MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by v5v3 | 2025-08-06 06:16:00+00:00
>By ten years of experience, you should probably have used all the major tech stacks in your area of expertise. If you're BE, probably Go, Node, Rails, Django, Spring, maybe even PHP. If mobile you should be able to use native, capacitor, PWA, Flutter, React Native, maybe KMP. And so on.

That's not real life.

Most Devs get a job and learn a stack and then they stay in that stack unless there is a reason to change

Most BE will know one of either Java or .Net or Python. As that is what most corporates use.
by ryao | 2025-08-06 06:16:11+00:00
I think he was referring to the ability to go from A to B within a certain amount of time. There is a threshold at which it is possible for a car, yet impossible for a horse and buggy.

That said, I recently saw a colleague use a LLM to make a non-trivial UI for electron in HTML/CSS/JS, despite knowing nothing about any of those technologies, in less time than it would have taken me to do it. We had been in the process of devising a set of requirements, he fed his version of them into the LLM, did some back and forth with the LLM, showed me the result, got feedback, fed my feedback back into the LLM and got a good solution. I had suggested that he make a mockup (a drawing in kolourpaint for example) for further discussion, but he had surprised me by using a LLM to make a functional prototype in place of the mockup. It was a huge time saver.
by motorest | 2025-08-06 06:16:26+00:00
> I've estimated that LLMs make me 2-5x more productive on the parts of my job which involve typing code into a computer, which is itself a small portion of that I do as a software engineer.

I think that the key realization is that there are tasks where LLMs excel and might even buy you 10x productivity, whereas some tasks their contribution might even be net negative.

LLM are largely excellent at writing and refactoring unit tests, mainly because their context is very limited (i.e., write a method in a class that calls this specific method of this specific class a specific way and check the output) and their output is very repetitive (i.e., write isolated methods in standalone classes without output that are not called anywhere). They also seem helpful when prompted to add logging. LLMs are also effective in creating greenfield projects, serving as glorified template engines. But when lightly pressed on specific tasks like implementing a cross-domain feature... Their output starts to be at best a big ball of mud.
by grepfru_it | 2025-08-06 06:16:29+00:00
Hey thanks! I hold copyright like a stack overflow post owner holds their copyright. In reality, the change was maybe 4 bytes, it got wrapped into a “refactoring” commit and tada no need to reference the OG author. I played the same games back then too, so I ain’t even mad.

I will still reach out because BSD dev was a small community back then and we have probably crossed paths!
by maxglute | 2025-08-06 06:16:53+00:00
UKR almost feels like yesterday's drone war. It seems pretty obvious purpose built murder bots by technologically capable powers like PRC would be fully autonomous and expendable like actual munitions. Image fuse some cheap rgb/ir/thermo with edge compute to maim any warm bodies at 100km+ speeds. Don't even bother to reusable / save material. Just send them out to indiscriminately detonate like cheap smart munitions that they should be.
by physicsguy | 2025-08-06 06:17:29+00:00
It certainly happened in my previous employer which I left two years ago, but the thing is that it was really the straw that broke the camels back. People who were already annoyed/thinking about leaving left. People who had other options left.

But then, two years on, there are not really that many remote working options in the UK now - I don't live in London and work remotely for a large international company with staff all over the world. I'm sort of debating moving on but what I see is that most tech-y companies are advertising for hybrid 2-3 days a week in London, Manchester, Oxford, Cambridge. Which gives a much more limited pool of jobs for those who want to move on now who don't live in those areas. With that though, if you get through to an interview stage, you find out that while it's advertised as that, most people are not in the offices that much at all. I visit an office near where I live just to get out of the house where staff are nominally in three days a week, and it's deserted apart from on Tuesdays.
by zeta0134 | 2025-08-06 06:17:35+00:00
Very helpfully, python has stuck around for just as long and is almost always a better choice against these two specific tools for anything complicated. It's not perfect, but I'm much more likely to open a random python script I wrote 6 years ago and at least recognize what the basic syntax is supposed to be doing. Bash beyond a certain complexity threshold is... hard to parse.

