MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ak217 | 2025-08-24 19:03:04+00:00
How old was your previous CPU? Different people have vastly different expectations when it comes to upgrading. I'm certain I can play all of the games that I'm interested in on my 3 year old Ryzen 7600x, and that I'm limited by the 5 year old GPU (which I dread upgrading because of the crunch). Would someone with a 5 year old CPU be well served by upgrading to a 9600x, absolutely. But some people think they have to upgrade their Threadripper every year.

(As far as work goes, I realize this directly contradicts the OP's point, which is the intent. If you know your workflow involves lots of compiling and local compute, absolutely buy a recent Threadripper. I find that most of the time the money spent on extra cores would be better spent on a more modest CPU with more RAM and a faster SSD. And more thoughtful developer tooling that doesn't force me to recompile the entire Rust work tree and its dependencies with every git pull.)
by altairprime | 2025-08-24 19:03:06+00:00
Can’t use AI on a date, or at a dinner party, or during a board meeting.

Faking intelligence with AI only works in an online-exclusive modality, and there’s a lot of real world circumstances where being able to speak, reason, and interpret on the fly without resorting to a handheld teleprompter is necessary if you want to be viewed positively. I think a lot of people are going to be enraged when they discover that dependency on AI is unattractive once AI is universally accessible. “But I benefited from that advantage! How dare they hold that against me!”
by pmontra | 2025-08-24 19:03:33+00:00
My most cpu intensive task is running the full test suite of a customer's Rails app. I can probably shave off a large percentage of its running time, but it also contains integration tests run with chrome. What I do to shorten the test time is running only the ones of the files that changed. The boot time of Rails is there anyway.

The CI system is still slower that my laptop. We are not really concerned about it.

I'm waiting for something to fail because $3000 on a laptop won't make me gain $3000 from my customer.
by zoeysmithe | 2025-08-24 19:03:48+00:00
Yep this. LLMs are just regressive models.

Imagine if we had a LLM in the 15th century. It would happily explain the validity of the geocentric system. It can't get to heliocentrism. The same way modern LLMs can only tell us what we know and cant think, revolutionize, etc. They can be programmed to reason a bit, but 'reason' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The reasoning is just a better filter on what the person is asking or what is being produced for the most part and not an actual novel creative act.

The more time I spend with LLM's the more they feel like google on steroids. I just am not seeing how this type of system could ever lead to AGI, and if anything, probably is eating away at any remaining AGI hype and funding.
by xenotux | 2025-08-24 19:04:33+00:00
I think a simple way to take emotion out of this is to ask if a computer can beat humans at math. The answer to that is pretty much "duh". Symbolic solvers and numerical methods outperform humans by a wide margin and allow us to reach fundamentally new frontiers in mathematics.

But it's a separate question of whether this is a good example of that. I think there is a certain dishonesty in the tagline. "I asked a computer to improve on the state-of-the-art and it did!". With a buried footnote that the benchmark wasn't actually state-of-the-art, and that an improved solution was already known (albeit structured a bit differently).

When you're solving already-solved problems, it's hard to avoid bias, even just in how you ask the question and otherwise nudge the model. I see it a lot in my field: researchers publish revolutionary results that, upon closer inspection, work only for their known-outcome test cases and not much else.

Another piece of info we're not getting: why this particular, seemingly obscure problem? Is there something special about it, or is it data dredging (i.e., we tried 1,000 papers and this is the only one where it worked)?
by astrobe_ | 2025-08-24 19:04:50+00:00
> but power failures are basically a non existent threat anyways

Not in the contexts sqlite3 is often used. Remember, this is an embedded database, not a fat MySQL server sitting in a comfy datacenter with redundant power backups, RAID 6 and AC regulated to the millidegree. More like embedded systems with unreliable or no power backup. Like Curl, you can find it in unexpected places.
by interstice | 2025-08-24 19:05:14+00:00
There is an awful lot of research into just how much is regurgitated vs the limits of their creativity, and as far as I’m aware this was not the conclusion that research came to. That isn’t to say any reasoning that does happen is not fragile or prone to breaking in odd ways, but I’ve had similar experience dealing with other humans more often than I’d like too.
by StilesCrisis | 2025-08-24 19:05:23+00:00
This is one of 4o’s biggest flaws. If you are a conspiracy theorist, it’ll confirm any outlandish theory you can come up with, and provide invented receipts to go with it. Of course, it’s just model hallucinations, but for those who are already primed to believe that secrets are being kept, it gives the “evidence” they were always looking for.
by asveikau | 2025-08-24 19:07:43+00:00
> (see Tyranny of Structurelessness, etc.) so I am also skeptical that a company may have continued with this practice

I have always been disappointed with people making claims that explicitly imposed bad hierarchy is inevitable, because of a vague complaint about implicit hierarchy.

