MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matt_d | 2025-08-11 05:21:56+00:00
Afterword:

"This pearl grew out of the authors’ frustration with textbook presentations of binary search. Given that binary search is one of the standard algorithms every programmer and computer science student should know, the subject is inadequately covered at best. Many textbooks mention binary search only in passing or they treat only special cases, such as computing the square root or searching an ordered table. A negative mindset prevails: the search possibly fails; in the divide&conquer step one half of the search space is excluded from consideration because searching this half will definitely fail. The correctness argument requires that the data is ordered, suggesting that monotonicity in some sense drives the search. One notable exception is Anne Kaldewaij’s textbook (Reference Kaldewaij1990): when discussing “function inversion” (given n , find an argument i such that fi⪯n≺f(1+i) ) he emphasises repeatedly that the correctness of the search does not require that f is an ascending function.

The gist of this pearl is to approach search problems with a positive mind-set: the search always succeeds; in the divide&conquer step the search continues with the half that guarantees success. The correctness argument relies on a suitable functional invariant, not on monotonicity. The “Beat Your Neighbours!” problem, a concrete make-up for local maximum search, shows that the extra generality is actually needed."
by pram | 2025-08-11 05:21:58+00:00
We are still hiring engineers. Everyone has a paid Cursor sub, and some people use Claude Code. We also have Claude in GitHub doing automatic PRs.

It’s mostly seen as a force multiplier. Our platform is all Java+Spring so obviously the LLMs are particularly effective because it’s so common. It hasn’t really replaced anyone though, also because it’s Java+Spring so most of our platform is an enormous incomprehensible mess lol
by 827a | 2025-08-11 05:25:19+00:00
Its a nice productivity and capability boost that feels on the same magnitude as, for example, React. The "dream" of it being able to just take tickets and agentically get a PR up for review is possible for ~5% of tickets. That goes up to ~10% if your organization has no standards at all, including even a self-serving standard like "at least make sure the repository remains useful to future AI usage".

My organization would still hire as many software engineers as we could afford.

- Stack Overflow has to be actually dead at this point. There's no reason to go there, or even Google, anymore.

- Using it for exploratory high level research and summarization into unfamiliar repos is pretty nice.

- Very rarely does AI write code that I feel would last a year without needing to be rewritten. That makes it good for things like knocking out a quick script or updating a button color.

- None of them actually follow instructions e.g. in Cursor rules. Its a serious problem. It doesn't matter how many times or where I tell it "one component per file, one component per file", all caps, threaten its children, offer it a cookie, it just does whatever it wants.
by drjeats | 2025-08-11 05:25:44+00:00
> Then why do my data structures detect if I go out of bounds?

Because you have iterator debugging and/or assertions turned on and are only using non-primitive data structures (e.g. std::vector, std::array).

Zig does the thing that Rust and Go do where it makes the primary primitive for pointers to chunks of memory (slices) bounds checked. You can opt out with optimization settings, but I think most programs will build in "safe release" mode unless they're very confident in their test coverage.

It's strictly better than C++, because in practice codebases are passing lots of `(data, len)` params around no matter how strongly you emphasize in your style guide to use `std::span`. The path of least resistance in Zig, including the memory allocator interface, bundles in language-level bounds checking.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-08-11 05:26:29+00:00
I think they'll pass it into law, and then find it's effectively unenforceable, same as all the other similar laws (the UK is busy discovering that age verification laws promote VPN use that circumvent all enforceability of any UK internet laws).

The authoritarian mindset that thinks that making something illegal will stop people from doing it, doesn't really grok how that just doesn't work.
by snarky101133 | 2025-08-11 05:27:59+00:00
That was indeed snarky. Also depending on the game and style lower frame rates can be perfectly fine and possibly preferable. Not every game is a 240fps fps. Movies are still 24fps, games have done 24fps for a more cinematic look and some animation is even done at 12fps (Spiderverse was animated on the twos)
by brap | 2025-08-11 05:28:06+00:00
I often find myself pissed off that AI can’t properly do even the most trivial, menial coding work. And I have to spend more time guiding it than doing it myself.

