MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fzeroracer | 2025-08-10 23:30:00+00:00
Missing the forest for the trees here.

The benefit of writing your own first draft is the same reason why you take notes during classes or rephrase things in your head. You're building up a mental model of the codebase as you write it, so even if the first draft isn't great you know where the pieces are, what they should be doing and why they should be doing it. The cognitive benefits of writing notes is well known.

If you're using an AI to produce code you're not building up any model at all. You have to treat it as an adversarial process and heavily scrutinize/review the code it outputs, but more importantly it's code you didn't write and map. You might've wrote an extensive prompt detailing what you want to happen, but you don't know if it did happen or not.

You should start asking yourself how well you know the codebase and where the pieces are and what they do.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-10 23:30:02+00:00
To make it clear I'm not accusing you of spamming, but I do think the supply vs demand for AI articles right now is out of whack.

What I was trying to say about spam is that your karma doesn't count so much as being a participant in the community counts. Like, I post a lot of articles to web sites that aren't my blog so if I post a few links to my blog it is OK. Now I'm an extreme case because I post a lot of links, but somebody who has like 1/10,000 the karma I have or less could post what they like so long as they aren't posting all links to the same web site. That's the place where your participation matters -- my posts don't do any better than anyone else's.
by Retric | 2025-08-10 23:30:10+00:00
My 4 nines + your 4 or 5 nines = 1 in 100 million to 1 in 1 billion.

Even adding all the churches, clubs, and nonprofits I don’t think it’s that rare. The Mormon church for example has ~293 billion in assets. Even the Church of Scientology is apparently worth ~2 billion.
by GolfPopper | 2025-08-10 23:30:47+00:00
I was born in the early 70s, and growing up in America's Mountain West had the reverse experience until personal computers and the internet arrived in the early 90s.

From the perspective of my childhood, technology (cars, planes, phones & faxes, rockets, computers, refrigerators and other household appliances, rock music, radio, movies, television, science fiction & fantasy, the machinery of war, factories, farming, medicine, etc) were all elements of society that had advanced in technological progress, but had "always been there". I, of course, knew that there was a world before all that - my great-grandfather, who lived into his 90s and whom I got to know well, had driven a stagecoach as a teenager - but all of those had entered something like their modern form during or in the immediate aftermath of WWII, and to me it seemed like there had been progress, but not systemic change, in all the time since. It helped that all the adults around me largely saw WWII as the defining event of modern history. There was "before the War" and there was "now" (which came after the war).

Partly that was result of being born at the right time - the space program was in full swing, computers were a staple of fiction and large business but no more, the counterculture had come and gone, etc. The world really seemed like a timeless place to me as a child, and then about the time I reached adulthood, the Cold War ended, and the Internet Era arrived, and the world changed (and continued to change).
by vFunct | 2025-08-10 23:31:35+00:00
Yes that's a convincing argument, because the public support has taken our side. Polls show support for Israel has massively dropped, even in pro-Israel countries like the US.

Some of us DO know as much as we think we do. Not everyone is the idiot that you think they are.

You have yet to explain why you believe Israel are the good guys? But every argument you could make has already been rebuffed anyways, which is why our side can speak out and your side cannot.

Face it: Israel is about to end, likely within the next decade. Palestine won. Israel lost.
by jimbokun | 2025-08-10 23:31:44+00:00
This is the best compromise for coding with LLMs I’ve seen!

On an old sitcom a teenager decides to cheat on an exam by writing all the answers on the soles of his shoes. But he accidentally learns the material through the act of writing it out.

Similarly, the human will maintain a grasp of all the code and catch issues early, by the mechanical act of typing it all out.
by lenkite | 2025-08-10 23:32:17+00:00
Anonymous functions aren't the same as lambda functions. People in the Go community keep asking for lambda functions and never get them. There should be no need for func/fn and explicit return. Because the arrow would break stuff is one of the reasons.

