MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yoyohello13 | 2025-08-02 15:37:04+00:00
A few years ago there was a blog post trend going around about “write you’re own x” instead of using a library or something. You learn a lot about how software by writing your own version of a thing. Want to learn how client side routing works? Write a client side router. I think LLMs have basically made it so anything can be “library” code. So really it comes down to what you want to get out of the project. Do you want to get better at C#? Then you should probably do the port yourself. If you just want to have the ported code and focus on some other aspect, then have Claude do it for you.

Really if your goal is to learn something, then no matter what you do there has to be some kind of struggle. I’ve noticed whenever something feels easy, I’m usually not really learning much.
Show HN: Find out how much your products or idea cost
by jgaleria | 2025-08-02 15:37:39+00:00
* With AI variance of course *

Vibe coded this over the weekend! - Upload a product sketch, image, or describe any idea and it generates a complete Bill of Materials with real components, suppliers and pricing.

Is this useful for any makers/builders? Looking for some feedback.

GitHub: https://github.com/jgaleria/make-stream-bom-demo/tree/main
by calebkaiser | 2025-08-02 15:37:45+00:00
The 1890s were the launching point for widespread unionization among coal miners in places like my home-state of Kentucky. Company towns were increasingly common, and major motivations for unionization were to combat things like being paid in company skrip or letting neighborhood kids ("breaker boys" as young as 8) work in the mines. Their social lives--from their neighborhood, to their social "clubs", to the literal currency they were able to use--were entirely defined by their job and the company they worked for.

Tough to use them as proof that this "doesn't have anything to do with economics" when their entire social life was defined by the economics of coal mining.
by roywiggins | 2025-08-02 15:37:45+00:00
This sort of thing from LLMs seems at least superficially similar to "love bombing":

> Love bombing is a coordinated effort, usually under the direction of leadership, that involves long-term members' flooding recruits and newer members with flattery, verbal seduction, affectionate but usually nonsexual touching, and lots of attention to their every remark. Love bombing—or the offer of instant companionship—is a deceptive ploy accounting for many successful recruitment drives.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_bombing

Needless to say, many or indeed most people will find infinite attention paid to their every word compelling, and that's one thing LLMs appear to offer.
by twoodfin | 2025-08-02 15:37:47+00:00
Real per capita disposable income has been on a steady upward trend for decades:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0

Unless socialization activities like bars or athletics are major outliers, it seems likely that in income-relative terms, the average American has much cheaper access to social activities.

(Unrelated, but if you squint at that chart you can see why Trump got elected, almost & then actually reelected.)
by jghn | 2025-08-02 15:38:16+00:00
Disagree entirely, and would suggest the parent intentionally dive in on things like this.

The best way to skill up over the course of one's career is to expose yourself to as broad an array of languages, techniques, paradigms, concepts, etc. So sure, you may never touch C# again. But by spending time to dig in a bit you'll pick up some new ideas that you can bring forward with you to other things you *do* care about later.
by Flimm | 2025-08-02 15:38:34+00:00
I share your intuition that your likelihood of getting a ticket is related to the speed of other vehicles. Presumably, police choose to prioritise ticketing the worst offenders when there are too many offenders to handle.

But I don't share your intuition that safety is also relative in that way. If you're driving dangerously (too fast, or while drunk), you're driving dangerously, even if everyone else is driving dangerously too. If you're in a country where nobody wears a seatbelt, it's still prudent to wear a seatbelt, just as much as in a country where that is the norm. I don't think Google Maps should encourage people to drive as dangerously as everyone else. Quite the opposite!
by klabb3 | 2025-08-02 15:39:09+00:00
> Here is the uncomfortable truth. Only a small group of people are capable of operating at an elite level. […] It is the same thing in sports as well.

It’s not just uncomfortable but might not be true at all. Sports is practically the opposite type of skills: easy to measure, known rules, enormous amount of repetition. Research is unknown. A researcher that guarantees result is not doing research. (Coincidentally, the increasing rewards in academia for incrementalist result driven work is a big factor in the declining overall quality, imo.)

I think what’s happening is kind of what happened in Wall Street. Those with a few documented successes got disproportionately more business based to a large part on initial conditions and timing.

Not to take away from AI researchers specifically, I’m sure they’re a smart bunch. But I see no reason to think they stand out against other academic fields.

Occam’s razor says it’s panic in the C-suites and they perceive it as an existential race. It’s not important whether it actually is, but rather that’s how they feel. And they have such enormous amount of cash that they’re willing to play many risky bets at the same time. One of them being to hire/poach the hottest names.
by SteveNuts | 2025-08-02 15:39:50+00:00
The VMWare merger is easily the worst tech disaster in my career. VMWare was the market leader basically since they started and they never really stopped innovating and making their product better (I’m talking specifically about vSphere not the desktop products).

