MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dreckneck | 2025-08-11 06:11:33+00:00
In the practical sense, not much of my work actually changed and my company seems to be hiring the same as before.

In the psychological sense, I'm actually devastated. I'm honestly struggling to be motivated to learn/create new things. I'm always overthinking stuff like:

- "Why would I learn mobile app dev if in the near future there will be an AI making better UIs than me?" - "Why would I write a development blog?" - "Why would I publish an open-source library on GitHub? So that OpenAI can train its LLM on it?" - "Why would I even bother?"

And then, my motivation sharply drops to zero. What I've been up to lately is playing with non-tech related hobbies and considering switching careers...
by bobbyraduloff | 2025-08-11 06:13:00+00:00
It’s quite upsetting that if you want a modern car so that you utilise the newest advances in safety, you have to consent to constant tracking, enshitification, subscription services, etc. It would be really cool if you could get something like a ‘67 impala that doesn’t make ‘67 emissions and has actual seatbelts and airbags…
by adwn | 2025-08-11 06:13:19+00:00
> The operation of copying data is super easy to parallelize across multiple threads. […] This will make the copy super-fast especially if the CPU has a large core count.

I seriously doubt that. Unless you have a NUMA system, a single core in a desktop CPU can easily saturate the bandwidth of the system RAM controller. If you can avoid going through main memory – e.g., when copying between the L2 caches of different cores – multi-threading can speed things up. But then you need precise knowledge of your program's memory access behavior, and this is outside the scope of a general-purpose memcpy.
by JdeBP | 2025-08-11 06:13:55+00:00
We've all done it. (-:

For some while I read people saying that, despite the existence of Paul Jarc showing how svscan as process 1 would actually work and Gerrit Pape leading the way with runit-init and demonstrating the basic idea, one could not do full system management with daemontools and wholly eliminate van Smoorenberg init and rc.

* https://code.dogmap.org/svscan-1/

* https://smarden.org/runit/

It was one of the motivating factors in the creation of nosh, to show that what one does is exercise a bit of imagination, take the daemontools (or daemontools-encore) service management, and fairly cleanly layer separate system management on top of that. Gerrit Pape pioneered the just-3-shell-scripts approach, and I extended that idea with some notions from AIX, SunOS/Solaris, AT&T System 5, and others. The service manager and the system manager did not have to be tightly coupled into a single program, either. That was another utter bunkum claim.

* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/#SystemMangement

* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/new-interfaces.html

Laurent Bercot demonstrated the same thing with s6 and s6-rc. (For clarity: Where M. Bercot talks of "supervision" I talk of "service management" and where M. Bercot talks of "service management" as the layer above supervision I talk of "system management".)

* https://skarnet.org/software/s6-rc/overview.html

The fallacy was still going strong in 2016, some years afterwards, here on Hacker News even.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13055123
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-11 06:14:03+00:00
>Landing in court is an expensive thing that companies don't want to happen.

"If the penalty is a fine, it's legal for the rich". These businesses also don't want to pay taxes or even workers, but in the end they will take the path of least resistence. if they determine fighting in court for 10 years is more profitable than following regulations, then they'll do it.

Until we start jailing CEO's (a priceless action), this will continue.

>companies is paying thousands of dollars a month (or more) for a paid service under the understanding that it won't train on their data.

Sure, but are we talking about people or companies here?
by dang | 2025-08-11 06:14:38+00:00
Not exactly, but I have keyboard shortcuts to quickly drive through HN Search and open/jump around the relevant HN threads and make lists of the interesting ones and then auto-format the list.

(This comes up a lot - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40564558, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35668525 if curious)
by goosejuice | 2025-08-11 06:15:09+00:00
> Like, I'm not making it up. So no need to pretend to be daft about it. You each time referred to yourself as someone particularly capable of rendering a reasoned opinion on the matter.

This is childish and does nothing for the discussion. It's not about me. I'm not claiming to be an authority, nor am I using myself as one.

> Tesla's actions are incredibly reckless. No other company is behaving like them so it's an absurd proposition to say its the fault of the regulators. It's not a market problem. It's a tesla problem.