It feels like they are using this to justify imposing a bad hierarchy from the top down, for the benefit of the people at the top of said imposed hierarchy. Like when you have a well-functioning team with a very weak explicit hierarchy, and the people at the top introduce a bunch of bad managers. They will tell you it was inevitable. There's no way the thing you saw working well could continue to work well. Because that lack of bad managers was actually working just as poorly, you see. In fact it was much worse.
by WalterBright | 2025-08-24 19:07:47+00:00
> It's like asking for less than you need or could get when negotiating pay for a job or position.

I disagree. It's chiseling.

If you don't like the deal you're getting, negotiate with your employer. If an agreement cannot be reached, it's time to part ways.

Disagreement does not make chiseling justifiable.

If you tell your friends and coworkers about the chiseling, they'll smile and nod, but they won't trust you any more.
by nine_k | 2025-08-24 19:08:01+00:00
A bunch of ideas that had been tabled because of the difficulty of implementation were released once the difficulty of making a 3D world was somehow alleviated by Unity.

Maybe something else is currently holding back another bunch of good ideas in gaming. Once another threshold gets lowered, we will see another wave of good games enabled by by that, and a return to the average rate of creation again.
by alt227 | 2025-08-24 19:09:03+00:00
Multi monitor support is still flaky and unreliable, cant boot linux environments, cant upgrade M.2 drives yourself, magic mouse still cannot be charged whilst using it etc etc.

On top of that when you look at price vs performance they are way behind.

Apple may have made good strides in single core cpu performance, but they have definitely not made killer development machines imo.
by 10-1-100 | 2025-08-24 19:09:41+00:00
The authors touch on potential wider implications in the abstract:

> These results suggest that APAP should be used with caution by women attempting to conceive. Given that cell division is fundamental to all development, further investigation is now warranted to substantiate these findings and to elucidate possible implications for other developmental processes, such as gonadal and brain differentiation.
by radley | 2025-08-24 19:10:19+00:00
> if the App Store had never existed? ...even though it lays golden eggs

Why is the general rebuttal always binary? Be grateful that it exists at all! It lays golden eggs!

No, they're just eggs. A few of us are lucky to sell a lot of eggs. That doesn't make them golden. The true gold eggs are grown despite the store (Netflix, YouTube, OpenAI).

Imagine an App Store that only lets you make black and white apps, but the store itself can produce full-color apps. Further, if your black and white app is actually successful, they'll copy it and release their version in color.

That's what's hindering us today.
by crooked-v | 2025-08-24 19:10:23+00:00
That one-hour timeframe from door to plane is usually my default now, as long as the airport isn't one the nightmares like LAX or DFW.

That said, I'll sometimes intentionally show up early just to wander around if the airport is interesting or interestingly weird, like how LHR funnels you from security straight into an upscale mall before you can get to any of the terminals.
by dcre | 2025-08-24 19:10:32+00:00
> To access their best models via the API, OpenAI now requires you to complete a Know-You-Customer process similar to opening a bank account.

This is not entirely true. It was entirely true for o3, but for GPT-5 it is only true for streaming and for reasoning summaries. I use GPT-5 with reasoning through the API without verifying my identity, I just don’t get the summary of the reasoning step. I don’t miss it, either. I never read them anymore now that the surprise has worn off.
by dkarl | 2025-08-24 19:11:11+00:00
> a high-pressure commerce zone clamoring for attention I don't want to give and trying to squeeze me

I find air travel mostly unpleasant, but if it's a given that I have to go through the ordeal of security and the flight, I find extra time sitting in the airport quite pleasant. Everybody regards you as in transit and unreachable. Nobody around you knows you or wants to talk to you, and it's easy to find a spot where the only sound intrusions are announcements and nearby conversations. It's so easy to sink into focus on work, or even a book.

Many times I have exaggerated my concern about making a flight so I could catch an extra hour of solitude in the airport.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-08-24 19:11:44+00:00
Fundamentally it is getting priced into services provided to residents as a whole. But you're also forgetting water is generally not provided by a business: Local government is not a profit enterprise, and generally has a lot of pressure to reduce (or limit the rise of, anyways) the bill.

I can tell you factually a lot of work goes into measuring leakage, narrowing down what part of the water system it is coming from (most active components are metered in some way, and you can use math to determine where all of the water is not making it through a segment), and correcting those issues where it is cost-effective to do so.
by roughly | 2025-08-24 19:12:02+00:00
While we’re discussing map projections - Tupaia’s map of the south seas deserves mention as a reminder that every map has a baked in set of assumptions and use cases: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/society/2021/re...

