MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gjvc | 2025-08-06 10:05:24+00:00
post a link to a stable repository on github on this site. watch as several people pipe up and say "last commit 2020; must be dead"

source code is ascii text, and ascii text is not alive. it doesn't need to breathe, modulo dependencies, yes. but this attitude that "not active, must be dead and therefore: avoid" leads people to believing that the opposite: unproven and buggy new stuff, is always better.

silly counter-example: vim from 10 years ago is just as usable for the 90% case as the latest one
by rowanG077 | 2025-08-06 10:05:42+00:00
The main problem for me here is that this is embedding some kind of DSL in an existing programming language. You can see the shortcomings really clearly with amaranth. A ton of things that you would expect to be just an operator are function calls. Literally if you want to write an conditional statement you have an if method. You mark states as Strings. you want to append some bytes? Cat instead of just python ++. When you are writing amaranth you are really writing two languages at once. You are writing the amaranth DSL while writing python.

There are however better takes. Clash, Spade, Silice are such much better in this regard. But I'd still take Amaranth over the big three.
by wisty | 2025-08-06 10:05:47+00:00
Evolution should make intelligent choices for us but there's thousands years where a few extra pounds meant surviving a famine.

Also I bet it will kill a few people with eating disorders.

As long as you're in a 1st world country and have a BMI over ... maybe 25 (and aren't on steroids so you're both anorexic and overweight at the same time) I'd guess you're dodging a lot of the most obvious risks.
by franga2000 | 2025-08-06 10:05:57+00:00
You don't need an equal replacement to lose your job, just a good enough and more economical one.

Lots of graphic designers lost their jobs or at least a lot of their work now that image generation models have gotten decent at rendering text. Now any idiot can whip up some advertising graphics at half the quality of a designer, but in 1/10th the time and 1/100th the cost (or even for free!). It doesn't matter that it looks like ass and makes no sense in context, they produced an acceptable result for a fraction of the cost.

Quality does not matter in the market, it never has. Whoever can produce the most slop at the lowest price nearly always wins. Yes, there are exceptions, many of them even. But not enough to employ nearly as many of us as there are now.
by SSchick | 2025-08-06 10:06:02+00:00
A lot of "engineers" nowadays don't know the concept of per-user/customers configs and how to build/expose them to non-technical staff.

The main appeal of feature flags is simplicity and being a low-hanging way to apply per-customer/user configuration, few platforms allow true a/b testing (amplitude comes to mind but I'm sure there are more).
by jpc0 | 2025-08-06 10:06:17+00:00
Not entirely related but humans have the same problem.

For scriptwriting when doing voice overs we always explicitly write out everything. So instead of 1 000 000 we would write one million or a million. This is a trivial example but if the number was 1 548 736 you will almost never be able to just read that off. However one million, five hundred and forty eight thousand, seven hundred and thirty six can just be read without parsing.

Same with urls, W W W dot Google dot com.
by probably_wrong | 2025-08-06 10:06:30+00:00
I don't think inefficiency is the right word. In fact, I'd argue the exact opposite: that one of the main problems with education is that every single administrator has been trying to optimize it to death for the wrong metrics, namely "number of students making it through" and "budget".

Smaller institutions are indeed better, but they are also less efficient. It's no wonder that only rich families can afford institutions like that.
by highfrequency | 2025-08-06 10:06:34+00:00
> These are not railroads—we aren’t building century-long infrastructure. AI datacenters are short-lived, asset-intensive facilities riding declining-cost technology curves, requiring frequent hardware replacement to preserve margins.

Neglects the most important benefit of large semiconductor spending: we are riding the Learning Curve up Moore's Law. We are not much better at building railroads today than we were in 1950. We are way better at building computers today. The GPUs may depreciate but the knowledge of how to build, connect, and use them does not - that knowledge compounds over time. Where else do you see decades of exponential efficiency improvements?
by so-cal-schemer | 2025-08-06 10:06:57+00:00
> You have to trust revealed preferences, not stated preferences.