See

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/59122

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/21498

res := is.Map(func(i int)int{return i+1}).Filter(func(i int) bool { return i % 2 == 0 }). Reduce(func(a, b int) int { return a + b })

vs

res := is.Map((i) => i+1).Filter((i)=>i % 2 == 0).Reduce((a,b)=>a+b)
by Jtsummers | 2025-08-10 23:33:11+00:00
If you like Ghuloum's paper, there are three fairly recent compiler books that are inspired by it:

https://nostarch.com/writing-c-compiler - Writing a C Compiler by Nora Sandler, language agnostic for the implementation.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262047760/essentials-of-compila... - Essentials of Compilation (using Racket) by Jeremy Siek

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262048248/essentials-of-compila... - Essentials of Compilation (using Python) by Jeremy Siek

Those last two both have open access versions.
by twiss | 2025-08-10 23:33:29+00:00
I may be missing something about how the PHP compiler/interpreter works, but I don't quite understand why this is apparently feasible to implement:

class BlogPostRepository extends BaseRepository<BlogPost> { ... } $repo = new BlogPostRepository();

but the following would be very hard:

$repo = new Repository<BlogPost>();

They write that the latter would need runtime support, instead of only compile time support. But why couldn't the latter be (compile time) syntactic sugar for the former, so to speak?

(As long as you don't allow the generic parameter to be dynamic / unknown at compile time, of course.)
by tptacek | 2025-08-10 23:33:29+00:00
I didn't get a CS degree to begin with. I recommended against CS degrees to both my kids, even though one of them is into coding; a degree in some other discipline pairs nicely with self-taught programming skills, and a lot of my colleagues have gone that route.

So I think the real question is less "should you get a CS degree" (I would have said no in 2015 too), and more "should you plan for a career in software development".
by Ygg2 | 2025-08-10 23:33:43+00:00
> This is a ridiculous claim that it’s only "maybe". It’s so obvious.

Given enough effort, you can banish all UB and their related CVEs from a codebase. So it becomes a contest of which library had more scrutiny. I.e. you can compare a battle-tested library like cURL to stuff like baby's first XML parser. Plus, seeing how something is safe in practice is much different than just being memory safe.

> That went fast from "proven to be safe" to "yeah there are bugs".

Modulo compiler/hardware bugs goes without saying. Nothing really can exist in vacuum. You could prove your program is proven to work correctly, but if you put it on a platform where carry can randomly flip, and your perfect proof falls flat.

> Yes, unfixed for two years. I don’t have this bug in Go, for example, so why, as a Rust user, should I care whose fault it is?

Because it will be eventually fixed, unlike Go's design (that said they could change their tune and fix it, and I'll respectfully correct my statements). Then again, it's not like it is in scope for Rust. It's a bug in LLVM.

Plus, `unsound` bugs get extra scrutiny. Hell they had to write a new trait solver, Polonius, to solve problems some traits presented to the safety system.

> And how did you arrive at these numbers of "—"?

How many UBs do you leave open? How many errors other errors can your program prevent (e.g. do you allow `null`/`nil`)? And was this an error extremely obvious at time of writing (billion dollar mistake)?
by BirAdam | 2025-08-10 23:34:17+00:00
Well, I know exactly what you're saying, but to be fair to Apple, my 68K Mac that's nearly 40 still works. My iMac G4 is fine. PowerMac G3 is fine. First gen Mac Pro is fine. Meanwhile, the only PCs I know of that survive time quite as well (and I collect old crap) were all nearly equivalent to Apple level pricing at the time of their introduction.

While Apple does charge nearly criminal markup for RAM and storage, they at least make some products that last (except for the TouchBar MacBooks' keyboards). I just hope my Mac Studio lasts too.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-08-10 23:35:14+00:00
Exactly. I have all sorts of personal feelings about "AI" (I don't call it that, whatever) but spending a few days with Claude Code made it clear to me that we're in a new era.

It's not going to replace me, it's going to allow me to get projects done that I've backburnered for years. Under my direction. With my strict guidance and strict review. And that direction and review requires skill -- higher level skills.

Yes, if you let the machine loose without guidance... you'll get garbage-in, garbage-out.

For years I preferred to do ... immanent design... rather than up front design in the form of docs. Now I write up design docs, and then get the LLM to aid in the implementation.