The FTC hasn't once acted on Tesla's marketing. That's tacit approval at this point.

The NHTSA has issued two? recalls on Tesla's ADAS and that wasn't until late 2023.

Relying on lawsuits from crash victims, based completely on unclear or lack of regulations, is far from the ideal situation. It's only a Tesla problem insofar they make up the vast majority of miles driven with this kind of ADAS. The NHTSA just isn't keeping up.

Is Tesla pushing the envelope? Yeah, of course they are. That's by design of the self certifying approach that the NHTSA landed on. Tesla could do a lot more safety testing, but that doesn't mean the regulators haven't dropped the ball.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2024/05/04/tes...
by roadside_picnic | 2025-08-11 06:15:51+00:00
The role of McKinsey and co has always been reputation laundering, not actual consulting.

Companies bring in McKinsey and pay the big bucks so that when something goes wrong or in unpopular they can point the finger and McKinsey. McKinsey consultants are paid to say the things that corporate leadership doesn't want to say.

The entire role of a consultant is the create theater to present the illusion that they are doing serious "business". Look how professional they are? If they get it wrong, then maybe nobody can get it right. Worst case we can shake our finger at them and frown, can you believe how they handled those layoffs? ... then call them back next month when it needs to be done again.

Everything goes right? Well, what great leadership this corporation has. Either way McKinsey gains a good reputation around other corporate leaders in need of these services.

AI is not replacing that particular service anytime soon.
by schmookeeg | 2025-08-11 06:16:17+00:00
Thank you for expounding, but man, I have so many "wait, what? who?" reactions to that narrative.

I'm addicted to coding, not work. I know this because I've tried other jobs, even in late career, and they sucked in comparison and brought me no joy.

"The company" is mine, so yeah, probably it doesn't care about me, but it's definitely not dropping me without consent. :)

48, soon 49, heart still going. Not even sure what that's referring to. I don't feel stressed in these crunches, I feel excited! I build cool shit! They pay me to build cool shit! They pay me way too much to build cool shit!

I guess I don't know what I would balance that excitement with. I have cool hobbies too, and those have their place, but... I just don't resonate with your take and view on the industry.

IF someone hated coding, creating, or the tech industry itself -- then I could squint and get behind your balance suggestions. For them. :)

Thanks for sharing the perspective though. If nothing else, you're fanning my gratitude flame.
by stephen_g | 2025-08-11 06:16:25+00:00
It's a silly hypothetical though - the argument that some emergency measures during an international pandemic emergency are authoritarianism would only make sense if we were all still subject to the measures (like stay at home orders).

The problem for your argument is that the temporary emergency measures turned out to actually be temporary. Authoritarian regimes use emergencies (often fake ones) to entrench long-term change, this was a real emergency that had a temporary response...
by viraptor | 2025-08-11 06:16:33+00:00
The full reorder buffer is still going to be only 200-500 instructions. The actual benchmark is not linked, but it would take only a hundred or so messages to largely ignore the reordering. On the other hand, when you use the library, the write needs to actually finish in the shared memory before you notify the other process. So unless the benchmark was tiny for some reason, why would this be irrelevant?
by asabla | 2025-08-11 06:17:28+00:00
> that rely on tool use for facts, and “knowledge bases” tuned for retrieval-heavy work

I would say this isn't exclusive to the smaller OSS models. But rather a trait of Openai's models all together now.

This becomes especially apparent with the introduction of GPT-5 in ChatGPT. Their focus on routing your request to different modes and searching the web automatically (relying on an Agentic workflows in the background) is probably key to the overall quality of the output.

So far, it's quite easy to get their OSS models to follow instructions reliably. Qwen models has been pretty decent at this too for some time now.

I think if we give it another generation or two, we're at the point of having compotent enough models to start running more advanced agentic workflows. On modest hardware. We're almost there now, but not quite yet
by bluefirebrand | 2025-08-11 06:17:28+00:00
> If you say AI does 0% of your work, I'd say you're either a genius, behind the curve or being disingenuous

AI was doing 0% of my work 10 years ago too, why should I be any less effective without it now?