Ah, the Pepsi Challenge! How apropos. Programming language popularity is mostly driven by marketing, after all.

It's a shame that a generation of programmers raised on high fructose corn syrup and aspartame will never know the refreshment of a homemade organic craft soda[S].

After all, if Racket[R] is the language for crafting languages[L], surely it's the SodaStream of soft drinks.

[R]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racket_(programming_language)

[L]: https://cacm.acm.org/practice/creating-languages-in-racket/

[S]: https://www.moodymixologist.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-c...
by saltysalt | 2025-08-06 10:07:04+00:00
No proxy yet, but I am considering one as many sites are re-directing my crawler based on its IP, which is causing indexing issues.

The hardest part BY FAR is the crawler: initially I was using Apache Nutch but it got slower and slower as the index grew, so I replaced it with my own crawler that I wrote in PHP (comfortable for me) and made that multi-threaded using Supervisor.

The second hardest part was the amount of security I had to build in to prevent bots running spam searches and hogging my infra.

I'll try to write a blog soon and post it here.
by KronisLV | 2025-08-06 10:07:53+00:00
For small enough codebases, that seems like an inevitable reality, eventually.

If you have nearly limitless compute to throw at an issue and a good enough model, then it should be able to create enough test cases to cover most aspects of the codebase (iterating thousands of times until it gets it right) and then eventually write a new implementation in a new language or a slightly different tech stack that passes all of the original tests, alongside a few more hundreds of iterations of refactoring.

I give it a decade until large orgs are doing that to avoid licensing restrictions and other liabilities.
by ralferoo | 2025-08-06 10:07:56+00:00
Likewise, while the idea of sticking the determination of whether a given feature is enabled or not in a REST service would make sense, it's not at all clear why you'd ever want to farm that out to another provider, apart from the rare case when you're making a static website with no backend at all.

If you have any kind of back-end infrastructure, it'd seem trivial to implement this yourself. Doing it yourself also allows you to make the feature flags more controlled, e.g. by some flag associated with the current user such as opting into experimental features.

For efficiency, I'd also want to batch a bunch of such flags together, so e.g. when a use logs in they get a list of enabled features that gets cached locally, rather than having to query each and every one via REST.

So I'd echo the question, what problem is this solving?
by Lutger | 2025-08-06 10:08:21+00:00
I didn't interpret it as decrying the use of AI. Especially because he plans to dedicate his time and energy into researching the very same AI he rants about, basically promoting its use!

Instead, I see it as a deeply personal rant about the state of affairs which he considers inevitable himself. That is why he leaves the ship.

Before AI slop, there has always been just the agile slop of the bare(ly) minimum product, good enough to woo the ones making a buying decision, or at least until the career sharks have moved on to the next thing. That kind of slop has always been there and everywhere actually. Its called capitalism, or consumerism. The trick is to work for a place that isn't squeezed too hard, because its still in the investment phase or because it just earns money on its own merit.

AI will certainly transform things, just like higher level languages and frameworks have done so. Maybe programming without AI will be the 'micro optimization' of the future: something that is still there and valuable, but only sometimes and only in a certain niche. Slop is eternal, it just has a new face and a new name.

This blog to me is a nice personal rant about a smart young developer coming of age, trying to find his way and guard his ideals or standards against the onslaught of consumerism, just as ambitious young developers always have tried to do.
by pessimizer | 2025-08-06 10:08:47+00:00
People with personal boundary issues see studies about how things currently are as prescriptive. They see a survey that says that most people put mustard on their hot dogs, then

1) get angry because they personally put catsup on their hot dogs,

2) argue with people about the math, but without actually pointing out any problems with the math other than it is being bigoted against people who like catsup and wants to "erase" people who put catsup on their hot dogs.

3) If they can manage to find somebody with the credentials that they deem important enough, and can leverage their complaint about the study to somehow guilt that person into wasting their time responding to their empty objection, they finally accept that the math works.

