MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lproven | 2025-08-24 10:31:50+00:00
Why should I care?

I wasn't interested in drawing pictures or playing games. I was interested in exploring programming on something that wasn't as horribly constrained as my previous machines -- 3 different Z80 powered boxes. (Sinclair Spectrum, SAM Coupé, Amstrad PCW 9512).

I had a choice of editors. I had BBC BASIC and a compiler. I had Obey scripts to explore OS scripting. I also could get hold of C, Pascal, and a few other compilers, but most of them were too expensive.

I could declare arrays that took a meg of RAM. Or, declare a RAMdisk and then put frames of short videos in it, then experiment with compressing and decompressing them, and later save the results to HDD or floppy.

I didn't want a gaming machine with some graphics apps, even if it could emulate a different 68K box that was so expensive that its apps cost as much as the entire computer I was sitting in front of.

I am not saying your use case was not valid for you, but it wasn't even something of interest for me to explore. I didn't, and still don't, care about drawing pictures. I'm quite interested in learning how to generate pictures, though.

You're presenting these things as drawbacks for the Archie and advantages for the Miggy. They're not. Those are absolutes. The stuff you describe are selling points for particular target markets... and some of the Archie's tools in related, overlapping markets were highly competitive. Impression and Ovation for DTP, Sibelius for musical notation. An offshoot of ArtWorks was sold by Corel for a while and it's still on sale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xara_Designer_Pro%2B

It is very much not fair to make out the Archie platform had no apps. It did, and some of the biggest names made it onto other platforms. Some are still on sale today.

https://www.xara.com/

https://www.avid.com/sibelius

But I didn't care about them on RISC OS myself then and I don't now because that's not an area of interest for me.

Still, they exist, and they are competitive.
by imtringued | 2025-08-24 10:35:22+00:00
I wonder when there will be proofs in theoretical computer science that an algorithm is AGI-complete, the same way there are proofs of NP-completeness.

Conjecture: A system that self updates its weights according to a series of objective functions, but does not suffer from catastrophic forgetting (performance only degrades due to capacity limits, rather than from switching tasks) is AGI-complete.

Why? Because it could learn literally anything!
by terribleperson | 2025-08-24 10:35:46+00:00
The gambling is the only thing I think you can reasonably attack them for. They didn't create microtransactions, those had already been figured out in Korea. The DRM was necessary for Steam to be palatable to publishers (and it's always been more of a pro-forma thing than a real attempt at DRM like Denuvo), and a world without Steam would absolutely have seen per-publisher e-shops that would also have DRM. Tying game installation to a game client... again, that was a 'when' not an 'if', and they weren't even the first. If I recall, you had to install a client to install Wild Tangent games. The client was also, arguably, malware.
by AddLightness | 2025-08-24 10:38:12+00:00
I'm very scared about the future though. What happens when Gabe is gone? The entire PC Gaming industry is essentially locked in to a single platform. If Steam decided to charge $10/mo people have so much invested into their libraries they would likely do it. What about $20 or $30 per month?

I'm not sure why Steam always seems to be exempt from the "perils of digital ownership" arguments
by alt227 | 2025-08-24 10:38:29+00:00
> Many focus solely on memory consumption, which often provides a distorted picture of actual system efficiency.

When other languages can do the same thing with an order of magnitude less RAM, any other efficencies in the system tend to be overshadowed by that and be the sticking point in peoples memories.

You may argue that holding on to this extra memory makes subsequent calls and reads quicker etc, but in my experience generally people are willing to sacrifice milliseconds to gain gigabytes of memory.
by frankvienna | 2025-08-24 10:39:11+00:00
Hey,

Most of my side projects started for fun but this one came from pure frustration.

After months of job hunting, I realized I was spending more time:

Tweaking my resume for ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems)

Rewriting the same cover letters over and over

Tracking 100+ job applications in spreadsheets

…than actually interviewing.

So I built Woberry, an AI-powered resume builder, cover letter generator, and job application tracker.