Python's standard library is just fine for most tasks, I think. It's got loads of battle tested parsers for common formats. I use it for asset conversion pipelines in my game engines, and it has so far remained portable between windows, linux and mac systems with no maintenance on my part. The only unusual crate I depend on is Pillow, which is also decently well maintained.

It becomes significantly less ideal the more pip packages you add to your requirements.txt, but I think that applies to almost anything really. Dependencies suffer their own software rot and thus vastly increase the "attack surface" for this sort of thing.
by verisimi | 2025-08-06 06:19:04+00:00
> There's anecdotes, and there's science.

> If your solution to the obesity crisis is "people need to try harder" your solution is demonstrably not helpful. Can it work for one person? Yes. Over a population, will it? No

Are you an individual or a population though? Take off the telescopes (and data, and science), and look at the world through your own eyes.

No one needs (or can) to address the obesity crisis in the population. The only crises that can be solved are the ones individuals find in themselves.
by tomhow | 2025-08-06 06:19:07+00:00
We have frequently asked users not to make public accusations of posting LLM-generated content, so much so that several of the most engaged HN users routinely flag these kinds of comments and post their own reminders not to do it, and email us to let us know about it.

That is the right way to deal with undesirable activity on HN: flagging, emailing us so we can take action, and if replies are to be posted, expressing them with respect and kindness as the guidelines ask of us.

The problem with a reply like yours – one that is much worse than an already-bad comment – is that it becomes the highest-priority comment for us to respond to, and makes it harder for us to deal with the original comment with our normal approaches.
by dcreater | 2025-08-06 06:19:14+00:00
First, I must say I appreciate you taking the time to be engaged on this thread and responding to so many of us.

What I'm referring to is a broader pattern that I (and several) others have been seeing. Of the top of my head: not crediting llama.cpp previously, still not crediting llama.cpp now and saying you are using your own inference engine when you are still using ggml and the core of what Georgi made, most importantly why even create your own version - is it not better for the community to just contribute to llama.cpp?, making your own propreitary model storage platform disallowing using weights with other local engines requiring people to duplicate downloads and more.

I dont know how to regard these other than being largely motivated out of self interest.

I think what Jeff and you have built have been enormously helpful to us - Ollama is how I got started running models locally and have enjoyed using it for years now. For that, I think you guys should be paid millions. But what I fear is going to happen is you guys will go the way of the current dogma of capturing users (at least in mindshare) and then continually squeezing more. I would love to be wrong, but I am not going to stick around to find out as its risk I cannot take.
by kubb | 2025-08-06 06:19:15+00:00
I'm always surprised by this attitude - just because one person doesn't want children, doesn't mean that the world population isn't at its peak and growing.

Extinction of the species while the species has 8.2 billion specimen seems like the most illogical thing to be woried about. If you have a full fridge of food and don't want to go grocery shoping, it doesn't make you pro-starvation.

If the population drops, and there's suddenly more space and resources available, people will want children again.
by 7bit | 2025-08-06 06:20:09+00:00
I noticed something that looked like inconsistent behaviour with the arch installer, and I wanted to learn why it looked like that to me. I asked in the forums a bunch of questions to understand the process better, with the aim to improve the installation guide for everyone else after me.

I was told I should just ignore the error messages I was seeing. When I kept asking, some of the most active members started insulting and ridiculing me. Then others started joining in.

The only thing I had in mind was to improve the guide for other people new to arch, that came after me. Instead, I was only insulted and ridiculed. I uninstalled Arch and never did anything with it again. The toxicity of that community still makes me angry today.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-08-06 06:20:16+00:00
what exactly is the 90% that he focused on, and the 10% he didn't?

Is the 90% just hand crafting? I don't believe there can be no place for hand crafting things at all, because there is not any other business or human endeavor in history which has been 100% mass produced without any place for artisans in the market.