4) Now that they accept the math, they stop putting catsup on their own hot dogs, and only use mustard from now on. They ridicule and attack catsup users at every social opportunity, and brag about their contact with the credentialed person.

The word salad is just a necessary tool for expressing empty approval or disapproval, borrowed from 8th generation pseudo-Freudian European literary critics. It supplies a lot of words with no meaning, so you can use them to talk over people. It explicitly centers associative logic and magical thinking as its most innovative tool, and the interpretation of the actual world as if it were a literary fiction.
by globular-toast | 2025-08-06 10:09:50+00:00
Sure, absolutely. But that's the hard part of software engineering. The dream is composing software from small components and adding new features by just writing more small components.

But nobody has ever managed to get there despite decades of research and work done in this area. Look at the work of Gerald Sussman (of SICP fame), for example.

So all you're saying is it makes the easy bit easier if you've already done, and continue to do, the hard bit. This is one of the points made in TFA. You might be able to go 200mph in a straight line, but you always need to slow down for the corners.
by yelirekim | 2025-08-06 10:11:14+00:00
It sounds like you're generally unfamiliar with using AI to help you at all? Or maybe you're also being disingenuous? It's insanely easy to figure this stuff out, I literally know a dozen people who are not even engineers, have no programming experience, who use these tools. Here's what Claude (the free version at claude.ai) said in response to me saying "i have no idea how to use AI coding assistants, can you succinctly explain to me what i need to do? like, what do i download, run, etc in order to try different models and services, what are the best tools and what do they do?":

Here's a quick guide to get you started with AI coding assistants:

## Quick Start Options (Easiest)

*1. Web-based (Nothing to Download)* - *Claude.ai* - You're here! I can help with code, debug, explain concepts - *ChatGPT* - Similar capabilities, different model - *GitHub Copilot Chat* - Web interface if you have GitHub account

*2. IDE Extensions (Most Popular)* - *Cursor* - Full VS Code replacement with AI built-in. Download from cursor.com, works out of the box - *GitHub Copilot* - Install as VS Code/JetBrains extension ($10/month), autocompletes as you type - *Continue* - Free, open-source VS Code extension, lets you use multiple models

*3. Command Line* - *Claude Code* - Anthropic's terminal tool for autonomous coding tasks. Install via `npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code` - *Aider* - Open-source CLI tool that edits files directly

## What They Do

- *Autocomplete tools* (Copilot, Cursor) - Suggest code as you type, finish functions - *Chat tools* (Claude, ChatGPT) - Explain, debug, design systems, write full programs - *Autonomous tools* (Claude Code, Aider) - Actually edit your files, make changes across codebases

## My Recommendation to Start

1. Try *Cursor* first - download it, paste in some code, and ask it questions. It's the most beginner-friendly 2. Or just start here in Claude - paste your code and I can help debug, explain, or write new features 3. Once comfortable, try GitHub Copilot for in-line suggestions while coding

The key is just picking one and trying it - you don't need to understand everything upfront!
by giis | 2025-08-06 10:11:15+00:00
To be honest, I do regret it. After 20 years of working on FOSS projects, I've invested enormous amounts of time, effort, and money into these and other free/open-source initiatives. It was enjoyable initially - there's something addictive about receiving praise from strangers and unknown communities. You keep going because it feels good and you develop a sense of moral superiority. But years later, when the people closest to you are no longer around - you pause and reflect on how much energy you devoted to random strangers instead of those who shared your life. If I had invested even 1% of the time and effort I put into FOSS projects into my relationships with loved ones, they would have been so much happier. Now I'm left wondering what the hell I was doing all those years https://giis.co.in/foss.html
by Festro | 2025-08-06 10:11:55+00:00
SEO takes longer than 3 months.

AI image generation is an emergent and bloated market, your content has very little chance of standing out.

Guest blogs are spam, Google can identify them easily and ignores them for domain authority calculations and passing of trust to linked sites. Do not do them.

