MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rconti | 2025-08-11 04:49:42+00:00
Had to look up "yuppie button" to figure out what they were on about.

Sounds like a fun fellow. Lights up all of the lights on the back of the car for funsies. Oh they're all DOT-approved, so it's probably a good idea. Definitely a safety feature. Their manifesto makes them totally believe that everyone else on the road is the problem.

https://techno-fandom.org/~hobbit/cars/yb/
by magarnicle | 2025-08-11 04:49:49+00:00
An e-ink display allows me to get sucked into reading on my phone. It eliminates half my time-sinks but makes the other half a little nicer. A device with a bad screen would make my productivity go up overall, but I wouldn't be using the device to do any work.

So perhaps what's needed for productivity on the device itself is in fact a much bigger screen. Those "tri-fold" phones might be big enough, if you could somehow also fit a usable keyboard in your pocket along with the phone.
by Incipient | 2025-08-11 04:51:47+00:00
I'm getting very tired of these 'either extreme' articles (produced, I expect, for clicks).

The reality is today:

- if you don't use AI coding at all you'll be left behind. No one writes HTML by hand, AI just means one less thing by hand

- doing "hey AI give me an app" absolutely is garbage, see the Tea app debacle

- relying on AI and not understanding what it's doing will absolutely degrade your skill and make a dev lazy, don't ask it for a bunch of Web endpoints and hope they're scalable and secure

Now will AI be able to make an entire app perfectly one day? Who knows.

edit: formatting
by adastra22 | 2025-08-11 04:51:57+00:00
If you think that 'these neighborhoods tend to be black, and these neighborhoods tend to be white, but for largely historical and cultural reasons, and people are free to move and live where they want' is "de facto segregation," then I think you have seriously watered down the term.

This isn't pedantic nitpicking. Segregation is a deeply evil employment of the state machinery to enforce and persist strict racial divisions in a society.

People choosing to stay near their friends, family, and community centers & therefore the census showing large clustering of self-identified racial groups, is not in any way the same thing.
by beala | 2025-08-11 04:51:58+00:00
Surely if running a local LLM is a goal, you're going to be disappointed by any small form factor desktop. Even an M4 Max is slow compared to a 5 year old rtx 3090, and the M4's only advantage is that it can run larger models, but very slowly [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1jn5uto/macbook...
by EvanAnderson | 2025-08-11 04:54:19+00:00
I am all for removing this needless communication the manufacturers are equipping cars with now, but between your cell phone associating with towers, the Flock cameras that every municipality has eagerly deployed, the repo bounty people driving parking lots with LPRs, and LEOs with on-car LPRs you're still being tracked.

Still, no reason to make it easier.
by schmookeeg | 2025-08-11 04:59:43+00:00
> you have the problem that you are never able to do coder.Health++ for bank.Money-- afterwards.

Can you expound on this for me? This rule is not at all obvious to me. I'm curious what perspective this hails from :)

For example, most of my career, I will take 6+ months off between particularly intense work crunches for contracts/startups/jobs. I find the time off restorative to the point where I get restless for the next crunch.
by ModernMech | 2025-08-11 05:01:25+00:00
With the volume of code people are generating, no you really can't just read it all. pg recently posted [1] that someone he knows is generating 10kloc/day now. There's no way people are using AI to generate that volume of code and reading it. How many invisible bugs are lurking in that code base, waiting to be found some time in the future after the code has shipped?

[1] https://x.com/paulg/status/1953289830982664236
by odyssey7 | 2025-08-11 05:02:08+00:00
It’s always disappointing to me, as someone who does not want to eat meat, when I see the vegetarian option is a beyond burger, the most aesthetically similar meat analogue they could think of.

Not to call out Beyond Meat specifically. I stopped eating the Burger King veggie burger when they switched from their Morningstar patties to the Impossible Whopper.
by k310 | 2025-08-11 05:02:47+00:00
You need better friends.

I found some in the most roundabout way. I was looking through Half Price Books and found a copy of "The Wisdom of the Lotus Sutra." This was interesting but living alone in the foothills, hard to visualize in action. So I consulted Apple Maps and looked for anything Buddhist and one meeting place turned up 50 miles away. Better than nothing, I drove there and met very like-minded and yes, compassionate people. The main philosophy in the west is some Ayn Rand-ish survival of the greediest, whereas Buddhism is all about sharing and caring.