What it does:

Instantly generates tailored cover letters from a job description or URL

Suggests improvements to your resume (keywords, phrasing, structure)

Organizes all applications in one place so you know when to follow up

It started as a tool for myself, but I’ve been surprised by how many others wanted the same thing. Now it’s slowly growing into a real product.

My question for you: Have you ever built a side project that unexpectedly solved a very “searchable” real-world pain point? Like something you originally made for yourself, but it turned out thousands of other people were Googling the same need?

Curious to hear your stories because sometimes SEO isn’t about keyword hacks, it’s about building something people are literally crying out for.
by mattjenner | 2025-08-24 10:39:38+00:00
This has been my experience with replit as well. It needs to use design docs as the source of task and truth, as it starts to crumble as the app size increases.

With OpenAI I find ChatGPT just slows to a crawl and the chat becomes unresponsive. Asking it to make a document, to import into a new chat, helps with that.

On a human level, it makes me think that we should do the same ourselves. Reflect, document and dump our ‘memory’ into a working design doc. To free up ourselves, as well as our LLMs.
by mrtksn | 2025-08-24 10:40:31+00:00
Trump appears to have particular hatred for the wind farms, not necessarily for all the renewables. He was talking about it, he brings it up when visiting European countries. What's up with that is it like a NIMBY thing?

They mention things like wind farms killing birds other says it's making noise or looking ugly but even though I never lived around a wind farm, I have came close to some large wind farms and they looked futuristic to me I didn't hear any noise. I'm not convinced that is uglier or noisier than any other modern infrastructure, like roads or planes.

Is this about money? is this ideological? what is this, what's going on?
by nicbou | 2025-08-24 10:46:15+00:00
I think it's fair to use AI as an editor, to get feedback about how your ideas are packaged.

It's also fair to use it as a clever dictionary, to find the right expressions, or to use correct grammar and spelling. (This post could really use a round of corrections.)

But in the end, the message and the reasoning should be yours, and any facts that come from the LLM should be verified. Expecting people to read unverified machine output is rude.
by Etheryte | 2025-08-24 10:47:04+00:00
> Researchers at MIT published a report showing that 95% of the generative AI programs launched by companies failed to do the main thing they were intended for

I think everyone had a gut feel for something along those lines, but those numbers are even starker than I would've imagined. Granted, many (most?) people trying to vibe code full apps don't know much about building software, so they're bound to struggle to get it to do what they want. But this quote is about companies and code they've actually put into production. Don't get me wrong, I've vibe coded a bunch of utilities that I now use daily, but 95% is way higher than I would've expected.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-24 10:47:06+00:00
I fundamentally disagree on code readability. A comment on the function header can save an hour of code reverse engineering for a complex library. Reading code is a last resort, and stale code docs is itself a red flag.

This post itself is a great example. The code is not self explanatory unless you understand the library below. So if this was library code; you would have to reverse through two abstraktion walls to understand it.

And as for high level documentation... it would be very helpful to have that DURING the development process to discuss the implementation, and quickly get people up-to-speed in the plan during code review. Id write that before the code.

I mention tests, because they are 10x more work to write than docs. So if the developer skips out on docs, my trust in their testing is also destroyed.
Newsletter fatigue and information overload. How widepsread?
by programmersn | 2025-08-24 10:48:25+00:00
Hi people,

I've been struggling to keep up with latest tech feeds. Being an engineer and founder it ate up at leat 1 productivity day per week.

Am I the only one ? I'm building an AI agent that automates that away from me. Like reading the tech feeds, and at some pint plugged as RAG into my projects, surfaces cool and insightful data from tech feeds that interests me.

I'm quite privacy-sensitive, so I'm trying to make it fully local (using local LLMs).

Does anyone feel the same pain point as I do, and would such a solution be of any interest ?

Thanks a lot for any feedback

Cheers
by mort96 | 2025-08-24 10:50:05+00:00
> The US getting 10% of Intel without any payment is very bad. Was there no shareholder vote?