On the other hand I find it super useful for debugging. I can paste 500k tokens into Gemini with logs and a chunk of the codebase and ask it what’s wrong, 80% it gets it right.
by werealldevo | 2025-08-11 05:28:36+00:00
Angry because this is yet another play by the ruling class to make more money, and you, I, and everyone you know is going to pay dearly for it.

Baffled because there are too many rank-and-file tech workers who seem to think AI exciting/useful/interesting. It’s none of those things.

Just ask yourself who wants AI to succeed and what their motivations are. It is certainly not for your benefit.
by cookiengineer | 2025-08-11 05:29:34+00:00
> I disagree. The year or two that ended with me burning out was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

> I couldn’t work for two years after it and it was still worth it.

That sums up kind of the problem I have with that type of survivor's bias.

Question to you:

Was it worth because of the burnout or because of other variables in that specific part of your life?

If the other variables were not the same, would you still recommend it, just for the sake of "recommending the experience of a burnout"?
by o11c | 2025-08-11 05:29:41+00:00
I'm just waiting for the hype-cycle to end. AI might revolutionize some industry (probably natural-language-adjacent), but not ours. COBOL has already been attempted, and far more competently (and with less energy cost).

If people can seriously have an AI do 50% of their work, that's usually a confession that they weren't actually doing real work in the first place. Or, at least, they lacked the basic competence with tools that that any university sophomore should have.

Sometimes, however, it is instead a confession "I previously wasn't allowed to copy the preexisting solutions, but thanks to the magic of copyright laundering, now I can!"
by zarzavat | 2025-08-11 05:29:56+00:00
"Could you wash the dog?"

Is not a question asking whether the person is capable of washing the dog. It's a command phrased politely.

"Try to wash the dog"

"Try and wash the dog"

If you had no prior information on whether the dog likes water or not, I'd say that the try-and version expresses a greater level of confidence that washing the dog will be successful, in other words it's a command.

Whereas try-to could be read either straight (this task may fail) or as a command phrased politely.
by palmotea | 2025-08-11 05:29:56+00:00
> To pull that off TSMC must have a culture than prioritizes families and child raising over profit. In most industries with not be possible. Either their higher costs would lead to them being eaten alive by their competitors, or bought out by PE because their employees could be squeezed to pay out more profit to their owners. There isn't going to be a rash of companies with TSMC style family policies breaking out any time soon.

So the problem is really capitalism run rampant.
by zkmon | 2025-08-11 05:33:12+00:00
Let's compare the progress made by the modern world against the life of the tribes on the remote untouched islands.

Unfortunately the stories of success of the modern world were written by the modern world. So what we call as success or progress is only valid in modern world. There is no language or terms that can describe success and agreed upon across these two worlds.

For example, you may be able to wipe out that tribal population within minutes. But that may not mean success or progress, in terms of adaptation to the surroundings. Dinosaurs also ruled the land with their might. But adaptation is something different from being mighty. The context can get much more mightier against you.

Most of scientific and industrial advances were made by people who have no survival struggles and who were greedy for money or reputation. A lot of it was not needed for human adaptation and evolution.
by Netcob | 2025-08-11 05:33:27+00:00
Once in a while I save ~10 minutes by using AI. About as often as embarrassing myself by having to admit that my primary source was an AI while researching some topic.

The main thing that changed is that the CTO is in more of a "move fast, break things"-mood now (minus the insane silicon valley funding) because he can quickly vibe-code a proof-of-concept, so development gets derailed more often.
by 6keZbCECT2uB | 2025-08-11 05:33:51+00:00
I've been meaning to look at Iceoryx as a way to wrap this.