It was expensive but worth every penny in my opinion, and it was literally everywhere. In enterprise IT it was just what you did, there was never really much of a question.

Nutanix will eventually eat the lunch that Broadcom doesn’t even care to try to eat.
by echelon | 2025-08-02 15:40:32+00:00
This feels like Windows itself is no longer producing enough growth for Microsoft relative to its other efforts. Even the enterprise sales lock-in isn't compelling enough for the cloud/AI-centric future Microsoft envisions. So Microsoft is slowly pulling resources that it can instead invest into Azure and AI and other high-growth business units.

I don't watch Windows too closely. Have there been any other signals of waning investment into Windows? Has Nadella or the other leadership admitted to this?

Hasn't Microsoft also been pulling back from Xbox? IIRC, haven't they been trying to consolidate and use gaming to lionize Windows as a platform? After spending billions on multiple AAA studios? That would seem counter to a Windows pullback strategy. Is this a case of the left hand not talking to the right hand?
by michaelcampbell | 2025-08-02 15:40:41+00:00
I'm on the tail end of my 35+ year developer career, but one thing I always do with any LLM stuff is this: I'll ask it to solve something generally I know I COULD solve, I just don't feel like it.

Example: Yesterday I was working with an Open API 3.0 schema. I know I could "fix" the schema to conform to a sample input, I just didn't feel like it because it's dull, I've done it before, and I'd learn nothing. So I asked Claude to do it, and it was fine. Then the "Example" section no longer matched the schema, so Claude wrote me a fitting example.

But the key here is I would have learned nothing by doing this.

There are, however, times where I WOULD have learned something. So whenever I find the LLM has shown me something new, I put that knowledge in my "knowledge bank". I use the Anki SRS flashcard app for that, but there are other ways, like adding to your "TIL blog" (which I also do), or taking that new thing and writing it out from scratch, without looking at the solution, a few times and compiling/running it. Then trying to come up with ways this knowledge can be used in different ways; changing the requirements and writing that.

Basically getting my brain to interact with this new thing in at least 2 ways so it can synthesize with other things in your brain. This is important.

Learning a new (spoken) language uses this a lot. Learn a new word? Put it in 3 different sentences. Learn a new phrase? Create at least 2-3 new phrases based on that.

I'm hoping this will keep my grey matter exercised enough to keep going.
by dismalaf | 2025-08-02 15:40:55+00:00
That graph starts 70 years after the aforementioned coal miner scenario...

And yes, in the 1800s housing was comparatively cheap because land was close to free and you built your own home. Same goes for booze and venues to drink it because you made your own and there was zero regulation.

Today everyone is being choked by the relatively high cost of real estate (inflation looks ok because we have cheap durable goods like electronics). The death of 3rd spaces is well documented.
by Rendello | 2025-08-02 15:41:00+00:00
I feel this. I think loneliness has been the principle feeling in my life forever, whether I'm with people very different to myself or like-minded. Lack of connection == lack of purpose, and that makes every action more difficult.

Piers Steel researches motivation and has a book called "The Procrastination Equation". In the book, motivation is modelled as Motivation = (Expectedness * Value) / (Impulse * Delay). In his academic papers, it's rendered as:

Utilityᵢ = (Eᵢ Vᵢ) / (Γᵢ D)

That is, the perceived utility of any action increases with the expectancy that one will be able to finish it, and the perceived value of the end result, and is reduced by a person's inclination to be impulsive or distracted and the end goal's distance from the present.

How can any action have utility if someone has no place in the world? As a social species, our purpose is largely defined socially. When you're going solo, it's hard to get a sense of value of a given action.
by galangalalgol | 2025-08-02 15:41:15+00:00
I tried 20/4 with 90 minutes every other day. It got me from obese to merely overweight, but stuck there. My doc told me to stop with the IF, that while it worked, it wasn't ideal nutritionally, and had me eat healthy meals three times a day with a high protein snack. Weight still isn't quite into my healthy range, but I feel way better and all my numbers are better.
by GregDavidson | 2025-08-02 15:41:37+00:00
I'm a geek and have shared my home with housemates for 50 years. When I was poor and when I was prosperous. When I was married and when I was not. It's almost always been good for me, including for growth in my social intelligence. It was especially valuable when my wife died. Some of my housemates have been challenging. More became close friends. Living together people take their masks off. Quality social connections have been invaluable to me.
by AIPedant | 2025-08-02 15:41:42+00:00
The distribution is merely tricky to pin down when looking at overall AI spend, i.e. these "$T+ scale impacts."

