use daily.
by npteljes | 2025-08-01 10:23:02+00:00
I think it's not about the truth in that message, but rather how the message is delivered, and how the kernel of truth is planted into what context.

For example, the same message could be told by referring to respect instead of fear.

"I want less war. You only stop war by having the best technology so much that earns the respect of your adversaries. If they don't respect you, if they don’t respect the might that your army can summon, you. Instead of going along with you, they will attack you at the next opportunity"
by mschuster91 | 2025-08-01 10:24:12+00:00
> Hope you had a good backup because the only way to fix it is to set it up again from scratch.

You can get that from any homelab setup though. Personally, I long since went the route of regularly setting up my Pis from scratch using Ansible - that way I at least know that I didn't forget to commit any manual changes made.

Pi-specific, my recommendation is to have a serious power supply. For the old Pis with Micro USB, Meanwell makes good ones, link that with a good wire gauge (18 AWG or more) and off you go. New Pis with USB-C, Anker power supply and a decent USB-C cable... that solves a lot of microSD corruption issues because the power regulation to the card isn't that good and just passes through brownouts/undervoltage conditions.

And the second recommendation, use "industrial" microSD cards, preferably those that are SLC. Grab them from Mouser, yes they are a bit more expensive than "normal" microSD cards but will live so much longer.

[1] https://www.mouser.de/ProductDetail/SanDisk/SDSDQED-008G-XI
by yoaviram | 2025-08-01 10:24:49+00:00
It seems to me that the ongoing “vibe coding” debate on HN, about whether AI coding agents are helpful or harmful, often overlooks one key point: the better you are as a coder, the less useful these agents tend to be.

Years ago, I was an amazing C++ dev. Later, I became a solid Python dev. These days, I run a small nonprofit in the digital rights space, where our stack is mostly JavaScript. I don’t code much anymore, and honestly, I’m mediocre at it now. For us, AI coding agents have been a revelation. We are a small team lacking resources and agent let us move much faster, especially when it comes to cleaning up technical debt or handling simple, repetitive tasks.

That said, the main lesson I learned about vibe coding, or using AI for research and any other significant task, is that you must understand the domain better than the AI. If you don’t, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
by Certhas | 2025-08-01 10:25:22+00:00
So one of several teams working on Chrome Mobile (so not the rendering engine, JavaScript engine, etc...) was 40+ people. That tells us nothing about the size of the overall Chrome team.

I have seen comments on HackerNews that estimated 1000-4000 people working on Chrome at Google, but without a sound basis. Chromium had ~800 individuals author a commit, that's probably as close as we can get to actual hard facts.

The Platform Division which includes Chrome was 20.000+ but it's pure guesswork to break out numbers for Chrome for that.

Honestly my prior is that the vast majority of software dev work at Moz goes towards Firefox, I don't see any evidence to the contrary, including in terms of products released/developed. A modern browser is an enormously complex engineering feat, nothing else Moz releases is in that ballpark.

I guess bottom line is that we don't really know the exact breakdown.
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-08-01 10:25:42+00:00
What would be needed is an international organization formed by at least all nations that have orbital launch capabilities to act as an FAA of sorts for rocket launches in general and putting things into orbit in particular. Earth orbit, and Low Earth Orbit especially so, is a limited resource and the outlook of permanently ruining dark skies globally or turning the skies into a big garbage patch that could make space travel impossible for centuries to come (aka Kessler syndrome) is just too bleak to not do it carefully with sustainability in mind.
by smartmic | 2025-08-01 10:26:10+00:00
This is because AI-generated code will always be mediocre. There is so much poor-quality code in the training base that it will dilute the high-quality sources. AI is not a craftsman who builds on his own high standards, but rather a token grinder tool calibrated to your prompts. Even if you describe your problem (prompt) to a high standard, there is no way it can deliver a solution of the same standard. This will be true in 2025 as it was in 2023 and probably always will be.
by mettamage | 2025-08-01 10:26:40+00:00
> TL;DR: My take on AI for programming and "vibe coding" is that it will do to software engineering what fast fashion did to the clothing industry: flood the market with cheap, low-quality products and excessive waste.

This metaphor is too limiting though. You can do so much more with software than you can with clothes. Take a look at what injidup wrote. People are creating small home brewed projects for personal use.

So a lot of "fast fashion software" is going to be used at home. And let's face it, for our own home brewed projects for personal use, standards have always been lower because we know our own requirements.

I think in this "shadow economy of personal software use", LLMs are a boon.
by anonnon | 2025-08-01 10:26:54+00:00
> Trump to feel strong and that you are weak

Trump (and the US) is strong, and Canada (and other individual trading partners) are weak. How is that not painfully obvious at this point, especially given Europe's recent capitulation? Take the best deal you can get and hope he spares you from the kind of public humiliation to which he subjected Europe. Face it, orange reddit was wrong (again) about how this would play out.

Oh, I mentioned Canada's flat real GDP growth. It's also worth noting that 40% of their GDP is just real estate--a massive bubble and shell game.
by thewisenerd | 2025-08-01 10:27:13+00:00
t1: select for update where status=pending, set status=processing

t2: update, set status=completed|error

these are two independent, very short transactions? or am i misunderstanding something here?