What are your keywords, what are you trying to rank for? Is SEO a priority for early user onboarding or is paid advertising a better angle (sorry if SEO is your only skill).

Has market analysis been done for this product? What is that saying? You mention a competitive space. This startup doesn't sound like it's going to last long.

It sounds like a startup that is best as a side project for a single founder churning out generated content until it gains some users and traction to rise above 90% of low effort AI tools.

As for your work situation - two weeks or what? They give you your notice? You get redundancy? Are you still in your probationary period? If you're doing work, results don't matter. That's their fault for a flawed startup market plan. Check your worker's rights where you are employed.
by esseph | 2025-08-06 10:12:20+00:00
Drones are being operated in layers based on range and capability. This applies to both long range / heavy payload drones and small / fast fpvs.

Long range, heavy payload, ISR drones with excellent optics and thermals are helping to spot targets from very far away that small groups of fpv operators can search and target.

Smaller drones must be somewhat closer, so this can't happen too far away from where are currently.

Depending on the terrain and what the enemy is using to adapt (like fiber optic tether for drones like a TOE missile, or like AI targeting and terminal guidance to counter controls + GPS jamming), fpv drones can be a liability (tree cover, rubble) or have a big impact.

What a lot of units are doing for tree cover is what is called a VT fuse for mortars or artillery. These can be configured to burst at tree height. Artillery/indirect often have coverage over top of drone units to cover their advance with smoke if need be, and much further range than FPV drone operations do without some sort of comms relay (could be another airborne drone relaying).

Yeah. Don't group up though. The first round of indirect fire is normally the most deadly.
by poemxo | 2025-08-06 10:13:41+00:00
I personally think so. I like lore behind the story, how the Snow Crash is a concept that has ties to ancient history, the scenes with Hiro and the librarian discussing Sumerian myth have stayed with me.

In the story, without spoiling anything, the titular Snow Crash can only happen to programmers. Similarly your LLM experience couldn't happen to a smooth-brained non-physicist like me.
by pimterry | 2025-08-06 10:14:05+00:00
Being able to rewrite existing working code sufficient to copyright-launder it isn't the same as being able to write it from scratch, unfortunately, especially since LLMs seem to be allowed to ignore quite a bit of copyright law with complete impunity.

Imo it's totally plausible that something will be expensive & time consuming to create, even with LLMs, but still easy to fork outside current licensing restrictions with LLMs.
by mcapodici | 2025-08-06 10:14:28+00:00
Feature flag can (usually does??) have another meaning, as a technical feature rollout mechanism, so you can roll back quickly without a deployment. A way to manage risk on teams that make hundreds of commits/deploys a week. You can then often send a certain % of traffic through the feature or not to look for early warnings.

I don't like feature flags for config. Just build a config system into the product UI - a settings page basically! That might have some bits you configure as the site owner, and some that are self-service.
by roenxi | 2025-08-06 10:14:45+00:00
It is possible - for example, getting a blob of physics data, fitting a curve then projecting the curve to theorise what would happen in new unseen situations. The information constraints don't limit the ability to generate new data in a specific domain from a small sample; indeed it might be possible to fully comprehend the domain if there is an underlying process it can infer. It is impossible to come up with wildly unrelated domains though.
by user____name | 2025-08-06 10:14:48+00:00
> Instead of training the personnel and putting faith in them, they are treated like children.

Exactly this, so much time and effort gets expended on paranoid bureaucracy.