But the distribution for individual researcher salaries really is pure guesswork. How does the datapoint of "Attention Is All You Need?" fit in to this distribution? The authors had very comfortable Google salaries but certainly not 9-figure contracts. And OpenAI and Anthropic (along with NVIDIA's elevated valuation) are founded on their work.
by cnst | 2025-08-02 15:41:59+00:00
Why would headphones need contacts permissions? Where are you getting these headphones from?

I routinely deny permissions to most apps on Android, and never have any issues. In my years of using random apps, the only app I'm aware of, which doesn't work without permissions, is Capital One banking app, which refuses to work unless it gets the phone permission. So, I just 1-star Capital One in the Play Store, uninstall as defective, and move on.

BTW, where are the permission screens on iOS? Or is the blissful ignorance more secure than being able to click "deny" a few times?
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-08-02 15:42:28+00:00
I totally agree, though I'd like to frame OP's argument a little differently in a way that makes more sense I think.

I agree the "shit is just too expensive" is a pretty lame excuse. I think to back when I was a poor ballet dancer around college age, and we always found lots of cheap things to do - a lot of it was like you said, usually just going over to people's houses to hang out, or doing stuff in the city that was cheap or free. Going out to restaurants was a rare treat, and it was almost always a cheap dive place. I had to laugh about the comment about the expense of "8 oz cocktails" - we weren't drinking cocktails, we were drinking 6 packs of Natty Light in someone's studio apartment.

But what I think has changed is that it's so much easier to not be bored with modern tech, even if it makes you lonely. There is TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, multiplayer gaming, etc. It's just a lot easier to sit at home with these kinds of entertainment, so the "activation energy" required to go get up and plan things with friends just feels a lot higher.
by Zambyte | 2025-08-02 15:42:29+00:00
I may ultimately stay away from full face helmets, but surprise impacts like t-bones and rear-ends are precisely why I find full face helmets appealing. For one, I can't really control how I fall in a surprise crash. And two, I'm less worried about the initial impact, and more about being slammed into the pavement. Especially from a higher center of gravity like I have on my standing scooter. Being rear-ended and slamming my head back against the hood of a car will hurt, but my current helmet will probably suffice for that. Being slammed forward into the ground, it seems like my face will become very familiar with the pavement.

Another instance that a full face helmet seems appealing is in in getting doored. I often don't have a choice but to ride near a bunch of cars parked on the street.

Road cycling enthusiasts are a good reference point, but the differences I see are in that I am not as focused on being aerodynamic and lightweight, since I have an electric throttle doing 100% of the work for me. In the tradeoff between efficiency and safety, I have the luxury of leaning much more into safety before negatively impacting the ride itself very much. Most of the negative impacts of additional safety gear are on either end of the ride (gearing up and down)
by squigz | 2025-08-02 15:42:53+00:00
> It surprises me how people are less and less open to socialize, to the point that some even see you with disgust if you DARE to interrupt them from.their mobile phone trance.

Have you considered that maybe it's you, and you're just interrupting at the wrong time? Imagine someone's reading a book and you interrupt them and then you blame them for getting annoyed?!
by undebuggable | 2025-08-02 15:43:47+00:00
The same here. Oftentimes Google Maps switches to most exotic language "because of reasons". Then I set it manually to my preferred language, for decades now, and it's been the same language all the time. Are they trying to say with poker face "we don't track you"? I don't think my home-grown privacy habits are that good, somehow they manage to show me an ad of "blue sneakers" someone in the household mentioned this morning.
by cassianoleal | 2025-08-02 15:43:54+00:00
> a UDM pro is a router (as well as other things). The expectation is that it is connected to WAN.

That's a bad expectation.

When I moved houses, I was without home broadband for almost 2 months. I bought a Cloud Fibre Gateway as everybody recommended Unifi. I intended to set my local network up, have Home Assistant running, as well as my NAS and other self-hosted apps.

Couldn't do any of that until I figured out a way to tether my phone to my OpenWRT router that the Unifi was supposed to replace, and wire them together over ethernet.

Not the final straw that made be give up on it but a truly atrocious first experience.
by michaelcampbell | 2025-08-02 15:44:14+00:00
> passionate losers

This is unduly meanspirited. Your passion projects are not even considered to probably the vast majority of the world; that doesn't make you a loser.

I have zero interest in the Win11 UI, and am even on board with the cynical view that this is purely a bean counter cost savings for MS rather than some benevolent outreach.

But I respect the people that take this on and want to keep it going.
by perching_aix | 2025-08-02 15:44:22+00:00
I did assume good intentions and even gave them the benefit of the doubt: that's why I asked them why they were using a commanding tone and said nothing else. They clarified that indeed, their intentions were good and so being rude and sounding commanding wasn't the intent, and that was the end of that. Why do you have to turn this into something bigger? It was a done topic.

