MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sMarsIntruder | 2025-09-13 10:59:18+00:00
I stopped reading at this point:

> It’s why the world wasted $10B+ on self driving car companies that obviously made no sense. There’s a much bigger market for truths that pump bags vs truths that don’t.

This reeks of bias-dismissing massive investments as ‘obvious’ nonsense while hyping its own tinygrad as the ‘truth’ in AI coding.

Author is allowed to claim ‘most people do not care to find the truth’ but it’s hypocritical when the post ignores counterpoints, like PyTorch’s dominance in efficient coding benchmarks.

Author doesn’t seem to care about finding the full truth either, just the version that pumps its bag.
by drob518 | 2025-09-13 11:01:11+00:00
Yep. And the reality is that 99.99% of open source is driven by a single contributor. I used to live in the open source world and talk with companies who were thinking about releasing something as open source and the biggest myth I had to disabuse them of was the idea that lots of contributors would show up to work on the code. In rare cases with high value projects that does happen, but mostly not. Honestly, GitHub was the best thing to happen to open source because it made it much easier to get the code and create PRs. In the old days, you had contributor agreements, emailed patches, etc. The bar was a lot higher for a contributor.
by ranguna | 2025-09-13 11:01:17+00:00
That's a fair concern about parental controls in general - many digital solutions are indeed poorly implemented. However, Steam actually has quite good parental controls (check out the sibling comments for examples).

Rather than assuming Steam falls into the same category as other problematic software, I'd suggest checking out Steam's family features before drawing conclusions.

Happy to discuss the specific merits of Steam's parental controls once you've had a chance to look at what Steam actually offers.
by enaaem | 2025-09-13 11:01:26+00:00
Quality was simply better, because reputation mattered. People used to gather in dedicated forums around a common hobby. People would eventually recognise each other's user names and you would built a reputation in the community.

Accounts like "Endwokeness" would have never worked in the old internet era. First of all, low effort political opening post with one sentence and a link would simply be removed. Secondly, people will make fun of him. Doesn't he have job? Why he is so obsessed with gays and trans people? Stuff like that will haunt him forever.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-13 11:01:39+00:00
I would suggest some curiosity when approaching this topic.

Here's a reactor in Sweden which went offline for ~2 weeks citing market conditions. At the same time as another reactor at the same plant had a 7 month extended outage.

https://www.nyteknik.se/energi/forsmark-2-ur-drift-pa-agarna...

During the infamous Iberian blackout the nuclear output was at ~45%. One reactor was offline for maintenance, the rest had voluntarily reduced their output citing market conditions.

You did not answer my question. Why should someone with rooftop solar and a home battery buy extremely expensive grid based nuclear electricity to prop up the reactors capex when their own installations delivers vastly cheaper electricity?
by coderatlarge | 2025-09-13 11:01:47+00:00
i wasn’t intending to say that the regulations favor a specific current competitor but rather that they are intended to force apple to build in a way that favors a certain kind of potential competitor who can only operate in Europe. from a pure engineering perspective i think it’s fairly well-established that if you design, build, and test for a limited set of deployment conditions you end up with a higher quality product. which bit of wisdom apple has used decade after decade to deliver systems that delight end-users who do not relish the idea of mixing and matching and hoping the interpretation of “standards“ worked out well enough in their particular case.
by jongjong | 2025-09-13 11:01:56+00:00
Boomers were raised in a high trust society, they think that the powers-that-be are fundamentally good. They don't see how easily it could be corrupted.

Millennials see reality through the lens of 'Squid game' and 'Hunger games.' Meanwhile boomers think we're Snowflakes. They don't understand that we're fighting a relentless psychological war in a hyper-competitive environment of scarcity.
by xattt | 2025-09-13 11:02:49+00:00
My HAM radio instructor (VE3XT) was a transmitter engineer who lamented the resurgence of tube amps in the 2000s. He said that what young people call “warmth” in sound is distortion that his kinfolk worked tirelessly to eliminate.

I didn’t understand it at first, and then I saw the growing interest in compact cassettes and was metaphorically tearing out my hair.
by joefourier | 2025-09-13 11:03:06+00:00
Vibe coding large projects isn’t feasible yet, but as a developer here’s how I use AI to great effect, to the point where losing the tool greatly decreases my productivity:

- Autocomplete in Cursor. People think of AI agents first when they talk about AI coding but LLM-powered autocomplete is a huge productivity boost. It merges seamlessly with your existing workflow, prompting is just writings comments, it can edit multiple lines at once or redirect you to the appropriate part of the codebase, and if the output isn’t what you need you don’t waste much time because you can just choose to ignore it and write code as you usually do.

- Generating coding examples from documentation. Hallucination is basically a non-problem with Gemini Pro 2.5 especially if you give it the right context. This gets me up to speed on a new library or framework very quickly. Basically a stack overflow replacement.

- Debugging. Not always guaranteed to work, but when I’m stuck at a problem for too long, it can provide a solution, or give me a fresh new perspective.

- Self contained scripts. It’s ideal for this, like making package installers, cmake configurations, data processing, serverless micro services, etc.