Pytorch multiprocessing queues work this way, but it is hard for the sender to ensure the data is already in shared memory, so it often has a copy. It is also common for buffers to not be reused, so that can end up a bottleneck, but it can, in principle, be limited by the rate of sending fds.
by earthicus | 2025-08-11 05:36:21+00:00
I’ve thought quite a bit about getting a teacher, but have hesitated for a few [somewhat legitimate] reasons. Among them, I’m partially disabled and can’t practice consistently. However, having a teacher berate me about my posture would actually probably help that at least a little bit, now that you mention in :-) Thanks for taking the time to share your experience and encouragement with me! Best of luck on your lessons as well.
by JdeBP | 2025-08-11 05:36:33+00:00
There was an awful lot of nonsense put about during the Operating System Wars, a lot of it by people who had not the first bloody clue about operating systems at all.

Sometimes it was a very clueless manifestation of the telephone game effect, where the fact that OS/2 API was designed to be easily callable from high-languages, without all of the fiddling about with inline assembly language, compiler intrinsics, or C library calls that one did to call the DOS API, could morph into a patently ridiculous claim that one could not write OS/2 applications in assembly language.

Sometimes, though, it was (as we all later found out) deliberate distortion by marketing people.

Patently ridiculous? Yes, to anyone who actually programmed. The book that everyone who wanted to learn how to program OS/2 would have bought in the early years was Ed Iaccobucci's OS/2 Programmers Guide, the one that starts off with the famous "most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time" quotation by Bill Gates. Not only are examples dotted throughout the book in (macro) assembly language, there are some 170 pages of assembly language program listings in appendix E.
Show HN: QuickShelf – Stop opening Finder just to drag files
by slowlab | 2025-08-11 05:36:39+00:00
I often found myself doing this tedious routine:

1. Download a file 2. Open Finder and locate it 3. Drag it into the browser/app to upload

For things like tax paperwork or testing uploads, I was repeating this dozens of times a day.

QuickShelf is a small macOS menu bar app that lets you instantly open a specific folder in a compact window and drag files directly — without opening Finder.

It’s lightweight, quick, and stays out of the way.

- https://github.com/Slowhand0309/QuickShelf - https://quickshelf-app.slowlab.dev
by pepa65 | 2025-08-11 05:37:23+00:00
Yes, "people largely relied on oral history", but don't underestimate the power of that. We are now (kept) so busy that we don't listen to stories being passed down, but this used to be very different! Also, if your knowledge comes from books in the school system, they can be (and regularly are!) replaced and their content adapted to 'current needs'.
by rkomorn | 2025-08-11 05:37:41+00:00
I'm trying to use it to do things I've never done before (ie UI stuff when I've mostly been a backend SRE type).

I like that it makes it easy to learn new things by example.

I don't like that I have no idea if what I'm learning is correct (or at least recent / idiomatic), so everything I see that's new, I have to validate against other resources.

I also don't really know if it's any different from "tutorial hell".
by kaboomshebang | 2025-08-11 05:37:44+00:00
I guess it's what excites a lot of people nowadays. Although I also feel it's way overused. Having said that, personally, my search behavior in the last years shifted from Google to LLMs almost completely, so it feels relatable.

(Furthermore: I welcome developments in new search initiatives. Even if advertised using the same AI-hyped-copy as all other companies ;) ;)
by cookiengineer | 2025-08-11 05:38:59+00:00
> I find the time off restorative to the point where I get restless for the next crunch.

That is a sign of addiction, not a sign of balance.

The issues I have with this "crunching it" mentality now (post-burnouts) is that even with some time off afterwards you'll pay the price with physical health.

Just the heart issues alone that you'll get because of the absurd and constant stress levels are now for me an indicator that it's not worth it.

A company doesn't give a damn about you. They are not your family. The first sign of risk they'll ditch you. Devs need to see work as what it is: it's a contract with mutual expectations.

And my recommendation is to self-reflect more on the health part, because we (including me) tend to rationalize that it's worth working more for the sake of building something or for the interesting research parts, or for learning experience or whatever we make up to justify it.

You can do that still with basic income. We just can't because society is fucked up, and research and development isn't paid enough to make a living and a healthy life. I also think that huge parts of the open source community that I identify myself with on a moral level are pretty hypocritical, considering that only the top notch famous "leaders" make enough to have a good balanced life. The 99%+ majority doesn't make enough to even rent a flat, and that's the absurd part of our society. I still can't fathom how the richest companies have money laying around on their bank accounts, and were built on the shoulders of unpaid open source contributors that got nothing in return.

