MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sdesol | 2025-08-12 17:27:10+00:00
I haven't looked at Claud Code, so I don't know if they have analyzers or not that understands how to extract any type of data other than specific coding data that it is trained on. Based on the runtime for some tasks, I would not be surprised if it is going through all the files and asking "is this relevant"

My tool is mainly targeted at massive code bases and enterprise as I still believe the most efficient way to build accurate context is by domain experts.

Right now, I would say 95% of my code is AI generated (98% human architectured) and I am spending about $2 a day on LLM costs and the code generation part usually never runs more than 30 seconds for most tasks.
by j45 | 2025-08-12 17:27:29+00:00
Gitlab can handle a lot of CI/CD hosted locally for free that github actually charges for.

Git was originally local only too. People would run their own source code repos, it was trivial to run and maintain for the most part for most basic to intermediate use cases.

I had clients who insisted source code (mine or theirs) couldn't be on a public cloud provider. It's not that unreasonable or uncommon.
by kmansm27 | 2025-08-12 17:27:34+00:00
I'd say it's more flexible! At least we're trying to head in that direction, since the SDK allows you to hook up any agent to our platform, not just CLI agents. And eventually we want people to be able to add their own frontend components for their agents, which would make the experience more custom than a terminal UI. Although yes, if you just want a 1:1 CLI agent on your phone, then mobile SSH clients might make more sense.
by Someone | 2025-08-12 17:27:55+00:00
I don’t think designing a fast CPU gets significantly easier with RISC-V. Yes, you don’t have to design an instruction set, but you still have to pick a good set of RISC-V of extensions, find the right mix of cache size, branch predictor memory size, number of integer and float ALUs, number of rename registers, vector size, etc, glue the parts together so that it all works and build something without hitting patents that others hold.

‘Cheaper’ only at come into view if you’re selling millions of devices, and even then there have been other designs that are similarly open for which you can’t buy really competitive cores.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-08-12 17:28:42+00:00
Yep I've worked at other big tech where they had periodic "executive bug filing" where executives would flag minor things that are annoying. These minor issues would then have higher than normal priority purely by virtue of being flagged by an exec. I have a likely controversial opinion that this executive bug filing actually led to better outcomes.

It did break prioritization in the opinion of the ground level teams and their goals but I argue it's not bad to at least periodically do this since grating against the current org structure prioritization and goals is not a bad thing to do on occasion.

Chances are they'll find there's no team that considers themselves the owners of spell check or spam filtering and the goals the keyboard team are going for is likely some silly thing like "number of sentences with correct punctuation" leading to the current ridiculous outcomes where the period in the URL is way too prominent, especially considering we don't even type full URLS into the search bar that often these days.

Dear Apple leads: if you're reading this do a short initiative where execs aim to file an annoyance a day. It's not hard to find such. There will be some complaints at the ground level that these executive annoyances get too much priority but part of that will be because you're questioning lower level org priorities (a healthy thing to do!), not because the issues don't matter. The end result will bring Apple a bit more in line with the quality we saw during the Jobs period since this is exactly the kind of shake up he did on occasion.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-08-12 17:30:06+00:00
For profit products are not individual human's putting in effort to learn. Stop making that comparison.

Humans are human. Humans can human when there is no profit motive without it being a copyright violation. Effectively infinitely scaling, for profit products, can't 'human' without it being a copyright violation. The two are much different cases, in no way comparable.

For profit products are PRODUCTS intended to make money for companies. AIs are scalable past an individual human.

Rules/concepts for humans are not relevant at all for for profit products.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-12 17:30:18+00:00
I've seen this in a UI. They went a step further and you could select a word (well token but anyway) and "regenerate" from that point by selecting another word from the token distribution. Pretty neat. Had the heatmaps that you mentioned, based on probabilities returned by the LLM.

This should also be pretty cheap (just one pass through the LLM).
by saratogacx | 2025-08-12 17:30:31+00:00
I find myself using it more and more as time goes on. I got one of those year long deals so I'm not really too invested in the cost but the overall experience is not bad.