Sure, it's going to be difficult to find compassionate people in a "beat the other guy down" ethos. It took me a long time to find them. Take the lack of drum-beating and media-bombardment as positives.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-11 05:06:10+00:00
> In the US, we have government programs like PRISM and unchecked oligopolies

In the US we also enjoy probably the most expansive protection of speech in the world at present. Our own government created Tor. Yet simultaneously the majority of the population willingly hands over the minute details of their daily lives to half a dozen or more megacorps for the sake of some minor conveniences. It's beyond perplexing. I suspect we may be the most internally inconsistent civilization to have ever existed.
by jot | 2025-08-11 05:07:23+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m one of the makers of this - thank you for posting!

We built it in early 2024 and it’s due an update.

While the main visualisation is currently out of date we’ve been grabbing screenshots monthly for the last 18 months. There’s a a free (no key required) API to all the data at https://ScreenshotOf.com

I’d love to hear any ideas you have for improving it.
by drjeats | 2025-08-11 05:07:28+00:00
Personally, I'd rather prefix with `\\` than have to postfix with `\n`. The `\\` is automatically prepended when I enter a newline in my editor after I start a multiline string, much like editors have done for C-style multiline comments for years.

Snippet from my shader compiler tests (the `\` vs `/` in the paths in params and output is intentional, when compiled it will generate escape errors so I'm prodded to make everything `/`):

test "shader_root_gen" { const expected = \\// Generated file! \\ \\pub const @"spriteszzz" = opaque { \\ pub const @"quadsprite" = @import("src\spriteszzz/quadsprite.glsl"); \\}; \\ \\pub const @"sprites" = opaque { \\ pub const @"universalsprite" = @import("src\sprites/universalsprite.glsl"); \\}; \\ \\pub const @"simpleshader" = @import("src/simpleshader.glsl"); \\ ; const cmdline = \\--prefix src -o testfile.zig src\spriteszzz/quadsprite.glsl src\sprites/universalsprite.glsl src/simpleshader.glsl ; var args_iter = std.mem.tokenizeScalar(u8, cmdline, ' '); const params = try Params.parseFromCmdLineArgs(&args_iter); var buffer: [expected.len * 2]u8 = undefined; var stream = std.io.fixedBufferStream(buffer[0..]); try generateSource(stream.writer().any(), params.input_files.items, params.prefix); const actual = stream.getWritten(); try std.testing.expectEqualSlices(u8, expected, actual); }
by EGreg | 2025-08-11 05:09:45+00:00
As a meat eater I can tell you that for me I just need to feel something substantial and somewhat large I can bite into and that doesnt give way right away. Something seared on a flame. Maybe a nice savory flavor too.

So for example biting into celery or bread with a crust gives that feeling. Whereas salads and rice, small beans etc. lack these elements. It’s just some mushy mass of small things going into your mouth, you don’t get to really use your teeth much at all.

So it’s not really the burger aspect at all for me. As a chef I could probably whip up a lot of vegetarian options that scratch that itch for carnivorous humans.
by userbinator | 2025-08-11 05:10:03+00:00
It's not clear from a skim of this article, but a common problem I've seen in the past with memory copying benchmarks is to not serialise and access the copied data in its destination to ensure that it was actually completed before concluding the timing. A simple REP MOVS should be at or near the top, especially on CPUs with ERMSB.
by komali2 | 2025-08-11 05:10:42+00:00
> People have been trading off sleep deprivation for productivity for all of human history.

I disagree, I believe what we mean when we say "productivity" these days was invented maybe during industrialization, maybe 1800s, and a couple etymology dictionaries I checked seem to agree, that the word being used in an economic sense to mean "production per unit" only started occurring in the 1890s. Also, I believe that the modern sense, meaning, "whether a human's time is spent being productive for the economy," is a mid to late 20th century invention of neoliberalism.