Even Automobile production has its place in the market for craftsmanship.
by ruszki | 2025-08-06 06:20:44+00:00
The audience yes, but the author clearly seems to not understand it when they wrote this the first time.

> I did a few tests in my terminal, and he was right!

He clearly had no clue how base64 worked. You don’t need a test, if you know it.

> As pointed out by gnabgib and athorax on Hacker News, this actually detects the leading dashes of the PEM format

They needed help for this. I’m not sure that they opened Wikipedia at last to understand how base64 works even now. The whole article has an “it’s magic!” vibe.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-06 06:20:49+00:00
Approximately speaking, you have a world model and an agent model. You continue to train the world model using data collected by the robot day-to-day. The robot "dreams" by running the agent model against the world model instead of moving around in the real world. Dreaming for thousands of (simulated) hours is much more efficient than actually running the physical hardware for thousands of wall clock hours.
by chrisco255 | 2025-08-06 06:21:16+00:00
To everyone critical of my statement, have a look yourself:

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5022

The same seasonal patterns play over and over with very little precision or interesting insights from 2015-2022.

"However, the OCO-2 data as observed by the on-board instrument have large data gaps in coverage due to the narrow 10-km ground track and an inability to see through clouds and aerosols. To provide a gap-filled view of Earth’s carbon cycle and atmosphere NASA’s Global and Modeling Assimilation Office (GMAO) ingests OCO-2 retrievals every 6 hours with a modeling and assimilation technique and derives the Gridded Monthly OCO-2 Carbon Dioxide/OCO-2 GEO"

It can't measure through clouds which is 2/3 of the earth's atmosphere at any given time. Ground based or flight based instrumentation is absolutely superior for this, and CO2 is already well mixed in the atmosphere so it provides very little insight to keep it going for whatever millions it is costing to run.

As I mentioned before the brigade, Moana Loa Observatory and others like it provide far more accurate data and have much more consistent data.
by cess11 | 2025-08-06 06:22:22+00:00
Perhaps a length limit? I tried this:

"This first Book proposes, first in brief, the whole Subject, Mans disobedience, and the loss thereupon of Paradise wherein he was plac't: Then touches the prime cause of his fall, the Serpent, or rather Satan in the Serpent; who revolting from God, and drawing to his side many Legions of Angels, was by the command of God driven out of Heaven with all his Crew into the great Deep."

It takes a while until it starts generating sound on my i7 cores but it kind of works.

This also works:

"blah. bleh. blih. bloh. blyh. bluh."

So I don't think it's a limit on punctuation. Voice quality is quite bad though, not as far from the old school C64 SAM (https://discordier.github.io/sam/) of the eighties as I expected.
by ducksinhats | 2025-08-06 06:23:40+00:00
Seen this a few times and am surprised it's actually a viable solution. Used to be heavily into fpv a long time ago and remember MIT(?) had autonomous CV software that could easily navigate through thick forests that was open sourced, I think the only real use of onboard GPS there was "go from point A to B"

This was perhaps a decade ago mind you, people rocking DIY setups had fairly limited computing compared to what you can buy today. The PID needed for quads/hex/octos to stay aloft has trivial compute requirements.
by chilldsgn | 2025-08-06 06:25:07+00:00
It really puzzles me how people would just pop a pill instead of make some lifestyle changes. Maybe it's just my personality type, but it disturbs me how most people just want something quick and easy instead of doing the actual work and becoming overall better via a real learning journey by struggling through changing bad habits.

But whatever, they do whatever works for them! I don't like pharma.
by allenu | 2025-08-06 06:25:14+00:00
As a solo builder myself, I totally agree. You get lost in your head a lot of times since you're the only one who understands the problem set you're working on, the progress you're making, and the challenges that still lie ahead.

The work you do is also not something that's easy to talk about with friends and family who have regular jobs either. I think for a lot of people what you're might be just a fun thing and not a real job, and if you talk about how hard it can be to try to work on something yourself, they might not fully appreciate it since you could just walk away from it all and get a "real job".