That is something I really don't understand because it's honestly really messed up if you think about it.
by ealhad | 2025-08-11 05:39:03+00:00
As a software engineer: the only impact the AI bubble has on me is the time it takes to explain what's a stake to less tech-savvy colleagues. Zero consequences on my actual job, excepet being pissed of each time a promising project "pivots to AI" and starts shoehorning it everywhere.

As a person I'm increasingly worried about the consequences of people using it, and of what happens when the bubble bursts.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-11 05:39:57+00:00
I'm happy to manually apply updates for my immobilizer as necessary. Keyless entry is already broken (recent front page) and can't be fixed via update AFAIK at least without leaving behind all current fobs. Given that it's still using a proprietary encryption scheme from the mid 80s it doesn't seem the manufacturers were particularly concerned about security to begin with.
by caro_kann | 2025-08-11 05:40:51+00:00
My company is still hiring engineers like it was doing before. About the work itself I can say LLMs are good with PoC or new projects, I can't say the same about already existing codebase. For me it's a good tool, but not THE solution. Lately I'm making a lot of AWS Serverless configurations with Cloudformation and LLMs hallucinate a lot for that. At this point, I always verify if it exists in the doc or not, because it spits out stuff that doesn't exist at all.
by b_e_n_t_o_n | 2025-08-11 05:40:58+00:00
I'm really enjoying using Claude Code. There is a learning curve, and you have to set your project up in a way that helps these agents work better, but when you do it's a massive productivity boost with certain stuff. It's generated some decent looking landing pages and other UI stuff that I would have otherwise spent multiple hours on. It can even build some backend services that I would have also spent a couple hours on. This time adds up, which lets me see my family and friends more and that's the most important thing to me.

I don't really see it replacing us in the near future though, it would be almost useless if I wasn't there to guide it, write interfaces it must satisfy, write the tests it uses to validate its work etc. I find that projects become highly modularised, with defined interfaces between everything, so it can just go to work in a folder satisfying tests and interfaces while I work on other stuff. Architecting for the agents seems to lead to better design overall which is a win.

I'm just writing crud apps though, I imagine it's less useful in other domains or in code bases which are older and less designed for agents.

My next experiment is designing a really high level component library to see if it can write dashboards and apps with. It seems to struggle with more interactive UI's as opposed to landing pages.
by bestham | 2025-08-11 05:40:59+00:00
On an adjacent theme there has been a large debate in Sweden if a car that has mandated automatic eCall over 2G or 3G is faulty and thus not roadworthy if the 2G and 3G networks are turned off. The eCall feature was introduced broadly in 2018. It still uses modem sounds over a voice phone call to relay car emergency status and position. New solutions for packet only networks (4g and 5G) have been standardised but are not retrofitted to older cars.
by vrighter | 2025-08-11 05:41:06+00:00
That is just not a solid argument. There are countless examples of LLMs splitting "blueberry" into "b l u e b e r r y", which would contain one token per letter. And then they still manage to get it wrong.

Your argument is based on a flawed assumption, that they can't see letters. If they didn't they wouldn't be able to spell the word out. But they do. And when they do get one token per letter, they still miscount.
by mckn1ght | 2025-08-11 05:41:50+00:00
I’ve tried this because I’ve long thought my circadian cycle is just a bit longer than average, where I just don’t feel tired until late at night, and traveling westward feels great because I can take an extra long day. Waking up early on a regular schedule is hard for me generally, like, I can do it but I feel braindead. Eastward jet lag of 3-6 hours is awful if I have to do stuff in the mornings.

So I tried a complete “cycle” of 28 hour days until I realigned with the normal day. Which happens to be the same thing GP did. LCM(24, 28) = 168 which is 7 days with 6 cycles. Roughly 19 hours waking and 9 hours sleeping. I did let myself sleep longer instead of holding to 7-8 hours like GP.