- Understanding and brainstorming new solutions.

- Vibe coding parts of the codebase that don’t need deep integration. E.g. create a web component with X and Y feature, a C++ function that does a well defined purpose, or a simple file browser. I do wonder if a functional programming paradigm would be better when working with LLMs since by avoiding side effects you can work around their weaknesses when it comes to large codebases.
by giveita | 2025-09-13 11:03:31+00:00
I have a boring opinion. A cold take? served straight from the freezer.

He is right, however AI is still darn useful. He hints at why: patterns.

Writing a test suite for a new class when an existing one is in place is a breeze. It even can come up with tests you wouldnt have thought of or would have been too time pressed to check.

It also applies to non-test code too. If you have the structure it can knock a new one out.

You could have some lisp contraption that DRYs all the WETs so there is zero boilerplate. But in reality we are not crafting these perfect cosebases, we make readable, low-magic and boilerplatey code on tbe whole in our jobs.
by bdcravens | 2025-09-13 11:03:51+00:00
Most of my work is for my employer, but the bigger point is that you wouldn't be able to tell my "AI work" from my other work because I primarily use it for the boring stuff that is labor-intensive, while I work on the actual business cases. (Most of my work doesn't fall under the category of "web application", but rather, backend and background-processing intensive work that just happens to have an HTML front-end)
by cycomanic | 2025-09-13 11:03:52+00:00
> How do we resolve the observable tension here with the fact that self-driving cars are operating right now, relatively successfully, in ten or so major American cities?

Because geo fenced driving in a few select cities with very favourable conditions is not what was promised. That's the crux. They promised us that we have self drive anywhere at anytime at the press of a button.

> Not a billion dollar business yet, maybe, but 300 cars generating five or six figures revenue per year each isn't far off.

I'm not sure how you get to 6 figures revenue. Assuming the car makes $100 per hour for 24x7 52 weeks a year we still fall short of 1 million. But let's assume you're right $300M revenue (not profit, are they even operating at a plus even disregarding R&D costs?) on investment of >10 billion (probably more like 100), seems like the definition of hype.

> (And I say this as someone who is skeptical that totally autonomous cars worldwide will ever be a thing, but you can get to £10Bn far, far before that point. Become the dominant mode of transport in just ONE major American city and you're most of the way there).

What I don't understand with this argument, how are you proposing they become the dominant mode of transport. These services are competing with taxis, what do they offer over taxis that people suddenly switch on mass to self driving taxis? They need to become cost competitive (and convenience competitive) with driving your own car, which would significantly drive down revenue. Secondly if robotaxi companies take over transport, why would the public continue to build their infrastructure and not demand that these robotaxi companies start to finance the infrastructure they exclusively use?
by 7952 | 2025-09-13 11:05:07+00:00
And that might work if there is a linear relationship between apparently unnecessary engineering work and deaths. My argument is that such a relationship does not exist, or is not something we can model.

As this is HN I assume you have some understanding of software/IT etc. Do you think a project manager on a massive software project could do the same with security flaws? Reduce the engineering effort by some percentage and get a predictable increase in security issues? And lets say that this project has massive amounts of sunk costs, is hugely important for the livelihood of everyone involved and also classified and closed source. All you have to do to reduce costs is increase data breaches from one to three per year. Easy. But in a complex human-technical system leadership do not have that kind of control authority.
Why not analyzing a dataset as if it were an image (with brushes, erasers,)?
by vinserello | 2025-09-13 11:05:49+00:00
I know this might sound like a stupid question, but while I was developing Datastripes (https://datastripes.com/), which is a visual data exploration web engine, I wanted to try and draw a dataset as an image, or, in other words, as a heatmap.

I tried using a brush, an eraser, and a color picker as tools. For example, the color picker is the filter, and the brush does averages and sums.

The experience was an out-of-body experience :D
by jeroenhd | 2025-09-13 11:05:53+00:00
Until we solve the long-term energy storage problem that renewable sources have, we're going to need a backup of some sort. Something you can turn up late at night in the middle of winter.

So far the cleanest solution we've come up with is gas plants, but gas plants made Europe extremely dependent on Russia. The alternatives are oppressive regimes or the US, which has been starting trade wars seemingly out of boredom.

Nuclear fuel, on the other hand, is exported not only by Kazachstan, but also Canada and Australia. In terms of "countries you don't want to depend on", I'd rather have Canada than Qatar.

I'm not sure if the economics still work out if you factor in the ineffective, half-assed Russian sanctions that have Europe fund Russia's war economy. The only alternative is probably coal, but only if you don't hold coal to the same standards in terms of waste disposal and nuclear exposure of the public as nuclear plants.

Nuclear isn't cheap, in part because it's become a niche market only some countries still participate in, but the politics and large-scale economics aren't as bad as the anti-nuclear crowd make them seem. They'd probably be bad for America, because the mighty oil industry stands to lose money and they'd need to import their fuel, but for countries already importing their fuel the balance is completely different.