It's made me a very prolific writer.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-08-10 23:35:38+00:00
A long time ago, it became useless to talk about Linux market share. And more recently, it became useless to talk about Linux desktop market share. This is because "desktop" is too broad a term. There are a lot of special-purpose machines out there, and Linux long ago reached parity with Windows for these embedded/kiosk purposes. How many of these are point-of-sale terminals, or handheld scanners in a warehouse? It's impossible to tell.

I think we should change our perspective 180 degrees and, instead of asking "what goes Linux do?" we should ask "what doesn't Linux do?" and go from there.
by credit_guy | 2025-08-10 23:35:40+00:00
Yes and no. With junior developers you need to educate them. You need to do that with LLMs too. Maybe you need to break down the problem in smaller chunks, but you get to this after a while. But once the LLM understands the task, you get a few hundred lines of code in a mater of minutes. With a junior developer you are lucky if they come back the same day. The iteration speed with AI is simply in a different league.

Edit: it is Sunday. As I am relaxing, and spending time writing answers on HN, I keep a lazy eye on the progress of an LLM at work too. I got stuff done that would have taken me a few days of work by just clicking a "Continue" button now and then.
Ask HN: AI Anxiety
by yodsanklai | 2025-08-10 23:36:15+00:00
Does anyone else suffer from AI anxiety or feel overwhelmed by the recent developments? What do you think programming will be like in a few years?

I was skeptical one year ago, but I'm more and more concerned that AI is going to take my job, or at least transform it in something less fun. It has already.

Even on HN, every other posts seem to be about LLMs, like if there's no room or need for other CS topics anymore. Also, there's a lot of hype at the moment, with people reacting very emotionally on way or another. I find it hard to see where we're going exactly.

My current impression is that AI will prove useful, will increase developer productivity but not order of magnitude, and only once the tools are mature enough and developers learn to use them properly. But it will not reduce the need for expertise and for people who know their craft. Maybe it's wishful thinking.
by avalys | 2025-08-10 23:36:15+00:00
This is likely because the state they live in does not allow insurance companies to price their coverage according to risk, and applies political pressure when they try to do so. Insurance companies are demonized and characterized as heartless, rapacious and greedy, despite the fact that they’re probably losing money at current prices. So, many companies decide to exit the market rather than be forced to sell a service that they expect to lose money on.
by WantonQuantum | 2025-08-10 23:36:42+00:00
The "lambda lifting" seems to be referring to section 3.11 "Complex Constants" in the linked Ghuloum PDF:

Scheme’s constants are not limited to the immediate objects. Using the quote form, lists, vectors, and strings can be turned into constants as well. The formal semantics of Scheme require that quoted constants always evaluate to the same object. The following example must always evaluate to true:

(let ((f (lambda () (quote (1 . "H"))))) (eq? (f) (f)))

So, in general, we cannot transform a quoted constant into an unquoted series of constructions as the following incorrect transformation demonstrates:

(let ((f (lambda () (cons 1 (string #\H))))) (eq? (f) (f)))

One way of implementing complex constants is by lifting their construction to the top of the program. The example program can be transformed to an equivalent program containing no complex constants as follows:

(let ((tmp0 (cons 1 (string #\H)))) (let ((f (lambda () tmp0))) (eq? (f) (f))))

Performing this transformation before closure conversion makes the introduced temporaries occur as free variables in the enclosing lambdas. This increases the size of many closures, increasing heap consumption and slowing down the compiled programs. Another approach for implementing complex constants is by introducing global memory locations to hold the values of these constants. Every complex constant is assigned a label, denoting its location. All the complex constants are initialized at the start of the program. Our running example would be transformed to:

(labels ((f0 (code () () (constant-ref t1))) (t1 (datum))) (constant-init t1 (cons 1 (string #\H))) (let ((f (closure f0))) (eq? (f) (f))))

The code generator should now be modified to handle the data labels as well as the two internal forms constant-ref and constant-init.
by Animats | 2025-08-10 23:37:15+00:00
> Google says that horses can go up to 70 km/h (45mi/h).

That is the fastest speed for a Thoroughbred racehorse over a mile. It's not sustainable for long. The horse record for 100 miles is 17MPH, on a really good Arabian.[1] 6MPH is a good working pace for a horse. 8-12 MPH at the trot, which can be kept up for a hour or two by many horses in good condition.