I don't really like hyper-generalizations like "all people have been doing this thing for all of human history," because it's just a silly thing to say on the face of it - the English were doing very different things and had very difference concerns in the year 800, 1100, 1700, 1900, and 2025! But also, the English in 1300 were doing very different things than the indigenous Americans in 1300! That said, one generalization I'm comfortable with is that throughout all of human history, until maybe the 1940s, people have been seeking comfort, leisure, and peace, and only recently have we developed a global society, and at that one that is obsessed with finding economic justifications for everything, including how humans spend their time!

You mention, "it isn't always a choice," and I agree, that is the failure of capitalism - there are people out there destroying their lives, minds, and bodies to scrape out a living. Our global economic system has failed these people - in fact it's sacrificed them on the alter of consumerism.

Many a child had stunted development from mothers and fathers subscribing to the cult of capitalism and overworking themselves and never being at home, with the self-serving justification of "I'm making a better life for my child," when in fact they're not.
by YZF | 2025-08-11 05:11:37+00:00
- No major change in hiring due to AI.

- A lot of our code base is very specialized and complex, AI still not good enough to replace human judgement/knowledge but can help in various ways.

- Not yet clear (to me anyways) how much of a productivity gain we're getting.

- We've always had more things we want to do than what we could get done. So if we can get more productivity there's plenty of places to use it. But again, not clear that's actually happening in any major way.

I think the jury is still out on this one. Curious what others will say here. My personal opinion is that unless AI gets smart enough to replace more experienced developer completely, and it's far from that, then I'm quite sure there's not going to be less software jobs. If AI gets to a point where it is equal to a good/senior developer we'll have to see. Even then it might be that our jobs will just turn into more managing AI but it's not a zero sum game, we'll do more things. Superintelligence is a different story, i.e. AI that is better than humans in every cognitive aspect.
by dbetteridge | 2025-08-11 05:11:44+00:00
Tired.

Mostly of having to try and explain to people why having an AI reduce software development workload by 30-50% doesn't reduce headcount or time taken similarly.

Turns out, lots of time is still sunk in talking about the features with PM's, stakeholders, customers etc.

Reducing the amount of time a dev NEEDS to spend doing boilerplate means they have more time to do the things that previously got ignored in a time poor state, like cleaning up tech debt or security checks or accessibility etc etc
Show HN: I integrated Ollama into Excel to run local LLMs
by SvenBosau | 2025-08-11 05:11:54+00:00
I built an Excel add-in that connects to Ollama, so you can run local LLMs like Llama3 directly inside Excel. I call it XLlama.

You can use it like a regular formula: =XLlamaPrompt("Is Excel a database") or run it on an entire range.

No API calls. No cloud. No subscriptions. Everything runs locally.

It’s useful for quick tasks like extracting names, emails, or phone numbers from text, or for doing light data analysis without leaving Excel.

Would love feedback, especially from people who use Excel daily.
by nunez | 2025-08-11 05:12:35+00:00
I came to the same conclusion two days after using Claude.

It's extremely easy to build heaps of absolutely vile code with this thing, but I can see it accelerating senior/staff/staff+ devs who knows what they are doing in certain situations.

In my case, it built an entire distributed system for me, with APIs, servers and tests, but on my goodness the compile errors were unending and Claude does crazy stuff to reconcile them sometimes.
by bawolff | 2025-08-11 05:12:42+00:00
> Another shrug, but part of it is that the PL community (programming language community) is pretty deep into its own jargon that doesn’t have as much overlap as you might think, with other subfields of computer science.

The word reified dates back to the 1800s. It isn't the most common word, but it also definitely wasn't invented by the programming language community.
What is Fil-C and how to use it?
by ricecat | 2025-08-11 05:13:46+00:00
I know many people fear about this article, but here's what you got.

For decades, memory safety flaws have fueled countless security incidents across the industry, undermining trust in technology and causing billions in losses. Traditional measures—such as code audits, fuzzing, and exploit mitigations—have helped but fallen short of stopping the problem, all while driving up costs.

Promising advances in hardware are emerging. Features such as ARM’s Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) which is equipped since Google Pixel-8 and the Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI) architecture provide valuable, complementary defenses—especially for securing existing code.

https://www.gizvault.com/archives/what-is-fil-c-and-how-to-use-it

I don't fxxking care if you are stupid enough to make this post dead, but it's great appreciated to whom developed "dead" rather than disappear in HN.
by bee_rider | 2025-08-11 05:13:59+00:00
This is tangential because the task was to come up with the riddle, not solve it.