You think I'm behind the curve because I'm not buying into the AI craze?

Ok. What's so important about being on the curve anyways, exactly? My boss won't pay me a single cent more for using AI, so why should I care?
by whakim | 2025-08-11 06:18:16+00:00
* Filterable ANN certainly decomposes into pre- and post-filtering, and there is definitely a lot of interesting innovation occurring around filterable ANN. But large-scale search systems currently do a pretty good job with pre-filtering, falling back to brute force search in the case of restrictive filters.

* You'd have to be a bit more exact re: dynamic updates/versioning for me to understand the challenges you're facing.

* Building graph indices can be slow, but in my experience (billions of embeddings) it is possible to build HNSW indices in tens of minutes.

* How is this any different to combining traditional keyword search with, say, recency boosting?
by pbkompasz | 2025-08-11 06:18:35+00:00
This is next level thinking:

Let’s check:

5.90 − 5.11 = 0.79

So it should be 0.79, not − 0.21.

If you got − 0.21 , that would be from solving

5.9 − 5.11 = − 0.21
by AndyNemmity | 2025-08-11 06:18:57+00:00
Usually when you learn difficult skills, you can go to a trainer, take a class, read about the solutions.

Right now, you are entirely up to the random flawed information on the internet that you often can't repeat in trials, or your structured ideas on how to improve a thing.

That is difficult. It is difficult to take the information available right now, and come up with a reasonable way to improve the performance of LLMs through your ingenuity.

At some point it will be figured out, and every corporation will be following the same ideal setup, but at the moment it is a green field opportunity for the human brain to come up with novel and interesting ideas.
by zevon | 2025-08-11 06:19:09+00:00
If you want factual, how about the source material the LLM was trained on?

If you want human interaction, you will probably have to deal with people being messy (just as LLMs are - they just hide it better beneath a veneer of sickly „politeness“).

The closest analogy might be to move somewhere where you can get slaves, find a few well-educated ones and interact with them like you would with an LLM. You could even make some psychedelics available to them so they can occasionally hallucinate a bit.
by Zee2 | 2025-08-11 06:19:33+00:00
DF cares much more about frame timings, not necessarily framerate. In many of their videos they praise games which achieve a locked, stable, hitch-free, 30fps. In some cases, frame time stability can be almost as important, or even more, than absolute average framerate.

Especially when Unreal has been infamous for shader compilation stutter, where even a on-the-surface 60fps average can feel terrible due to inconsistent frame timing and hitches.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-08-11 06:20:34+00:00
> having to try and explain to people why having an AI reduce software development workload by 30-50%

I'm tired of having to try and explain that AI isn't remotely reducing my workload by 30-50%, and in fact it often probably slows me down because the stupid AI autocomplete gets in the way with incorrect suggestions and prevents me from getting into any kind of flow
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-11 06:21:17+00:00
>Someone can just look at a screenshot of my aicodeprep app and just make one and make it look the same too.

To some extent. But without your codebase they will make different decisions in the back which will affect a myriad of factors. Some may actually be better than your app, others will end up adding tech debt or have performance impacts. And this isn't even to get into truly novel algorithms; sometimes just having the experience to make a scalable app with best practices can make all the difference.

Or the audience doesn't care and they take the cheaper app anyway. It's not always a happy ending.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-11 06:21:21+00:00
Yeah, but since this stuff comes in cycles, now we have WebAssembly Component Model, with gRPC predating it.

And I would vouch that REST/GraphQL with SaaS products, finally managed to achieve that vision of software factories, nowadays a big part of my work is connecting SaaS products, e.g. fronted in some place, maybe with a couple of microservices, plugged with CMS, ecommerce, payment, marketing, and notifications based SaaS products.
by chandu_vrs | 2025-08-11 06:22:06+00:00
Nice work. I started working on something similar, but my use case is slightly different (but the solution is similar). We all are interested in certain topics, there is a lot of content that gets published and our time is limited, so we need something that helps us identify top 10 articles or so per topic. This is why most of us like HackerNews. I think HackerNews by topic or interest would be a good idea to implement (but along with users posting links, it can come from crawling few sites as well)
by Animats | 2025-08-11 06:22:32+00:00
In the early days of telephony, system load was measured by how much current was being drawn from the talk power supply. This was done with a watt-hour meter, calibrated in erlangs.[1]

(It's amazing how little logging went on in the phone system before computerized switching. But that's another subject.)