[1] https://www.chronofhorse.com/article/world-endurance-record-...
by williamcotton | 2025-08-10 23:37:25+00:00
Here's my blog with a work in progress article [0], written in a DSL I wrote called Web Pipe [1] that I started four days ago [2] with probably about 12 hours worth of work:

[0] https://williamcotton.com/articles/introducing-web-pipe

[1] https://github.com/williamcotton/williamcotton.com/blob/mast...

[2] https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe-rs/commits/main/?af...
by giantg2 | 2025-08-10 23:37:25+00:00
CA can't even get their own house in order. If they were serious, they would apply the wildlands fire code to all the new construction in LA after the recent fires, but they won't. The real moral hazard is thinking the risks, costs, and benefits are as clear cut as you're making them... plus the non-starter about implying not paying taxes.
by lackoftactics | 2025-08-10 23:37:32+00:00
It’s on us as developers to use LLMs thoughtfully. They’re great accelerators, but they can also atrophy your skills if you outsource the thinking. I try to keep a deliberate balance: sometimes I switch autocomplete off and design from scratch; I keep Anki for fundamentals; I run micro‑katas to maintain muscle memory; and I have a “learning” VS Code profile that disables LLMs and autocomplete entirely.

As unfashionable as it sounds on hacker news, a hybrid workflow and some adaptation are necessary. In my case, the LLM boom actually pushed me to start a CS master’s (I’m a self‑taught dev with 10+ years of experience after a sociology BA) and dive into lower‑level topics, QMK flashing, homelab, discrete math. LLMs made it easier to digest new material and kept me curious. I was a bit burned out before; now I enjoy programming again and I’m filling gaps I didn’t know I had.

I often get down-voted on Hacker News for my take on AI, but maybe I am just one of the few exceptions who get a lot out of LLMs
by jvert | 2025-08-10 23:37:55+00:00
Early in Win32 development, the x86 calling convention was __cdecl. I did all the work to change it to __stdcall (callee clean-up). Yes, it was done purely for performance reasons. It was a huge change to the codebase and as a side-effect turned up a lot of "interesting" code which relied on cdecl calling conventions.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-10 23:38:05+00:00
They’re the world’s fourth largest economy (behind the US, China, and Germany), they’ll be fine economically. Red states actively choose to ignore climate change, with Texas going so far as to attempting to disadvantage renewables while supporting fossil fuels [1]. Florida’s insurance market is functionality insolvent [2]; they extend and pretend. Why would we financially help folks who don't believe in the active climate crisis? Vote for folks who dismantle FEMA? Vote for folks who rollback the inflation reduction act and climate mitigation spending [3]? Vote for folks who rollback vehicle emissions standards? Enjoy your vote. Better luck next time.

[1] https://prospect.org/environment/2025-06-05-texas-legislatur...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-04-24/home-insu... | https://archive.today/g8Ic5

[3] https://www.lw.com/en/insights/one-big-beautiful-bill-new-la...
by Eisenstein | 2025-08-10 23:38:12+00:00
You can do something similar with a laser. The laser is reflected off of an object and into an receiver where it is converted into audio. The two techniques differ in methods, but they both rely on measuring the movement of secondary materials affected by sound waves which can then be used to infer speech.

* https://hackaday.com/2010/09/25/laser-mic-makes-eavesdroppin...
by gurjeet | 2025-08-10 23:39:02+00:00
And it does it in an unusual way. After browsing around on the website and then noticing that the back button history is just the same site name repeated many times, I worried about my history needlessly polluted by this website. But when I opened my browser history, it was just a handful of URLs in there, each representing the screenshot I had actually clicked on.

So, yes, it does break the back button, but it doesn't pollute the actual history.
by shazbotter | 2025-08-10 23:39:22+00:00
What's more likely, worst tsunami ever, beyond previous safety stones? Or company shortcuts safety and falls over because they failed to account for predictable circumstances?

Given the latter happens constantly, and the former is once in generations upon generations, I think it's safe to assume the problem is human and the tsunami was within historical ranges.