You get several models you can use (albeit they're not quite as powerful as their branded versions directly). you can setup projects and most other features you come to expect.

They do a good job with search though which is kind of their core value prop. They summarize well, cite sources, and have largely been pretty accurate with their findings. Being able to start a research task and provide more info and context while it is running is nice too for that "oh, I forgot about this!" moment.

With the pro sub you also get $5 in api credits a month so there's that.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-12 17:30:45+00:00
While I mostly agree, I will say they're leaps and bounds better than a couple decades ago. Windows now accounts for less than 10% of MS revenue, and definitely lacks in attention by all indications. Linux on Azure outweighs their Windows use by an increasingly wider margine, and a significant amount of the progress that has occurred on Windows has been to make Linux development easier.

.Net and a lot of other tooling and projects are on Github under BSD licensing, and that's pretty cool... almost everything they do outside Windows/Office works in Linux these days. I do think they should at LEAST get a version of office (offline) that works in Linux... even if it's a bastardized web version that runs in Electron.

Aside: I couldn't say how much I appreciate the work Valve has done to improve gaming on Linux, and have no expectations of ever moving back to Windows. MS seems to want to extract literally every cent of value out of every Windows user, and it sickens me.
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-12 17:31:21+00:00
Which city? Which "high crime area?" Crime is down all across the US and way down in most major cities. Let's see some statistics, friend.

I live in NYC[0] and I'm old. It's never been safer in the many decades I've been alive.

And the police have little to do with that. They're just the biggest and best-armed gang.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City[1]

[1] In fact, NYC saw fewer murders in 2024 than any year since 1958 -- long before my parents ever met.
by hilbert42 | 2025-08-12 17:31:28+00:00
"A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering"

It still is. The spell checker on my Android phone is a PIA. It's too dumb to correct many typos, there's no way of highlighting wrongly used but correct words such a 'fro' and 'for', etc. There's no automatic or user defined substitution such as correcting 'rhe' with 'the' and yet keep the words highlighted until a final revision.

Wordpossessor spellers have no way of tagging certain words that one may or may not wish to use depending on context. A classic example that's caught me out past the draft and found its way into the final document without me noticing it is 'pubic' for 'public'. Why doesn't my speller highlight such words in red and ask whether I actually meant to use this word?

Moreover, spellers are not all of the same level of accuracy, for example Microsoft Word's speller is much better than LibrOffice's much to my annoyance as LibreOffice is my main (preferred) WP.

Nor is there a method of collecting misspelled words or typos and tagging them as spelling errors or typos for the purpose of helping one's spelling or typing. It'd be nice to have a list of my misspelled words together with their correct spelling, that way I could become a better speller. Also, spellers could be integrated with full dictionaries—highlight the word and press F1 for its meaning, etc.

There are no dictionary formats that are both universal and smart, that is that would allow for easy amalgamation between dictionaries and yet could contain user defined words and other user metadata which would be distinguished from the general corpus of words when crossed or amalgamated. For example, a smart dictionary format could contain metadata that would allow a dictionary and thesaurus to coexist in the same word list, similarly so different dictionaries, technical, medical etc.

All up, spellercheckers are still a damn mess. They need urgent attention.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-12 17:31:56+00:00
>I have a friend who collects and restores classic cars, and it is mindblowing how polished modern vehicles are (despite attempts by Ford et al to fill them with the world's shittest software so that you sometimes have to pull over and power cycle (restart) your car just to fix the GD radio). If you haven't ridden in a vehicle 50 years or older in a while, and you get a chance to, take it!

Exactly. The progress just keeps adding up and for far enough comparison points it's a categorical difference.

Always gives me a chuckle when you get some geniuses in the comments screeching about how their 70s/80s/90s Camry (or whatever, but let's be real here it's usually a Toyota product) was hot shit when even showroom new it was incredibly rough by modern standards.
by stronglikedan | 2025-08-12 17:32:46+00:00
> I may sound ignorant but if you delegate your knowledge to LLMs you'll stay ignorant.