[1] https://physicsmuseum.uq.edu.au/erlangmeter
by bluefirebrand | 2025-08-11 06:22:42+00:00
> If people can seriously have an AI do 50% of their work, that's usually a confession that they weren't actually doing real work in the first place. Or, at least, they lacked the basic competence with tools that that any university sophomore should have.

Strongly agree here. I am extremely skeptical of anyone reporting this kind of productivity gain.
by famahar | 2025-08-11 06:25:14+00:00
I can confirm that I have no lead poisoning. Just an artist. Here is my game with the 14fps lock.

https://infinitetears.itch.io/cityephemera

Many people seem to really enjoy the experience. I believe I can get away with this specifically because I don't care to make my games fun. They are art pieces made with game engines in a sense.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-11 06:25:33+00:00
>The role of McKinsey and co has always been reputation laundering, not actual consulting.

Reminds me of why companies choose penetration testing services/audits from some specific well known companies, but also only want to pay for the bare minimum amount of testing. They want the reputation of the label that they passed an audit from X company, they don't actually care about their security.

>McKinsey consultants are paid to say the things that corporate leadership doesn't want to say.

More like they're paid to say the things corporate leadership doesn't want to hear from its own employees. They already know it, but they just pay McK to have external confirmation, to reinforce what they already know.
by mrkeen | 2025-08-11 06:25:48+00:00
> Erased generics the type information is not available at run time. That's the way Java does it and it kinda sucks.

In a good statically-typed language you don't need runtime type information. It could be a Void in the bytecode for all I care, as long as it behaves correctly.

> obj.GetType() == typeof(typename)

In a statically-typed language, this can be optimised away to a bool at compile time.
by englishrookie | 2025-08-11 06:26:22+00:00
Would you mind sharing your setup (LLM model, IDE, best practices)? Personally, I'm struggling to get value out of Continue.dev in VSCode (using Gemini 2.0 Flash by default, with the option to switch to more advanced models). I still revert to pasting code into ChatGPT chat window (using the website), frequently.

Are you using agentic features, given that you have not just one but two PMs?
by nolok | 2025-08-11 06:26:41+00:00
> Its the biggest example out there why should not use PHP for anything close to, say 10% of facebook scale.

What a weird take to base your current belief on something that happened more than a decade ago.

Not only the condition for Hack creation (speed, memory usage and strict type checking) have been fixed a long time ago since php 7.0

But also if you reach 10% of facebook scale, it doesn't matter what language you used, you will need to rewrite anyway.

Show me a company where PHP is the issue because they reached 10% of facebook scale, and what you're showing is a company that succeeded thanks to PHP. Applies to other language the same. Picking your stack based on "but what if I reach that scale" has to be the mother of all premature optimisations.
by kalasoo | 2025-08-11 06:26:58+00:00
Agree

I agree on this in every aspect

AI or any technology serve users locally will eventually empower users in a great manner because users can fully understand what they want.

Like a paper and pencil, which was not "cheap" in early history but eventually local. "AI" or any technology will function the same way eventually.

why?

1. free to run and create (free == cheap, free == uncensored) 2. ambient everywhere
by palata | 2025-08-11 06:27:17+00:00
> The only reason I can think of it's that it's deep state control.

Then you lack imagination :-). Let me give one example: "I am a fundamentally good guy, and I want to protect the people. If I was given access to all the communications of everybody, it would be easier for me to do my job and to improve the security for everybody".

Of course, (as you know) this is flawed, be it just because you can't guarantee that a surveillance system will only ever be used by fundamentally good guys in the eyes of their people. Or said differently, if you create a backdoor for the good guys, you also create a backdoor for the bad guys.