I know that this is how it was reported everywhere including here, but I recently learned that it's apparently false. The US just bought shares. From https://www.reuters.com/business/us-take-10-equity-stake-int...:

> Under the agreement, the U.S. will purchase a 9.9% stake in Intel for $8.9 billion, or $20.47 per share, which represents a discount of about $4 from Intel's closing share price of $24.80 on Friday.

So they bought a 9.9% stake at a slight discount. (And just have to go back a couple of weeks to find Intel's stock price at under $20.47 per share, so I'm not sure you can really call it a real "discount").
by bob1029 | 2025-08-24 10:50:35+00:00
> I don’t know yet if the implementations of this yet are good enough to use at scale. Maybe they’re slow or maybe the bugs aren’t ironed out yet.

This technique is very well supported in the big commercial engines. In MSSQL's Indexed View case, the views are synchronously updated when the underlying tables are modified. This has implications at insert/update/delete time, so if you are going to be doing a lot of these you might want to do it on a read replica to avoid impact to production writes.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/v...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/statements/creat...
by SXX | 2025-08-24 10:50:39+00:00
Gamedev is just very poor industry. Think of your usual FAANG salary and divide it by 5. Or just any random software engineer job and devide salary by 2. There are companies like Epic Games that pay competetive salaries, but they are few.

Gamedev is also very stressful industy because both constant crunches and job instability. So you not only paid worse, but you'll work 2-3 times more that average SWE. And often fired when project is complete regardless of success.

So working at Valve is somewhat like a pipe dream for many people in the game industry. Especially because whole Valve is under 500 people which is like 10-20 times less people than work for Epic, Ubisoft or EA.

Source: I work in indie game company.
by a_bonobo | 2025-08-24 10:51:39+00:00
I feel we're developing something like what made Test-Driven Development so strong: TTD forced you to sit down and design your system first, rather than making it all up on the fly. In the past we mapped the system while we were building the code for it.

This kind of AI-driven development feels very similar to that. By forcing you to sit down and map the territory you're planning to build in, the coding itself becomes secondary, just boilerplate to implement the design decision you've made. And AI is great at boilerplate!
by lewdwig | 2025-08-24 10:52:15+00:00
I use Claude Code almost daily now, and I think I’d rather cut off my own arm than go without it, but I don’t delude myself into thinking that current gen tools don’t have significant limitations and that it is my job to manage those limitations.

So just like any other tool really.

I have discovered this week that Claude is really good at redteaming code (and specs, and ADRs, and test plans), much better than most human devs who don’t like doing it because it’s thankless work and don’t want to be “mean” to colleagues by being overly critical.
by supersrdjan | 2025-08-24 10:52:23+00:00
Living in the northern hemisphere, it bugs me that standard north-up, west-left maps don't match up with the sun and with our clocks. It's neat that both clock hands and the sun are "up" at noon. It would be even neater if that upward direction corresponded to south, since that's where the sun actually is at midday. With south-at-top, east-to-the-left, maps would sync with both our clocks and the sun's daily arc. But then we would lose the west-left rhyme.
by diminish | 2025-08-24 10:52:46+00:00
Mini swe agent, as an academic tool, can be easily tested aimed to show the power of a simple idea against any LLM. You can go and test it with different LLMs. Tool calls didn't work fine with smaller LLM sizes usually. I don't see many viable alternatives less than 7GB, beyond Qwen3 4B for tool calling.

> right tools allow small models to perform better than undirected tool like bash to do everything.

Interesting enough the newer mini swe agent was refutation of this hypothesis for very large LLMs from the original swe agent paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.15793) assuming that specialized tools work better.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-08-24 10:54:04+00:00
5% saying it's helping their company is roughly in line with the lizard man constant. [1] There will always be people who will never admit a thing didn't work out as planned and those who just like to answer sarcastically. It's not unreasonable to assume that, if this report is even remotely accurate, it's pretty much 100% of people finding AI fairly disappointing.