Ideally the decisions on these things should be taken by those with a good amount of practical experience, who've been held accountable in the past, know the kinds risks low-skill employees bring and the pressures vested interests bring to the table. The ivory tower types don't know any of that.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-08-06 10:15:33+00:00
What I am still looking for is a way to clone voice locally. I have OK hardware. For example I can use Mistral Small 3.1 or what it is called locally. Premade voices can be interesting too, but I am looking for custom voice. Perhaps by providing audio and the corresponding transcript to the model, training it, and then give it a new text and let it speak that.
by NeutralForest | 2025-08-06 10:16:27+00:00
Cool article, I think a lot of those issues are not Python specific so it's a good overview of whatever others can learn from a now 30 years old language! I think we'll probably go down the JS/TS route where another compiler (Pypy or mypyc or something else) will work alongside CPython but I don't see Python4 happening.
by muzani | 2025-08-06 10:16:53+00:00
First attempt in 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35770094

It was a typical roguelike kind of engine with AI-generated monsters and responses. It was okay, but far too slow, and the mechanics funneled it to being repetitive (e.g. whatever class you made up, you had a spear and a blade). Most of the players ended up playing with the character generation screen more than the game itself.

Second attempt, 2025: https://smuz.itch.io/good-cop-bad-cop

It's an attempt to vibe code a dialogue-runner game. It was fast enough that switching tones became a game, but not very fun and took too long to make.

Attempt 3, July 2025: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmxj20zQ7wA

An actual breakthrough. It's open-ended. Make any character you can imagine, toss them into any kind of scenario. Unlike AI Dungeon's Do and Chat modes, you can just roleplay like you would in a messaging app, and the AI will handle it. There's a nice mix of algorithms here - tropes make characters more interesting than raw AI, palettes always land on something nice looking, some rules so you can't simply just disintegrate people. I feel like I should wrap this up but I've learned what I can from it.

What next? I want to take the engine from #3 and make proper games by adding rules.

A) Godfather sim. You're trading favors, saying the right things, dealing with criminals and family members who you can't trust. A little bit of the Disco Elysium skill system - detect lies, charm people, economics, intimidation, etc. Alternative: El Presidente sim.

B) Superhero school. School is a perfect mix of training center, romance, politics, and prison. They're transitioning to heroes, but are learning to control themselves.

C) Sword & sorcery. Roguelikes were fun, but I want to capture the feel you get from the Conan books. Primal poetry. Unstoppable force meets immovable object. The end of the video in #3 demoes it well - you can throw a fork at someone's heart, rip the chains off the wall, catch a blade trap, and deal with the suspense of waiting to see how AI will resolve it. Poetry is core to the Conan experience, and I feel like we can do some Tarantino-style dialogue here too. Alternatives: John Wick sim, Ghostbusters.

D) Magic shopkeeper. While the rest are drama, this is cozy. Forge magic artifacts. Talk to kings and legends, change fates.

If you have any suggestions or interests, I'm open to that.
by devnen | 2025-08-06 10:17:16+00:00
That's a great point about the dependencies.

To make the setup easier and add a few features people are asking for here (like GPU support and long text handling), I built a self-hosted server for this model: https://github.com/devnen/Kitten-TTS-Server

The goal was a setup that "just works" using a standard Python virtual environment to avoid dependency conflicts.

The setup is just the standard git clone, pip install in a venv, and python server.py.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-08-06 10:17:56+00:00
"Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuX8QMgy4qE

Algorithmic isomorphism practically ensures most CS approaches will fail to formally model the problem clearly. To be blunt, that million dollar prize will be waiting around a long time.

An infinite amount of Papers do not necessarily have to converge on a correct solution. =3
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-06 10:19:11+00:00
> For WASM to become a replacement it would have to gain full DOM access to the containing page.

To become a total replacement, as in no-JavaScript-at-all-needed, sure, WASM would need to be able to access the DOM. But to to replace JavaScript as the language you’re writing, you can easily generate DOM bindings so you trampoline via JavaScript, and people have been doing this for as long as WASM has been around.

Giving WASM direct DOM access does not enable anything new: it merely lets you slim down your JS bindings and potentially improve time or memory performance.

> Browser makers have refused to do that for clear security reasons.

Actually, they’re a long way down the path of doing it. They’ve just been taking their time to make sure it’s done right—they’ve headed in at least three different directions so far. But it’s been clear from just about the start that it was an eventual goal.