But it's easy to be well-intentioned and not understand that it's impossible to build cryptography only for the good guys. No need to invent a deep state when the simplest explanation is "the people who believe it are uninformed".
by kalasoo | 2025-08-11 06:27:49+00:00
Agree

I agree on this in every aspect

AI or any technology serve users locally will eventually empower users in a great manner because users can fully understand what they want.

Like a paper and pencil, which was not "cheap" in early history but eventually "local". AI or any technology will function the same way eventually.

why?

1. free to run and create (free == cheap, free == uncensored) 2. ambient everywhere
by bluefirebrand | 2025-08-11 06:29:32+00:00
No, you're not alone

I find it wastes my time more than it helps

Everyone insists I must be using it wrong

I was never arrogant enough to think I'm a superior coder to many people, but AI code is so bad and the experience using it is so tedious that I'm starting to seriously question the skills of anyone who finds themselves more productive using AI for code instead of writing it themselves
by zevon | 2025-08-11 06:29:38+00:00
I think immersing yourself in a university is a good thing for a few years. It almost doesn’t matter what you study as long as you don’t treat university as a school or degree machine. Sit in on courses from other fields of study. Engage in student politics. Build a plane / car / student coffee shop. Stick your head in a lot of research labs and ask the people there questions. Roam though the cellars, liberate an old mainframe / robot arm / CNC machine and make it work again. Do theater. Whatever. Universities are big, interesting places and there are not many other environments where you can learn, try out and hack on so many different things.
by JdeBP | 2025-08-11 06:29:55+00:00
You actually mis-remember. One of the things that was a perpetual telephone-game distortion during the Operating System Wars was people talking about a single input queue.

Presentation Manager did not have a single input queue. Every PM application had its own input queue, right from when PM began in OS/2 1.1, created by a function named WinCreateMsgQueue() no less. There were very clearly more than 1 queue. What PM had was synchronous input, as opposed to asynchronous in Win32 on Windows NT.

Interestingly, in later 32-bit OS/2 IBM added some desynchronization where input would be continued asynchronously if an application stalled.

Here's Daniel McNulty explaining the difference in 1996:

* https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.os2.beta/c/eTlmIYgm2WI/m...

And here's me kicking off an entire thread about it the same year:

* https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.os2.programmer.misc/c/Lh...
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-11 06:30:03+00:00
>Hackernews is free. The posts are valuable to me and I guess my posts are valuable to me, but I wouldn't pay for it and I definitely don't expect to get paid.

at this point, we may need future forums to be premium so we can avoid the deluge of AI bots plauging the internet. a small, one time cost is a guaranteed way to make such strategies untenable. SomethingAwful had a point decades ago.

But like any other business, you need to follow the money and understand the incentives. Hackernews has ads, but ads for companies with us as the audience. It's also indirectly an ad for YCombinator itself as bringing awareness of the accelerator (note what "hackernews.com" redirects to).

I'm fine with a company advertising itself; if I wasn't the idea of a company ceases to really function. And in this structure for companies, I can also get benefits by potentially getting jobs from here. So I don't mind that either. Everything aligns. I agree and support the structure. I can't say that about many other "free" websites.

As for me. I do want to monetize my data one day. I can't stop the scraping the entire internet over (that's for the courts), but I sure as heck won't hand it to them on a silver platter.
by theshrike79 | 2025-08-11 06:30:16+00:00
Mentally people still map EV batteries to the batteries used in power tools and phones. None of which last over 5 years in a usable state.

EV batteries have statistical historical data proving they easily last 10-15 years before falling to even 80% of maximum - and these are the 10-15 year old batteries, current ones are even better.
by martin_a | 2025-08-11 06:30:20+00:00
> Somewhat related, an easy early fix was to disable the car's microphone in the headliner light assembly.

This (and maybe the things he does further on) would probably interfer with the eCall system that is mandatory for cars in Europe. The author seems to be in the US so that might be fine, but if you're in Europe, please don't do stuff like this.