(For further exploration of the ideals of maps, James C Scott’s Seeing Like a State is excellent treatise for pulling the boundaries of the question back.)
by evanelias | 2025-08-24 19:12:15+00:00
> My recommendation would be to have a NewGroup function or equivalent that returns an empty group

That goes against common practices in Golang, articulated in the second paragraph of https://go.dev/doc/effective_go#allocation_new among many other places.

Also the errgroup documentation specifically says "A zero Group is valid, has no limit on the number of active goroutines, and does not cancel on error." And, as you noted, one of the examples doesn't use WithContext.
by darth_avocado | 2025-08-24 19:12:21+00:00
No it isn’t. I tech infrastructure gets the same treatment as regular infrastructure: we don’t want to build a new one because the old one kinda still works and a new one would cost us money.

The reality is that you need to keep upgrading and building new infrastructure. Because inevitably the old one won’t work or no longer be enough to support the needs of the users. And when that happens, it will be even more painful and expensive to get it up and running again. And the best case scenario would be that no one loses their lives over it.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-24 19:12:33+00:00
In 2003, Egenera boxes could compile Linux in around 15 seconds.

Even my dual 7402 with 96 threads and 512 GiB of RAM can't compile a maximal Linux config x86 build in RAM in under 3 minutes.

What I find helps repeated builds is maintaining a memcache server instance for sccache.
by estimator7292 | 2025-08-24 19:12:37+00:00
I like LLMs because it helps abstract code in a way that's more directly compatible with how I think about programs.

When I read code, it gets turned into something akin to an AST, where functions and calls are more of an abstract notion of input and result.

The LLM vastly simplifies the inverse process. Instead of having to go and find the way to represent an idea in code, or digging through my memory and code archives for an example, I can instead tell the LLM to write the boilerplate to initialize WiFi or whatever. It simplifies code into Lego pieces that I can assemble into a program that's more representative of my internal conception of the problem.

I've been flying through different programming languages with LLMs. When the text and grammar can be abstracted away, I can focus on the program. I was able to do this before LLMs, but with a lot more effort. Like, sure, I don't learn a whole lot about each language as I go, but that's exactly the point. The text and semantics of any one language should be largely irrelevant to the logical flow of the program itself. The text is nothing more than a semi-standardized way of representing logic in a form that can be parsed by machines and (secondarily) by humans.

First we abstracted machine code to assembly. Then low level languages like C, then higher and higher level languages until the machine itself became utterly irrelevant. It only seems natural that we'd further abstract these languages and move closer to the goal of programming instead of coding.

I don't think we've even seen hints of how this will look in the end, but I'm certain that we'll spend less and less time writing and more time programming.
by ghaff | 2025-08-24 19:13:29+00:00
Traveling is mostly what I find the tablet use case to be. I find it useful relatively rarely at home. I try and then I just end up grabbing an older laptop from the dining room.

If you want to spend most of your time reading, a Kindle may have advantages but I'm more inclined to travel with a tablet. The newer magnetic keyboards are actually pretty good but I'm at fewer conferences and the like these days where I'm taking notes and I actually have found that I've adapted to just using a phone for many purposes.
by vips7L | 2025-08-24 19:14:04+00:00
Ok I mispoke on Arc because I was being hasty; but you're still being pedantic. Concurrency still requires locks. Wait/lock free algorithms can't cover the entirety of concurrency. Rust ships with plenty of locks in std::sync and to implement a ConcurrentHashMap in Rust you would still need to lock. In fact it doesn't even look like Rust supplies concurrent collections at all. So what are we even talking about here? This is still a far cry from "a lot of Java objects use global synchronized locks".
by Keyframe | 2025-08-24 19:14:24+00:00
It took me few days on and off to do this with llm: https://www.susmel.com/stacky/

overall I'd say around two working days. I used it as a test ground first for greenfield and then Brownfield development, so nothing serious, but I found myself in a loop of ever growing details I wanted tuned, more and more features (super rotations system, das, this and that).. I'd say it's maybe 10-20% of where I'd take it as a full game, even have a webgl version functional somewhere.. but I had to stop before I started making my ultimate Tetris since I don't want to get sued nor I have (probably) money for a full license to drive it through the end. I heard they charge a pretty penny.. but I am now confident I could drive it home and that's what I took, the experience, to other software development with llm now.

the other day there was an interesting link here on HN about parametric functions. I got an itch then as well, and within an hour or two a playground: https://www.susmel.com/graphy but also, details, details, details. If you know what you wanna see it's quite enjoyable actually.
by neilv | 2025-08-24 19:15:12+00:00
* Racket is for great programmers who don't care about whether they have the latest JS or Python community commodity keywords on their resume. You can be ridiculously productive with it.

* Over the years, the academic priorities and investment of Racket have been its greatest strength, but also sometimes a weakness.