--

edit:

i think i'm not seeing what the 'transaction at start of processor' logic is; i'm thinking more of a polling logic

while true: r := select for update if r is None: return sleep a bit

this obviously has the drawback of knowing how long to sleep for; and tasks not getting "instantly" picked up, but eh, tradeoffs.
by okasaki | 2025-08-01 10:27:33+00:00
Really? What's your ranking then and methodology?

IMO one of the primary ways the US terrorizes is by bombing with impunity. According to its own record keeping, the US has dropped 337000 bombs in the last 20 years, or 46 bombs per day.

Can you imagine living in one of the countries that the US keeps bombing? Every time you hear an airplane you have to think if you're about to die, or someone you know is about to die, or a school is about to be blown up, or a water treatment facility.
by sillyfluke | 2025-08-01 10:27:53+00:00
> My sense is actually that the reason he talks that way is to make sure that people who consider themselves "on the left" don't mistake him for being someone "on the right" (and therefore in camp b), and immediately dismiss his claims.

This is a tad naive I think. "antitrust left" is also to useful term to use to signal to the billionaire class of Democratic party that you are not their enemy. If the author actually agreed with many of the antitrust group's positions and housing policy was one of the few exceptions they disagreed on, they would shy away from using the term. The only reason you would use that term is because you want to bring disrepute to their entire platform.

These abundance folks appear to be the only hope the billionaire Democrats have after having sunk so low as to direct their media assets to support Cuomo and to pour bucketloads money into the coffers of the corrupt disgraced governor in order prevent those "wacky socialists" to gain any more traction.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-08-01 10:28:00+00:00
Out of curiosity, which country in the world is going to "begin the slaughter, enslavement, rape and pillaging" of:

- The country already having the largest army in the world, whose internal military branches are larger than most armies in the world ?

- The country that has a ocean to ocean control of its land, with east and west being fundamentally impossible to attack ?

- The country that is surrounded north and south by either allies, or third world countries struggling to even maintain peace within their own borders ?

- The country that is already going down some of the fastest descent into fascism history has seen ?

And how exactly that relates to Palantir, whose goal is not to provide vision algorithms for bombing brown people in the middle east, but to straight up build a file about their own citizens that would have made the Gestapo drool ?

The vast majority of countries that can afford a solid military already do, and neither is at threat of whatever bullshit you're making up here. Even local tensions like Pakistan and India, Thailand and Cambodia are being handled with incredibly small portions of their militaries, despite some pretty deep hatred. The countries that cannot, either have agreements with other powers in the region, or indeed get attacked by a military so overwhelmingly strong for them that even putting 100% of their GDP into it would not suffice.

I'll tell you what "pursuing military supremacy" does though: as it stands, the vast majority of the world sees the United States as a threat, with ever renewed imperialistic needs and aspirations. The United States is always just a single dip towards madness away from being the greatest danger that currently exists in the world. And now, they are suppressing internal protesters. But hey, if you're looking to rediscover how 9/11 was like and why it happened, pop off I guess.
by tgv | 2025-08-01 10:28:21+00:00
My experience is that it does produce low quality code. Perhaps I tried some unusual stuff, but the other day, I had a simple problem in JavaScript: you have an image, add a gray border around it, and keep it within given width/height limits. I figured that should be common enough for whatever OpenAI model I was using to generate useable code. It started with doing something straightforward with a good-looking Math.min operation, and return a promise to a canvas. I asked "why is this returning a promise?", and of course it answered that I was right and removed the promise. Then it turned out that if the image was larger than limits, it would simply draw over the borders. Now I had to add that it should scale the image. It made an error in the scaling. IIRC, I had to tell it that both dimensions should be scaled identically, which led a few more trials before it looked like decent code. It's a clueless junior that has been kicked out of boot camp.

What it does do perfectly: convert code from one language to another. It was a fairly complex bit, and the result was flawless.
by mettamage | 2025-08-01 10:28:51+00:00
> That said, the main lesson I learned about vibe coding, or using AI for research and any other significant task, is that you must understand the domain better than the AI. If you don’t, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Only if you fully trust it works. You can also first take time to learn about the domain and use AI to assist you in learning it.

This whole thing is really about assistance. I think in that sense, OpenAI's marketing was spot on. LLMs are good at assisting. Don't expect more of them.
by mschuster91 | 2025-08-01 10:29:05+00:00
He's not wrong in that excerpt.

Russia only dared invade Ukraine because the US under Obama didn't do shit when Assad violated the "red lines" of using chemical weapons and barrel bombs against civilians or when the "little green men" took over Crimea and Donbas. And it's not Obama alone for what it's worth, Trump was just as bad in cozying up to Putin, and us Europeans didn't care either.

The secret to the relative period of peace after WW2 was that everyone was mightily afraid of getting smacked hard by the US. The first cracks obviously started back with Vietnam, but the actual erosion of the US hard and soft power was the clusterfucks in Iraq and Afghanistan.
by vendiddy | 2025-08-01 10:29:28+00:00
It is but requires discipline.