But, do reasoning models usually do this poorly?

It comes up with a valid solution, SAGE, then disqualifies it for incomprehensible reasons.

Then it discovers that SAGE works if it “reads it carefully.” But then seems to disqualify it(?), or at least goes to list other words for some reason.

Then it comes up with SAME, a word… with exactly the same shape as SAGE, just swapped out the irrelevant letter.

What is going on here? Is it programmed to constantly second-guess itself to make it better at finding weaknesses to its answers to harder riddles? But since it doesn’t know how to accept a good answer, it seems like it is just rolling the dice and then stopping at a random point.

I guess it is technically right, but the logic is a total mess.
by TheCapeGreek | 2025-08-11 05:14:21+00:00
You're going to have to add more context about what information you're looking for here. Are you a US citizen looking to work from Africa, or are you an African looking for remote US work?

I can offer some info for the latter.

It's possible, but increasingly rare, especially if you're expecting to be hired directly. Even with the remote boom a few years ago, US orgs still prefer timezone alignment where possible, which mostly means outsourcing to South America instead. Every once in a while and eastern US role will ask for some overlap that western EU peeps can cover for about half the workday.

You could find a company/team that's basically an outsourced dev department for a US org, but the entire point of that is that they'll pay you local rates.

If you're looking for better income overall, remote work for EU orgs is probably a better bet for getting hired.

If you want to know about the practicalities like getting paid and dealing with taxes, I've written on this topic from the South African perspective. Some of the topics may translate over to wherever you are. So self plug: https://nik.software/working-remotely-from-south-africa/
by adityaathalye | 2025-08-11 05:14:50+00:00
The trouble with “Semantic” anything, is that it’s so easy to get “wrong” and so hard to get "right". Meaning-making uses context cues---metadata---in addition to the dictionary semantics---the data.

Arbitrarily remixing of data and metadata gives us our real world, where The Official Standard (Or Else) says one thing about `AThing`, and We, The People use AThing in a way that completely violates the official intent, but makes complete sense in the narrow sense that it is being used.

Concretely, `<div>` is to HTML, what `F#@!` is to natural language (not just the Queen’s English). It can mean any number of things depending on where it is, when it is, how it is, or why it is. Slap on the right AIRA and you can say `<div>` off to anybody on the Internet.

Or is it `<div>`, I love you so much for reading this?

(edit: fix typos)
by jameshart | 2025-08-11 05:14:51+00:00
There's explanations in the article of why 'try and' can't be parsed as simply as that kind of parallel ellipsis structure.

No reordering: You can't rephrase as I'm going to change the course of Hip-Hop and try the way you can I'm going to watch the game and crack open a beer

No use of both: You can't say I'm going to both try and change the course of Hip-Hop the way you could I'm going to both crack open a beer and watch the game

No inflections: You can't say I have tried and changed the course of Hip-Hop the way you can I have cracked open a beer and watched the game
by hnfong | 2025-08-11 05:16:03+00:00
Who the heck downvoted the parent comment?

This isn't a news article, it's an opinion from some journalist who thinks Beyond Meat is doomed for bankruptcy. I googled "beyond meat chapter 11" and this HN discussion is on the second spot.

Interestingly I noticed a prediction site currently with ~30% chance of that happening by 2026: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/12112/will-beyond-meat-f...
by TMWNN | 2025-08-11 05:16:20+00:00
>and all the exams/assignments are graded via Goldsmiths University

I realize that you are doing this to check off the degree box on your visa application, but if your degree will be from Goldsmiths (that is, "Goldsmiths, University of London" on a résumé, as opposed to the generic "University of London", that would be especially helpful.
by wenc | 2025-08-11 05:16:54+00:00
I didn't know BK stopped offering veggie burgers.

There used to be the Veggie burger and the Impossible Whopper, and they were two completely different products.

As a meat eater, I'm a big fan of the Impossible Whopper. It does taste different from the regular Whopper, but it's just as good. That's how good Impossible is (better than Beyond any day).