[1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Lizardman%27s_Constant
by hetspookjee | 2025-08-24 10:55:33+00:00
That is exactly what this felt like indeed! I found a lot of interest in both refining the test strategy and test decisions, but when it started implementing some core functions were in fact lost in the process. This rather leaky memory still suprises me every now and then. Especially 'undoing' things is a big challenge as the (do not) kind of route versus the (do) route is so much more confusing for the LLM, it seems.
by manfromchina1 | 2025-08-24 10:56:30+00:00
So far all the headlines focus only on developers and other adjacent knowledge workers. Not enough fear porn. I think the range of everyone replaceable should be expanded. AI will start mining its own rare earths, pumping its own oil and generating its own electricity needs soon. Right up until it invents perpetual motion at which point everyone will be royally fucked or wont ever have to work again.
by rsynnott | 2025-08-24 10:56:44+00:00
I mean, I assume the blogspam industry is thrilled with it…

For the time being, and the foreseeable future, LLM’s sweet spot seems to be low-grade translation, and ultra-low-grade bottom barrel ‘content generation’. Which is… not nothing, but also not what you’d call world-changing. As a number of people said, there probably is an industry here; it’s just that it’s worth on the order of tens of billions, not trillions as the markets currently appear to believe.

(Some people will claim it’s a great programming tool. Personally sceptical, but even if it’s the greatest, most amazingest programming tool ever, well, “we might be even more important than Borland and Jetbrains were” is not going to thrill the markets too much. Current valuations are built on mass-market applicability, and if that doesn’t show up soon there will be trouble.)
by tra3 | 2025-08-24 10:56:55+00:00
I can’t help but feel like the hype generators don’t use the tech themselves. I can contrast this with crypto as a recent example. Sure there were some interesting tidbits there, but I just didn’t see the appeal.

With llms the changes are transformative. I’m trying to learn 3d modeling and chatgpt just gave me a passable sketch for what I had in my mind. So much better than googling for 2 hours. Is the cooling off because industry leadership promised agi last year and it’s not here yet?
by luckylion | 2025-08-24 10:57:09+00:00
> Despite the rush to integrate powerful new models, about 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration; the vast majority stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on P&L. [1]

"We wanted to make money with it, but we didn't immediately make a lot of money" feels very different from "the project failed to deliver what it set out to".

[1] https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generat...
by mort96 | 2025-08-24 10:57:28+00:00
They are buying the shares like any other investor, but the white house lied about that. Plenty of people just repeated Trump's Truth Social post which claimed: "The United States paid nothing for these Shares, and the Shares are now valued at approximately $11 Billion Dollars".

In reality, the US bought a 10% stake for roughly $8.9 billion, paying market price for the shares.
by dep_b | 2025-08-24 10:58:16+00:00
Just got a few recommendations by my colleagues on LinkedIn that were clearly written by an LLM, the long emdash was even present. But then again, the message was tuned to specific things I did. Also they were from Eastern Europe, so I imagine they just fixed their input.

If you call yourself a writer, having tell tale LLM signs is bad. But for people who's work doesn't involve having a personal voice in written language, it might help them getting them to express things in a better way than before.
by amtamt | 2025-08-24 10:58:29+00:00
I hope not. It was a semi-humorous take on someone worrying about a bottle of wine while another human fainted due to excessive heat.

I have no idea how long wine would be good in 30C+, I guess it would survive 1 hour.

I felt compelled to reply here, so this answer doesn't start a myth about Spaniards or French.
by kryogen1c | 2025-08-24 10:58:56+00:00
>Valve is flat. It’s our shorthand way of saying that we don’t have any management

> Team leads Often, someone will emerge as the “lead” for a project. This person’s role is not a traditional managerial one. Most often, they’re primarily a clearinghouse of information. They’re keeping the whole project in their head at once so that people can use them as a resource to check decisions against. The leads serve the team, while acting like as centers for the teams

I appreciate the out-of-the-box-thinking+creativity foundation theyre trying to lay here, but... this is what management is. I understand management has other emergent properties and misaligned incentives, but those are literally the core (technical) value-adds of managers.
by latexr | 2025-08-24 10:59:16+00:00
> One argument to not disclaim it: people do not disclaim if they Photoshop a picture after publishing it and we are surrounded by a lot of edited pictures.