That's kind of an ironic statement given the context. AI is just a glorified search engine that makes it very easy to find relevant information on a topic, just like a search engine but faster. One must still verify the results to be true, just like a search engine. AI is a tool to help you do your work faster, not do it for you, and should be trusted as much as any other anonymous source.
by hnlmorg | 2025-08-12 17:32:59+00:00
Yes because 5 is smaller than 4, and 4o isn’t even a number.

Also, some ChatGPT models include “gpt” in the name. Others do not.

I cannot guess what model string I need to pass. Whereas with Anthropic I can. And if I have to look it up each time on OpenAIs website, then it’s clearly garbage.

Also the “arcane barely used” part of your post is entirely subjective. I get you want to make the point that Anthropic naming is poor to support your point about OpenAI, but you’re over exaggerating your point there.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-12 17:33:09+00:00
I had the same thing when the Encarta CDs started to include pronunciation tests. You'd get a word, speak it in the microphone, and get a "score" on how well you pronounced that word. Knowing what I know now, it was probably pretty inaccurate and hand wavy, but in the early 90s that was an absolutely amazing experience for an ESL person.
by theamk | 2025-08-12 17:33:12+00:00
Seems reasonable to me? After all, they went to "predictable pricing" which seems to be generally better than usage-based one.

I think the only reason to go with usage-based pricing is if you want to take a risk to save money - you are getting unpredictable bills but hope that average is going to be cheaper. As any gamble, you can win or lose.
by wand3r | 2025-08-12 17:34:03+00:00
Yeah. I have noticed a disturbing amount of people believe fake stories, tweets, videos, propaganda etc. because it confirms their worldview or is otherwise fun. For example, the amount of people who thought dumb Republicans were dying from eating horse dewormer was way overblown. Or that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs.

I have adopted an extremely skeptical view of almost all content on the internet now. Fun videos that are staged aren't particularly harmful. Something like "a crazy coincidence or wild prank" made to look real and genuine is not particularly sinister. I personally have briefly put way to much stock in a screenshot of a Tweet from an unattributed anonymous poster alleging X happened. Simply because "it feels true" and confirms my bias. Be careful out there kids!
by danaris | 2025-08-12 17:34:20+00:00
> I think it’s that people tend to build up “logical” conclusions where they think each step is a watertight necessity that follows inevitably from its antecedents, but actually each step is a little bit leaky, leading to runaway growth in false confidence.

Yeah, this is a pattern I've seen a lot of recently—especially in discussions about LLMs and the supposed inevitability of AGI (and the Singularity). This is a good description of it.
by handfuloflight | 2025-08-12 17:34:32+00:00
Well you should look at it, because it's not going through all files. I looked at your product and the workflow is essentially asking me to do manually what Claude Code does auto. Granted, manually selecting the context will probably lead to lower costs in any case because Claude Code invokes tool calls like grep to do its search, so I do see merit in your product in that respect.
by hinkley | 2025-08-12 17:34:32+00:00
One of the big feats I accomplished on my last job was converting a Stygian nightmare of co-recursive code my “clever” coworker wrote into a tree scan and a single loop.

I fixed two bugs I knew about, four bugs nobody knew about, cut 20 seconds off of startup time per instance and 10 minutes off of deployment. And enough memory to run another process per box.

This is not even the first time on that job and it won’t be the last. In fact it was a theme. I landed half of the real improvements to response time and cluster size in about a quarter of the time investment, mostly by unraveling recursive bullshit inserted by two architectural astronauts. About ten percent was done by people following up on stuff I started. The rest was long slogs trying to do major architecture shifts while leaving the shape of the existing code alone.

To be clear: the iteration is not a super optimization weapon. It just clears the water enough that people can see what’s going on. This is to me the heart of “make the change easy”. You start refactoring for one problem and you find two more while you’re in there that were lost in the noise.