Neither are healthy, but if I had to stop eating meat, I would have no trouble with the Impossible Whopper.
by fjkeufllo | 2025-08-11 05:17:16+00:00
Certainly both.

Rarely can you get the recipients to admit to the latter...

> I have not accepted payments from LLM vendors, but I am frequently invited to preview new LLM products and features from organizations that include OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and Mistral, often under NDA or subject to an embargo. This often also includes free API credits.

... but even HN's favorite shill "discloses" the former.

> One exception: OpenAI paid my for my time when I attended a GPT-5 preview at their office which was used in a video. They did not ask for any editorial insight or control over what I wrote after that event, aside from keeping to their embargo.

https://simonwillison.net/about/#disclosures
by brucehoult | 2025-08-11 05:17:41+00:00
Conclusion

Stick to `std::memcpy`. It delivers great performance while also adapting to the hardware architecture, and makes no assumptions about the memory alignment.

----

So that's five minutes I'll never get back.

I'd make an exception for RISC-V machines with "RVV" vectors, where vectorised `memcpy` hasn't yet made it into the standard library and a simple ...

0000000000000000 <memcpy>: 0: 86aa mv a3,a0 0000000000000002 <.L1^B1>: 2: 00267757 vsetvli a4,a2,e8,m4,tu,mu 6: 02058007 vle8.v v0,(a1) a: 95ba add a1,a1,a4 c: 8e19 sub a2,a2,a4 e: 02068027 vse8.v v0,(a3) 12: 96ba add a3,a3,a4 14: f67d bnez a2,2 <.L1^B1> 16: 8082 ret

... often beats `memcpy` by a factor of 2 or 3 on copies that fit into L1 cache.

https://hoult.org/d1_memcpy.txt
by SvenBosau | 2025-08-11 05:20:09+00:00
I'm an Excel nerd. Started out as a business analyst and now build Excel templates and add-ins for small businesses and data folks.

I made an integration for ChatGPT in Excel right when it came out. Shared it on YouTube. Many users liked the idea, but were hesitant, as spreadsheets often include financial or other sensitive data they don’t want to send to OpenAI.

So I built XLlama to fix that. It runs everything locally using Ollama. It’s useful if you want to analyze text or data without leaving Excel. Also works well for tasks like extracting names, emails, or phone numbers from text.

Hope it might be also helpful to you.

Sven
by TheCapeGreek | 2025-08-11 05:21:36+00:00
Woah, where is 20k buying a comfy life these days?

Genuinely curious. I'm supposed to be in the third world but COL has become ridiculous in the last few years.

I felt similarly to you not long ago, sometimes still do. Honestly right now SWE is still a valuable skill to get paid for. Leverage your network to find calmer waters after taking a break, or freelance part time instead.

Recovering from burnout in my experience is a combination of changing environment, finding tools to help with mental health, and lots of patience with yourself. If can take years to feel like your old self again, and even then your output never quite comes back the same.
by chrisco255 | 2025-08-11 05:21:53+00:00
AI does 0% of my work and we are actively hiring. As someone mentioned on another AI thread, if AI is so good why aren't people just doing 15 PRs a day on open source projects like Node.js, React, Kubernetes, Linux, Ansible, etc?

AI is sometimes a productivity booster for a dev, sometimes not. And it's unpredictable when it will and won't be. It's not great at giving you confidence signals when you should be skeptical of its output.

In any sufficiently complex software project, as much of the development is about domain knowledge, asking the right questions, balancing resources, guarding against risks, interfacing with a team to scope and vet and iterate on a feature, managing resources, analyzing customer feedback, thinking of new features, improving existing features, etc.

When AI is a productivity booster, it's great, but modern software is an evolving, organic product, that requires a team to maintain, expand, improve, etc. As of yet, no AI can take the place of that.
by sneak | 2025-08-11 05:21:55+00:00
I think this is just a personal preference and has nothing to do with meat. I was a meat eater for many years and love meat, but even then I would go for weeks sometimes when I was busy on just Soylent meal replacement shakes (which are vegan, and liquid, so no biting at all).

It’s just a habit, what you’re used to. You can adjust.