It definitely felt weird because my wife wasn’t on the schedule, but I didn’t feel super sleep deprived. I’m sure with multiple complete cycles you’d see more adverse effects, so it’s probably best to only do this very sparingly. Maybe napping during the wake period could alleviate issues.
by dwd | 2025-08-11 05:42:41+00:00
The Parkes radio telescope had issues with fast radio bursts that they couldn't attribute to what they were tracking. Turned out to be a microwave oven in a nearby building where the door was opened before it had stopped.

While I wouldn't subscribe to standing in front will cook you idea, opening the door prematurely does give off radiation. Standing in front of a microwave beam dish may be a different story - knew an ex-Telecom tech who told a possibly tall tale of cooking chicken.

https://theconversation.com/how-we-found-the-source-of-the-m...
by wahnfrieden | 2025-08-11 05:43:40+00:00
Developer operations and architecture haven’t caught up to efficient and productive AI workflows yet. Most orgs don’t have good ways for all their employees to have agents running in parallel and closing the loop within the agent (generating results that the agent can check and iterate on, with the dev being able to jump in easily to inspect). These iterations still require too much manual and bespoke management. So management and devs don’t see the full picture yet on current genetic productivity potential and dismiss it as a wash on time savings.
by torginus | 2025-08-11 05:46:22+00:00
> Stack Overflow has to be actually dead at this point. There's no reason to go there, or even Google, anymore.

I wonder if we are going to pay for that, as a society. The number of times I went there, asking some tricky question about a framework, and have the actual author or one of the core contributors answer me was astonishing.
by otterley | 2025-08-11 05:46:50+00:00
ECS uses bog standard Linux containers. It tries hard to isolate what it can, but there are limits to what it can do that are inherent to the model.

Back when I was an AWS containers specialist SA, I used to tell customers that containers aren’t security boundaries, and should not be treated as such. VMs are much better isolation constructs.

And containers usually have no business accessing IMDS; that’s why not using v2 with a max hop count of 1 should raise a security finding by default at any customer.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-08-11 05:47:04+00:00
Count me as a person who could never figure out how to directly use WINE. All of the special configuration knowledge is seemingly spread across dozens of forum posts. Best case, you will find some obscure post which ends with, "Never mind, figured it out!"

I have been using Bottles for a while now, and it has been painless to launch a few necessary Windows programs.
by thaw13579 | 2025-08-11 05:47:19+00:00
This has been my observation as well. To add, I'm seeing leadership and stakeholders use their chats with LLMs to justify claims like "what I'm asking for is incredibly simple according to ChatGPT, and it should be done by end of today." Of course it rarely is, because the prompt is underspecified, the LLM solution is oversimplified, and it lacks context on the complexities of existing codebase, and the team's development & deployment processes.
by ForOldHack | 2025-08-11 05:49:25+00:00
Ahem the minute I got my 286 ( free ) home, I added Mode con lines=50 to my Dos 3.3/Tp 3.02+8087 disk, everything worked perfectly until you actually tried to do some text addressing, but I was able to pass physics 1 and 2 and Pascal and the program design and styles class with As the machine served me well. Now if I had the $400 for the extra 4mb of ram, it would have run os/2 2.1 in text mode... Or not.

Oh the screen would go to snow often, and sidekick would bring it right back.

How well did OS/2 handle the text modes for VGA?
by pjmlp | 2025-08-11 05:49:32+00:00
The pressure to do more AI based work is certainly there.

Also from my experiences with agents, and given that I have been around computers since 1986, I can clearly see where the road is going.

Anyone involved with software engineering tasks, should see themselves becoming more of a technical architect for their coding agents, than raw coding, just like nowadays while Assembly is a required skill for some fields, others can code without ever learning anything about it.

Models will eventually become more relevant than specific programming languages, what is worth discussing X or Y is better, if I can generate any that I feel like asking for. If anything newer languages will have even harder time getting adopted, on top of everything that is expected, now they also have to be relevant for AI based workflows.