I’d say roughly half of the rest of my time was spent reworking code we ostensibly wrote for other teams that they balked at owning, in order to add features and convince them to take ownership of it. And almost half of that work was ironing out similar Rube Goldberg machines. How do you expect people to own code they can’t figure out how to maintain?

You won’t know if you haven’t tried, and “I haven’t seen this” is not a strong signal that you have. Keep an eye on the next coworker who talks like me and see what they’re up to.
by mike_hearn | 2025-08-12 17:34:52+00:00
My codebase has about 1500 files and is highly domain specific: it's a tool for shipping desktop apps[1] that handles all the building, packaging, signing, uploading etc for every platform on every OS simultaneously. It's written mostly in Kotlin, and to some extent uses a custom in-house build system. The rest of the build is Gradle, which is a notoriously confusing tool. The source tree also contains servers, command line tools and a custom scripting language which is used for all the scripting needs of the project [2].

The code itself is quite complex and there's lots of unusual code for munging undocumented formats, speaking undocumented protocols, doing cryptography, Mac/Windows specific APIs, and it's all built on a foundation of a custom parallel incremental build system.

In other words: nightmare codebase for an LLM. Nothing like other codebases. Yet, Claude Code demolishes problems in it without a sweat.

I don't know why people have different experiences but speculating a bit:

1. I wrote most of it myself and this codebase is unusually well documented and structured compared to most. All the internal APIs have full JavaDocs/KDocs, there are extensive design notes in Markdown in the source tree, the user guide is also part of the source tree. Files, classes and modules are logically named. Files are relatively small. All this means Claude can often find the right parts of the source within just a few tool uses.

2. I invested in making a good CLAUDE.md and also wrote a script to generate "map.md" files that are at the top of every module. These map files contain one-liners of what every source file contains. I used Gemini to make these due to its cheap 1M context window. If Claude does struggle to find the right code by just reading the context files or guessing, it can consult the maps to locate the right place quickly.

3. I've developed a good intuition for what it can and cannot do well.

4. I don't ask it to do big refactorings that would stress the context window. IntelliJ is for refactorings. AI is for writing code.

[1] https://hydraulic.dev

[2] https://hshell.hydraulic.dev/
by Analemma_ | 2025-08-12 17:35:00+00:00
Perplexity had a business case for one hot minute there, before OAI, Anthropic and Google all added search to their models, but now that have it, Perplexity doesn’t have a reason to exist anymore. They’re kind of the poster child for “if you don’t have your own model, you’re basically VC-funded market fit research for the companies which do, who will go on to copy and crush you.”
by SquibblesRedux | 2025-08-12 17:35:01+00:00
Another way to think about it is how interesting it is that humans can be so easily influenced by strings of words. (Or images, or sounds.) I suppose I would characterize it as so many people being earnestly vulnerable. It all makes me think of Kahneman's [0] System 1 (fast) and System 2 (slow) thinking.

[0] "Thinking, Fast and Slow" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow
by didibus | 2025-08-12 17:35:12+00:00
You seem possibly more knowledgeable then me on the matter.

My impression is that LLMs predict the next token based on the prior context. They do that by having learned a probability distribution from tokens -> next-token.

Then as I understand, the models are never reasoning about the problem, but always about what the next token should be given the context.

The chain of thought is just rewarding them so that the next token isn't predicting the token of the final answer directly, but instead predicting the token of the reasoning to the solution.

Since human language in the dataset contains text that describes many concepts and offers many solutions to problems. It turns out that predicting the text that describes the solution to a problem often ends up being the correct solution to the problem. That this was true was kind of a lucky accident and is where all the "intelligence" comes from.
by rowanG077 | 2025-08-12 17:35:37+00:00
Well yes I find these pretty insane. It's not ergonomic. It doesn't actually offer any safety. It has no integration with anything else. If I compare this to, for example, the rust Option, or Haskell's Maybe, it's not even funny how stark the difference is. And both of them are over the counter included.