* Yes, getting good at Scheme or Racket and/or Common Lisp will make you a better programmer, but a less employable one. Keep it secret, not on your resume. (Though, if you write blog posts to promote your personal brand, you can do a rare post on Lisps, with a carefully-tuned level of casual curiosity, so that readers think you are a smart and savvy brogrammer, but not an actual nerd. Be sure dilute the Lisp on your blog, with some currently popular other keywords, to signal in a way recognizable to bros that you are gettin' it done, in a bro fist-bumping way, with your stacks and workflows and sprints and standups and OKRs and KPIs and RSUs.)
by SkyPuncher | 2025-08-24 19:15:50+00:00
For me it comes down to signal vs noise.

I’m absolutely confident that AI/LLM can solve things, but you have to shift through a lot of crap to get there. Even further, it seems AI/LLM tend to solve novel problems in very unconventional ways. It can be very hard to know if an attempt is doomed, or just one step away from magic.
by hermitcrab | 2025-08-24 19:16:06+00:00
Intersex is not ultra rare. About 1.7% of people are born intersex and with intersex babies it is sometimes hard to tell what sex they are from the genitals.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/sexual-orientation-and-gender-ident...

Also you can have people who develop to look like completely normal adult females, but are actually biologically male.

https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001669.htm

It's complicated.
by oooyay | 2025-08-24 19:16:50+00:00
Not sure that you and I disagree here friendo. I was replying to this (which was dead by the time I arrived): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44992082

What I was speaking to was the ignorance of referring to the entire state as a singular voting bloc. A lot of liberals and leftists will happily cut each other down over something as simple as geography by wishing ill on an entire state with some kind of "you earned it" smugness. Not super productive.
The problem of scheduling life like a spreadsheet
by mihailyonchev | 2025-08-24 19:16:59+00:00
Highly ambitious individuals often have lots of going on in their mind - they want to get things done, train hard, eat well, maintain social life (scientifically this can excel productivity), build relationships and push their limits.

And what do they do? They optimize. But then it doesn't work, and it sucks. But why?

While optimizing processes like cooking and cleaning can save time and make it look like your schedule is perfectly balanced (X hours working out, Y hours of social life, Z hours of rest...) this doesn't scale, neither work long-term, but why?

The concept of Allostatic Load explains it - it's the mental stress, the every day pressure, and the physical load - all combined. It's important to understand that all of this variables add up in your system and you need to recover from all of it, not just from your training. That's why during example periods its natural to cut back on social life - so students can carry more load to focus on exam. The same applies to startup founders, prior board meeting their cognitive bandwidth and stress load may be maxed out, and this time may not be the healthiest for certain personal or work decisions.

TLDR; It's important to manage your total life stress, so you can actually recover and then perform when it matters.
by rsynnott | 2025-08-24 19:17:05+00:00
> Does anyone really think Greenland is the most important place in the world?

Well, no-one sensible. However.

"I love maps. And I always said: 'Look at the size of this. It's massive. That should be part of the United States.'"

That’s noted very stable genius Donald Trump, there, on the enormity of Greenland, and why it would therefore be something which it is sensible to somehow try to buy.
by rustystump | 2025-08-24 19:17:23+00:00
I have done a decent amount of hobby game dev including completing several games. The comments here i think show a strong lack of real game dev knowledge.

Coding is a hard part of game dev. Coming up with interesting novel mechanics or plays on known genres is rather easy but bringing them to life is hard esp the code. Multiplayer vampire survivors but with giant battletech mech customization. See, very easy. Good luck building that with an LLM.

This uses well known card games as the mechanics which is about as interesting as snake games. This is not a knock at the op. But it is clear many people here havent done much game dev from the comments.
by megaloblasto | 2025-08-24 19:17:35+00:00
The implicit idea in your comment that there is no important work in low GDP countries reminds me of this quote:

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops"

I think you are giving too much credit to billion dollar companies that really just want to milk as much labor from poor countries as they can.
by kelnos | 2025-08-24 19:17:38+00:00
Pre-pandemic, I tended to keep an erratic home-work/office-work schedule. Sometimes I would be at home working, and then leave to go to the office for a meeting, but I'd arrive a half hour before the meeting was to start. That time turned out to be mostly wasted. There was no way I was going to get any deep work done in that time. Sure, sometimes I could do some idle research, stuff that I could get into and out of quickly, but largely it was wasted time.

I could have just spent all my time in the office, but the open office plan environment is not conducive to deep work, even without direct interruptions (which there would be, too).

I guess the best solution for me would have been to arrive at the office 5-10 minutes before the meeting start time, but it was surprisingly hard to get that right, even with a predictable commute time (bus or walking).

On top of all that, I would occasionally completely miss meetings if I was in a flow state before that. I would somehow miss desktop and phone notifications that a meeting was coming up. I guess the solution to that would have been to set an actual alarm on my phone, something that I couldn't ignore, but I never ended up doing that for some reason.