I also disagree that this isn't helpful. *

For one, they're now aware that they come off as commanding when they write like this. They now know they should look up why that is (if they care), and how to alter their language accordingly. This should serve them well, since it makes their use of language more in line with their intentions, and prevents them from receiving rude / more involved meta responses from those who don't assume good intentions or aren't willing to hear them out like I did. It should also prevent them accidentally causing reputational harm to the projects and organizations they're trying to support this way.

Second, since I kept it brief and minimal, I avoided other people asking about this not so nicely and not so straightforward. Could have turned into an ugly flamewar.

Speaking of, I do not understand why some people have it so out for "tone policing". It feels like an overreaction, a grand backwards swing in response to supposed "moderation overreach / censorship". Admittedly very in vogue these days, but cultural standards exist for a reason. I refuse to be forced to decide between the two extremes of overpolicing and no policement at all. I do also appreciate the value of just letting moderation tools and moderators do their job, but I do still have some - increasingly faint - hope that with some people, communication is also a viable, or even the preferable way - as it was in this case.

* And I further disagree that being helpful in terms of information content or effect would be mutually exclusive with all this, or would even be related. Helping alone doesn't make a helpful person, particularly if helping isn't their explicit intention.
by rorylaitila | 2025-08-02 15:45:05+00:00
So I've been full-time independent for 12 years now. In general, I don't think AI is a major driver of employee vs contractor decision but we'll see.

The market has been trending towards specialists for a long time. AI may help employees in the short term be more effective generalists, and so be able to compete with specialists. AI may help specialists be even more effective in their niche, while also serve wider needs, and so compete better with employees.

Something I do see happening is companies are doing a lot of low hanging fruit themselves in my space (I do revenue and business analytics). Today, they will get 80% of my specialty done themselves. That is enough for most companies. But that last 20% for those who want it, still requires a specialist like me who knows the domain entirely.
by burnte | 2025-08-02 15:45:37+00:00
They COULD be great AI chatbots with good data, but in general what is being deployed is just crap. The cheapest app they can get set up as fast as possible so they can check a box, there's no real concern to make it good. I had a talk with my last CEO in January about a similar project, I gave a plan on how to do it right. They instead tried to half ass it and it completely failed. But they don't care because the board member that wanted it is happy because it exists.
by nico | 2025-08-02 15:45:55+00:00
Agreed, for CC to work well, it needs quite a bit of structure

I’ve been working on a Django project with good tests, types and documentation. CC mostly does great, even if it needs guidance from time to time

Recently also started a side project to try to run CC offline with local models. Got a decent first version running with the help of ChatGPT, then decided to switch to CC. CC has been constantly trying to avoid solving the most important issues, sidestepping errors and for almost everything just creating a new file/script with a different approach (instead of fixing or refactoring the current code)
by michaelt | 2025-08-02 15:45:59+00:00
> I guess at some point people started taking themselves way too seriously. Worrying about what others think, or something, I don't know.

When I was a teenager, precisely one guy had videoed his teenage self waving around a broomstick like a lightsaber, and had it end up online. Video cameras and editing equipment were rare and expensive. And that one man was a cautionary tale, not to wave a broomstick like a lightsaber anywhere there are video cameras.

Now the video cameras are in everyone's pockets 24/7, and with the internet connection built in. Is it any wonder nobody's waving a broomstick like a lightsaber?
by accrual | 2025-08-02 15:46:19+00:00
Yeah, hidden context is starting to become an issue for me as well. I tried using my corp account to chat with Copilot the other day and it casually dropped my manager and director's names in the chat as an email example. I asked how it knew this and it said I had mentioned them before - I hadn't. I assumed it was some auto-inserted per-user corp prompt but it couldn't tell me the name of the company I worked for.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-08-02 15:46:32+00:00
The comment I responded to was specifically talking about "banning social media" and their confidence this would have a "positive" impact on birth rates, despite the clear preferences of younger people. I'm "bringing up" coercion because I'm not sure how to describe such policies and intentions otherwise?

The reason for it might not have been made explicit but we both understand what they were driving at and why they weren't "merely" asking the question of what effect a social media ban might have on chocolate sales or something equally arbitrary.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-08-02 15:46:43+00:00
Actual headline: Vikings grew barley in Greenland

Correction to the editorial addition: Climate was mild when and where they landed.

The Medieval Warm Period (MWP), also known as the Medieval Climate Optimum or the Medieval Climatic Anomaly, was a time of warm climate in the North Atlantic region that lasted from about 950 CE to about 1250 CE. Climate proxy records show peak warmth occurred at different times for different regions, which indicate that the MWP was not a globally uniform event. The MWP was followed by a regionally cooler period in the North Atlantic and elsewhere, which is sometimes called the Little Ice Age.

ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period

xkcd global climate timeline: https://xkcd.com/1732/