Especially the the safety is something I can't step over. I don't feel it offers anything substantial over just having the struct without these macros.
by wiremine | 2025-08-12 17:35:53+00:00
> Having spent a couple of weeks on Claude Code recently, I arrived to the conclusion that the net value for me from agentic AI is actually negative.

> For me it’s meant a huge increase in productivity, at least 3X.

How do we reconcile these two comments? I think that's a core question of the industry right now.

My take, as a CTO, is this: we're giving people new tools, and very little training on the techniques that make those tools effective.

It's sort of like we're dropping trucks and airplanes on a generation that only knows walking and bicycles.

If you've never driven a truck before, you're going to crash a few times. Then it's easy to say "See, I told you, this new fangled truck is rubbish."

Those who practice with the truck are going to get the hang of it, and figure out two things:

1. How to drive the truck effectively, and

2. When NOT to use the truck... when talking or the bike is actually the better way to go.

We need to shift the conversation to techniques, and away from the tools. Until we do that, we're going to be forever comparing apples to oranges and talking around each other.
by michaelrpeskin | 2025-08-12 17:36:04+00:00
I attribute my barriers to entry as things that forced me to really learn. All my family could afford was a 386 with 16MB of ram when 486s where pretty common. I had to really hack to make things work. Working under constraints meant I was exploring limits and understanding efficiency.

I still carry that in my day job which I _think_ helps me write better code - even in unconstrained systems, thinking in terms of memory and instruction efficiency can still help make better/faster code.
by scarmig | 2025-08-12 17:36:12+00:00
The original:

"Because it is on-brand with Musk behavior. If for example somebody would write that Mercedes bricked a car to an influencer, people would be skeptical because that would not be how Mercedes usually operates."

The paraphrase:

"Yeah I fell for the bait, but that says a lot about my political enemies."

Seems fair to me.
by cyrilou242 | 2025-08-12 17:36:13+00:00
> Everything you do needs to be synchronous and almost everything requires a reload.

this is pretty incorrect, you may want to look into the concept of "partials" in SSR. maybe you meant everything requires a roundtrip ? but SPA would not solve most of the roundtrips necessary in github given many interactions in the github app require authn/authz checks.

would you care getting into more details ?

Also, 'old' github was known to be very fast an reliable and was indeed a ruby on rails SSR app. Since a few years ago github started to introduce react and more client side logic and it correlates with more issues and more slowness in the frontend. It only correlates, but still.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-12 17:36:37+00:00
>Ford Transit vans have absolutely no such negative connotation.

Yet. Give it 5-10yr depending on region.

Because they're mostly new enough and substantially less robust and more expensive to deal with so they are in the service of nicer newer fleets, not your local courier who also sells coke, and they don't as frequently remain economically viable as commercial vehicles into the really low rungs of the economic ladder.

Despite being a "modern looking" Euro van the average 04ish Mercedes Sprinter (sold as Dodge/Freightliner/Serling in the US) absolutely gives off the same "free candy" vibes as a clapped out Ford/Chevy van because of how old they are. The Transit in the US isn't that old yet. You see plenty of Transit Connects that are just about there though. Give it a few more years for the big ones.
by spott | 2025-08-12 17:36:50+00:00
This depends on what you are trying to figure out.

If you are talking about cosmology? Yea, you can look at existing data in new ways, cause you probably have enough data to do that safely.

If you are looking at human psychology? Looking at existing data in new ways is essentially p-hacking. And you probably won’t ever have enough data to define a “universal theory of the human mind”.
by moomin | 2025-08-12 17:36:55+00:00
A small thing that drives me up the wall:

* Microsoft has code that references a URL shorterner

* The URL shortener is in-house and points to a Microsoft property.

* However, the documentation team don’t keep this stuff up to date, resulting in you getting error messages containing a broken link.

You would have thought it would be more than possible for Microsoft to keep their own house in order.