Not having coworkers is tough when you just want to chill and hang out for a few minutes before getting back to work, although if you were working remote during the pandemic or are still working remote today, you probably got used to that.

Have you tried co-working spaces? I know you won't necessarily be able to vibe on the work you're doing, but having random conversations with people might make the solo work a bit more bearable.

Going to meetups or events with other entrepreneurs may also help. I've gone to meetups and talked to other people who are doing their own thing (or startups with others) and I can see they have the same experiences, which helps keep me sane.
by croes | 2025-08-06 06:25:30+00:00
>I think we're in the mass-production era for code and nobody wants a hand-crafted anything anymore.

Not all people like IKEA furniture.

>Quantity has a quality all its own

You understand the meaning of this Stalin attributed quote?

I wouldn’t want that kind of quality in planes, cars, surgical robots, power plants etc.

I think it’s a good time to introduce fines for severe damages by software bugs.
by js8 | 2025-08-06 06:25:46+00:00
I agree but I would say it differently - if you're an investor in EU, you have no reason NOT to invest in the U.S. There is no "stick" for defecting the country you live in. That causes capital leaking out of EU, and thus EU cannot build up its own new industry to compete globally. EU is far too liberal in this, and needs more protectionism.
by vunderba | 2025-08-06 06:26:16+00:00
How much of the story was generated by Gemini? The dragon overcomes the problem by using a fart to blow away the fog. Wouldn't that just be replacing one cloud with an equally visibility limiting cloud... only worse smelling?

Feels like this could have been an opportunity by the LLM to take the story in a less pedestrian direction with a loose parable around a noxious equivalent to Maslow's hammer.
by chrisco255 | 2025-08-06 06:26:56+00:00
Please see my sibling reply. The data is very inaccurate, it can only scan in 10km tracks, it can't see through clouds (2/3 of the earth's atmosphere at any given time), and so the data it puts out is coaxed into a model, which provide us with nothing we don't already know from ground based instrumentation.
by MrGilbert | 2025-08-06 06:27:03+00:00
I like the creativity behind this. And I feel sorry for them that the current wave of AI has lead to them abandoning their pet project. Maybe they will pick up the project again, once the dust has settled. At the end, at least for me, they are pet projects for exactly that reason: An escape route from the day to day business. One should still be proud of what they achieved in their spare time. I don’t care if my job requires me to use K8s, Claude or Docker. Or if that’s considered "industry standard".

My projects, my rules.
by braza | 2025-08-06 06:27:12+00:00
> And we don't care as much about money.

I think this is a very broad statement that does not reflect the reality on the ground for a significant amout of non-etnical-europeans.

Europe is a very diverse continent culturally speaking and also has a big immigration background, and those blank statements, while they're cool as a counter-narrative to the 'Europoor' memes, lack nuance in terms of the representation of what is going on.

I come from a significantly large cohort of demographics to the EU that was searching for upward mobility from a poverty/middle-class background in South America/India, and on the contrary (maybe our fellow Asians in Central Europe can agree here also), money matters. A lot.

If you're an ethno-European and you live in Munich, Freiburg, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Zurich, Basel u.z.w not needing money would be OK because at the end of the day you can have relatives nearby, and probably you might be sitting on some real estate heritage that can make you good in the future.

But for a large part of the cohort that I mentioned, there's no family at max 3h flight, and money matters to help family abroad.

> Venture capital is pure gambling in the US. We don't subscribe to the American unrestricted capitalism here (well except for the UK and Netherlands which are heavily influenced by America)

This turns me off most of the time, but here we go...

VCs are just the capital allocators; most of the time those people represent family offices, institutional investment funds, and sovereign wealth funds that have some excess capital to allocate in several ways to have positive disproportionate positive returns, where those returns will subsidize the failed ones.

Capital for investment means that an ecosystem can start to work and you can have a flow of talent and capital, and it potentially flows to other parts of society—more explicitly, to the economy—but at the end of the day, it goes back to the public via taxes and public services.