I've been coding for 15 years but I find I'm able to learn new languages and concepts faster by asking questions to ChatGPT.

It takes discipline. I have to turn off cursor tab when doing coding exercises. I have to take the time to ask questions and follow-up questions.

But yes I worry it's too easy to use AI as a crutch
by westurner | 2025-08-01 10:30:00+00:00
`pip install numpy` does not install the most optimal build for a given platform, or e.g. MKL or BLAS -linked packages. `pip install numpy-mkl` is not the official way as those binary wheels are built by a third-party.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37808036 :

> conda-forge maintainer docs > Switching BLAS implementation: https://conda-forge.org/docs/maintainer/knowledge_base.html#...

rattler-build supports CPU levels and CUDA levels. Thus conda-forge packages may be more performant on modern CPUs and GPUs than the average PyPI package: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41306658
by rnhmjoj | 2025-08-01 10:30:16+00:00
I stopped using tmux, but not for the reasons mentioned here. I think tmux is perfectly fine, I just don't like the default keybindings and I could never remember how to copy/paste between windows.

I've switched to abduco for persistance and use neovim for window management (both vim and neovim have a built in terminal emulator). Using vim keybindings for managing windows and tabs is more natural, I can copy/paster just normally and you even get some perks like `gf` to quickly open a filepath under the cursor.
by simonw | 2025-08-01 10:30:49+00:00
I calculate that as $61.59 https://www.llm-prices.com/#it=3644200&ot=92349&ic=15&oc=75

So that's about $12/hour, or 2.6 cents per line of finished code.

Still pretty cheap! Very few unassisted human programmers can churn out 2300/(5 * 60) = 7.6 lines of code per minute consistently over a five hour time span.

That said, I think Claude Code, while impressive, is incredibly quick to burn through tokens. I still mostly use copy-and-paste info Claude or ChatGPT as my main AI-assisted workflow which keeps me in more control and spends a ton less tokens.
by benterix | 2025-08-01 10:31:01+00:00
Although I agree with you in principle, after having seen what Putin is doing in Ukraine, I believe the original message would reach the target better than yours.

To add to the confusion, you can have military intelligence assess your potential target and still fail miserably just like Putin failed in his blitzkrieg. So a little bit of saber-rattling might serve a purpose, I guess.
by slightwinder | 2025-08-01 10:31:12+00:00
> Raspberry Pi gets a lot of negative comments these days, with unfavorable comparisons to mini PCs at similar price points, which is certainly justified.

It entirely depends on the purpose you use them for. Mini-PCs are good for PC-things, meaning raw power, storage, just running software. But they fall flat if you tinker with them. They usually don't have GPIO, nore a community build around hacking and tinkering with them (AFAIK).

But here is the thing, many people were using raspis for those software-jobs, as NAS, homeserver, mediacenter, gamestation, they have no need for tinkering and GPIO. So this group of people is totally fine with a mini-pc, and maybe even should stay with them, and giving the raspi room to focus on its original purpose again.
by pornel | 2025-08-01 10:31:47+00:00
Bringing the check immediately is associated with fast food, and overcrowded touristy places that are rushing customers to leave. Places that want to be fancy act like you're there to hang out, not to just eat and leave.

It is sometimes absurd. In the UK there's an often an extra step of "oh, you're paying by card? let me go back and bring the card reader". Some places have just one reader shared among all waiting staff, so you're not going to get it faster unless you tip enough to make the staff wrestle for it.

I like the Japanese style the best — there's a cashier by the exit.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-01 10:33:16+00:00
>How does your theory explain the 30 European nations that have been at peace with each other for decades?

How much of a percentage is those decades of peace out of the 200k year existence of the entire human race that has been defined only by war and conquest? You're cherry-picking the one exception the proves the rule.

Secondly, peace amongst EU countries was due to the US world nuclear power having established occupation of Europe after WW2, and then EU countries have allied together not out of fondness for one another (which doesn't exist even today), but out out necessity of survival, since that was the only way they could stand up to USSR threat. The enemy of my enemy is my friend basically.

Thirdly, conquest is at the core of EU too, except it's bureaucratic, political and economical, not military. Just because you don't see bullets being fired, doesn't mean the spoils of the economic pie doesn't get split up between victors.
by doom2 | 2025-08-01 10:33:54+00:00
This is why I can't get into fountain pens (also left handed). I want to hold a pen like a right handed person does. I want to use the inks, pens, and papers that everyone else uses without taking special consideration for my being left handed. Why should I have to learn to write underhand or to hook my wrist or to tilt the paper when I write, just to avoid smudging? I don't see right handed people doing it.
by k4rli | 2025-08-01 10:34:51+00:00
Madman seems better than a con-man. All those satellites for an unnecessary service that could never become profitable...

Is this the node_modules/js ecosystem for space? 7k+ satellites for a service that Viasat and others can do with ~10. Supposedly Starlink has better ping, but as it's still unusable for gaming, it doesn't appear nearly as beneficial.