Especially since other reactors were hit by the same tsunami and were fine.
by itsthecourier | 2025-08-10 23:40:28+00:00
geez, such a dense and nebulous article. I mean look at that:

"Photography as such has no identity. Its status as a technology varies with the power relations which invest it. Its nature as a practice depends on the institutions and agents which define it and set it to work. Its function as a mode of cultural production is tied to definite conditions of existence, and its products are meaningful and legible only within the particular currencies they have. Its history has no unity. It is a flickering across a field of institutional spaces. It is this field we must study, not photography as such."
by slowdog | 2025-08-10 23:40:31+00:00
As a heavy EC2 user who hasn't used ECS, the behavior makes perfect sense as ECS is running on EC2 but unless I sat and thought about it my first instinct would be that AWS would make it "secure by default" on a container level since containers often have different permission requirements and so the container would be the security boundary.

That said, I'm guessing it would have been obvious to anyone once they start setting up IAM permissions and therefore not much of a pitfall.

So it's a good reminder, but I agree with you, maybe the article doesn't need to be so long to get to the same point.
by radio879 | 2025-08-10 23:40:37+00:00
look up LLM7, and Pollinations AI. Both offer free GPT 4.1, but I am not sure how limited it is. They have tons more models but the names are different (openai-large = gpt-4.1)

Meta has free and generous APIs for the crappy Llama 4 models... they're okay at summarizing things but I have no idea if its any good for code. Prob not since no one even talks about those anymore.
by komali2 | 2025-08-10 23:40:43+00:00
> Physicians warned that "diseases of the wheel" came by "the almost universal use of the bicycle" and that "serious evils" might befall the youth who rode without restraint. Moralists condemned women who “pedaled along gleefully, having discarded their corsets and put on more practical clothing, including trousers.”

Modern takes on gender roles feel as deeply unserious to me as this take. Whenever I hear about the tradwife trend or hear some pundit blaming the "fertility crisis" on women liberation it sounds just like these 20th century takes.
by feraloink | 2025-08-10 23:40:52+00:00
At first I thought, same-old same-old, but I changed my mind halfway through. I like how the author, Elke, identifies the underlying similarities between e/acc and the AGI doomers. (By AGI doomers, I'm referring to many Less Wrong folks, NOT earnest people who worry about whether AI will cause 20% unemployment or if it is hype and they're being played).

I think pmarca may have had a change of heart about being on the e/acc side, but he certainly is associated with funding lots of AI startups, so that may be more relevant.

Also, after the SBF_FTX fiasco and association with effective altruism, I'm not sure if EA should be so strongly linked to the doomers as Elke does. This and my vague recall of what Andreessen says on Twitter are minor points. Elke wrote an insightful, clever post about AGI (and even AI without attaining AGI) as a form of eschatology.

P.S. My next stop will be to look for the 1999 book she mentioned for an earlier view of tech eschatology.
by varenc | 2025-08-10 23:40:55+00:00
I have the same frustration. The built in Apple algorithm is far too conservative. The `batt` tool has solved this for me now.

iPad OS on recent iPads has a dead simple "limit charge to 80%" option in system settings. MacOS should just have the same feature.

I also limit my iPhone's charge by using shortcut automations and a smart power plug. It just turns the plug off when charge exceeds 80% and on when it drops below 75%. Not ideal but I think still better for battery life than having it sit at 100%. (lmk if I'm wrong!)
by nudgeOrnurture | 2025-08-10 23:41:07+00:00
your son could move to Germany if you can't cover the cost.

if he's that bad into it, he'll be doing gigs and projects with students and cracks all over the world.

it's not about getting a degree in CS, it's about how bad you want to feed your curiosity. the field is still in it's teen years. there's whole human-like brains to build, hardware and infra and artificial minds that run on it.

employers? your son sounds like he'll be one in no time.
by giantg2 | 2025-08-10 23:41:11+00:00
"We don’t have an insurance issue, we have a healthcare and inflation cost issue. Same goes with home insurance."

I think this is the primary driver. However, we can't ignore how insurance company behavior also influences the pricing. The feds play a bigger role in this than you might think with things like Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement rates and residency funding leading to provider scarcity.