That is both a false equivalence and a form of whataboutism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

It is a poor argument in general, and a sure-fire way to increase shittiness in the world: “Well, everyone else is doing this wrong thing, so I can too”. No. Whenever you mention the status quo as an excuse to justify your own behaviour, you should look inward and reflect on your actions. Do you really believe what you’re doing is the right thing? If it is, fine; but if it is not, either don’t mention it or (ideally) do something about it.

> why don’t we see people mentioning they used specific tools to proofread before AI apparition?

Whenever I see this argument, I have a hard time believe it is made in good faith. Can you truly not see the difference between using a tool to fix mistakes in your work or to do the work for you?

> It feels like an obligation we have to respect in a way.

This was obvious from the beginning of the post. Throughout I never got the feeling you were struggling with the question intrinsically, for yourself, but always in a sense of how others would judge your actions. You quote opinion after opinion and it felt you were in search of absolution—not truth—for something you had already decided you did not want to do.
by Traubenfuchs | 2025-08-24 10:59:27+00:00
You make „utilities“, those initiatives are about replacing complex processes, business-people-engineer communication and the engineers themselves with AI.

e.g. I waste a lot of time with converting business requirements into a proprietary rule language. It should be simple tasks, but the requirements are freaky, the language is limited and I often need to look up internals of systems that produce data the rules act upon.

My bosses boss currently wants me to replace my work with AI. It can not work. It‘s setup for failure.
by rnrn | 2025-08-24 11:00:08+00:00
This was in the “truth” posted by Trump on his social media announcing the deal:

> It is my Great Honor to report that the United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of INTEL, a Great American Company that has an even more incredible future. I negotiated this Deal with Lip-Bu Tan, the Highly Respected Chief Executive Officer of the Company. The United States paid nothing for these Shares, and the Shares are now valued at approximately $11 Billion Dollars. This is a great Deal for America and, also, a great Deal for INTEL. Building leading edge Semiconductors and Chips, which is what INTEL does, is fundamental to the future of our Nation. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Thank you for your attention to this matter.

“The United States paid nothing for these Shares”

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1150744446179...
by lewdwig | 2025-08-24 11:00:25+00:00
There are nascent signs of emergent world models in current LLMs, the problem is that they decohere very quickly due to them lacking any kind of hierarchical long term memory.

A lot of what is structurally important the model knows about your code gets lost whenever the context gets compressed.

Solving this problem will mark the next big leap in agentic coding I think.
by jsheard | 2025-08-24 11:01:37+00:00
Yep, and that applies to Valve at two levels because Steam dwarfs the ROI of their games, and their forever-games like Counter Strike dwarf the ROI of any singleplayer game they'd ever be able to make. It's a miracle they even got Alyx out of the door, that was a special case since it was part of their larger VR initiative.
by rsynnott | 2025-08-24 11:02:39+00:00
Yeah, it was a 4GL. Roughly since the 1950s, every ten years or so someone has come along with “this will allow unskilled people to write programs, and destroy those awful programmers forever” (_COBOL_ was originally basically marketed as this!) SQL is by _far_ the most successful thing to actually come out of this recurrent trend, in that it is actually useful, and unskilled people can actually use it to an extent. Most of the rest of it, 4GLs and 5GLs and drag and drop programming and no-code and… was just kinda useless; at most it made for a good demo, but attempts to make actual workable maintainable software with it broke down fast.
by latexr | 2025-08-24 11:02:40+00:00
> clearly written by an LLM, the long emdash was even present.

Can we please stop propagating this accusation? Alright, sure, maybe LLMs overuse the em-dash, but it is a valid topographical mark which was in use way before LLMs and is even auto-inserted by default by popular software on popular operating systems—it is never sufficient on its own to identify LLM use (and yes, I just used it—multiple times—on purpose on 100% human-written text).

Sincerily,

Someone who enjoys and would like to be able to continue to use correct punctuation, but doesn’t judge those who don’t.