If the alternative for the capital arriving in Central Europe is (a) founders fleeing to the USA and opening their companies there, (b) European companies using Delaware LLCs to operate at EU, (c) working at traditional old-money companies that squeeze wages, and (d) having those jobs and capital fleeing to Poland/Spain/Paris/Portugal/Amsterdam; I will take the capital at any time of the day.
by jader201 | 2025-08-06 06:28:01+00:00
Because Excel and Sheets exist, most businesses don’t bother with custom software for things that basic spreadsheets can handle, which is a lot.

Sure, more complex things can be handled by custom software, but there are still basic things that spreadsheets handle just fine. No need to reinvent the wheel.

Even large companies that use SAP still rely on spreadsheets for simpler needs.
by disillusioned | 2025-08-06 06:28:19+00:00
The fact that we have not yet seen a high-profile political assassination by drone, particularly from the "death from above" method, absolutely _boggles_ my mind, and I don't think we get out of this decade without that occurring, and I'm not particularly sure what sort of counter-measure you could reasonably put in place to stop that. The 2030s are going to be messy.
by SilentTiger | 2025-08-06 06:28:29+00:00
Because they're incredibly fast, exceeding 40 meters per second. You can't fire a shotgun at 80 meters. A typical shotgun's effective range is only 40 meters, and once it's within range, you only have one second to fire.

Furthermore, drones are generally difficult to detect at 400 meters unless you're using a synthetic detection system. By the time you spot them, it's too late.
by strken | 2025-08-06 06:28:50+00:00
"No free lunch" is a reasonable question to ask when evaluating medication, if it would improve the evolutionary fitness of the majority of people. I think this is behind some of the skepticism. If Ozempic is so great then how come our bodies don't just produce more GLP-1? How come we aren't like chimps, with eternally shredded bodies and cheese grater abs, provided we get the protein to support them?

I would guess that getting fat in times of plenty was a feature and not a bug in the ancestral environment, and that's why we get fat today, which is obvious if you think about it. Still, it means GLP-1 agonists are smacking into quick "is it bullshit?" heuristics for a lot of people.

The second point I haven't seen discussed is that weight loss drugs prior to GLP-1 agonists include cigarettes, which (worst case) give you cancer; stimulants, which cause your heart to fail; parasitic intestinal worms, which can kill you but more importantly are just plain gross; and mitochondrial uncouplers, which set you on fire at a cellular level. That's a long history of miracle weight loss drugs which turn out to have horrible side effects. It's not reasonable to think GLP-1 is bad just because of other drugs with different mechanisms, but it certainly causes some skepticism anyway.
by troupo | 2025-08-06 06:28:55+00:00
> You either hire programmers to make a custom financial suite so that people can input things and then the software does the relevant calculations

There's a reason Excel rules the world. And it's not because there aren't programmers capable of writing "custom financial suites".

But because Excel can handle most anything you can throw at it

> SAP is an example of that. They're not worth 300 billion for no reason

Yes. There's very little reason for SAP to be worth that much. SAP are infamous for their projects that are nearly always over time and over budget and still don't do what was intended.
by YurgenJurgensen | 2025-08-06 06:30:52+00:00
That’s moving the goalposts. The fact that Mastercard doesn’t even apply their own rules consistently is another, arguably even greater problem that you would probably be better off not mentioning. Stop deflecting and explain why Mastercard lied by omission by claiming they don’t do something that their own rules clearly state that they do. If you can’t do this, you’re not interested in the facts, you’re just whiteknighting for a poor defenseless international megacorporation with veto power over a huge portion of the world’s economy.
by int_19h | 2025-08-06 06:31:16+00:00
In the case of Microsoft layoffs, that is how it is sold to the public, but the reality according to my former colleagues is that fewer people tasked with the same amount of overall work just end up grinding more. But the charade must be sustained, and so now "how much do you use AI" is one of the performance metrics pushed from the top. Nobody wants to be in the next layoff wave so everybody finds ways to meet those metrics, which then Satya goes and parades to the investors.

(I am an AI optimist, by the by. But that is not one of its success stories.)