Infuriatingly, the crowd that wants to do something about global warming also seems to think every nuclear reactor is going full Chernobyl within the decade. All of the parties I even consider voting for are staunch anti-nuclear activists for no documented reason other than "we don't like it".
by eviluncle | 2025-09-13 11:06:09+00:00
Yes. He mentions that in passing that saying people will accuse him of hating on it because he didn't profit from it. I think his point of view is that his company's attempt was smaller scale and not part of the $10B+ waste?

In any case I don't fully understand what he's trying to say other than negating the hype (which i generally agree with), but not offering any alternative thoughts of his own other than- we have bad tools and programming language. (why? how are they bad? what needs to change for them to be good?)
by wcagscans | 2025-09-13 11:06:36+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been building a small SaaS around a problem I kept running into: checking website accessibility quickly before launch.

Existing tools were either:

Too basic (WAVE just highlights issues), or

Enterprise-only (expensive platforms like Siteimprove / Monsido).

So I built WCAGScans — a lightweight tool that:

Runs a WCAG-style audit in ~60 seconds

Detects common issues (alt text, labels, contrast, ARIA)

Gives you a shareable score + JSON export

Free plan: 5 scans/week • Pro: 300/month

There’s also a Deep Render mode (executes JS first), since many modern sites hide issues behind frameworks.

It’s still early, but already useful for agencies and SaaS teams who just want a quick way to de-risk launches.

Would love feedback on:

What features would make this more valuable to devs?

Is there appetite for bulk/crawling scans?

Thanks for checking it out
by onion2k | 2025-09-13 11:06:39+00:00
I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the good parts.

In some cases, especially with the more senior devs in my org, fear of the good parts is why they're against AI. Devs often want the inherent safety of the boring, easy stuff for a while. AI changes the job to be a constant struggle with hard problems. That isn't necessarily a good thing. If you're actually senior by virtue of time rather than skill, you can only take on a limited number of challenging things one after another before you get exhausted.

Companies need to realise that AI to go faster is great, but there's still a cognitive impact on the people. A little respite from the hardcore stuff is genuinely useful sometimes. Taking all of that away will be bad for people.

That said, some devs hate the boring easy bits and will thrive. As with everything, individuals need to be managed as individuals.
by piker | 2025-09-13 11:06:47+00:00
Pretty much nailed it. Once you’re at about 40k LOC you can just turn off the autocomplete features and use Claude or GPT to evaluate specific high-level issues. My sense is 40k LOC is the point at which the suggestions are offset by the rabbit holes they sometimes send you down, but, more importantly by obscuring from you the complexity of the thing you’re building—temporarily.
by maplethorpe | 2025-09-13 11:07:37+00:00
Even when copy-pasting an entire function from stack overflow, you generally still need to have some understanding of what the inputs and outputs are, even if it remains somewhat of a black box, so that you can plug it into your existing code.

AI removes that need. You don't need to know what the function does at all, so your brain devotes no energy towards remembering or understanding it.
by dvh | 2025-09-13 11:08:27+00:00
> Me: If I want to blend 50% two images what should be the opacity of first image and opacity of second image?

> GPT: To blend two images equally—so that each contributes 50% to the final result—you should set the opacity of both images to 50% when layering them. The combined visual contribution of both images should total 100%.

It just keeps repeating this mistake no matter what I do. Btw correct answer is 100% opacity first and 50% opacity second. With 50%+50% the result is 75% opaque.
by ogou | 2025-09-13 11:09:01+00:00
Social media hasn't been social for a while. Personal posts from people I know are buried under the algorithms. It's a high friction action to actually find my friends. All the defaults are pointed at optimized content from generic sources. I have many friends that are artists and musicians. I follow them on these platforms and my engagement with them is captured and funneled into garbage content about art and music instead of letting my see my friends. I hate it.
by IshKebab | 2025-09-13 11:09:09+00:00
I think people are still working out the best way to do GUIs and game engines in Rust, but I wouldn't say that's because it's impossible. It's just quite new.

It took decades to get a C++ GUI framework that was really nice (Qt) and even then it used MOC so wasn't pure C++.

Intrusive lists are quite niche and not a big deal.

I think people are working on improving the ergonomics for Rc<Refcell< etc.

So there are definitely some downsides, but also so many upsides. You could easily say C++ can't replace Rust in many areas because of X, Y, Z.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-09-13 11:09:29+00:00
What percentage of the earth's surface have little wind and solar? What percentage of the human population live there?

They have solar farms in Alaska and the Antarctic because it's cheaper than shipping in diesel for 6 months of the year.

And the law of economics making modular renewables cheaper is Wright's Law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effect
by funnyStrange | 2025-09-13 11:09:30+00:00
scrapy_cffi keeps a Scrapy-style crawler architecture, supporting async execution and both HTTP & WebSocket requests. CLI support is minimal—Python API is recommended for running spiders.

The real highlights are its utility extensions:

• JSON Extractor – handles standard, embedded, and malformed JSON

• Media Downloader – segmented downloads for videos and large files

• Async Database Managers – Redis, MySQL, MongoDB with automatic retry and reconnection

• Multi-process RPC – quickly register functions, classes, and objects for rapid prototyping without MQ/Redis

These utilities can be used independently or combined into full async crawlers, offering flexibility, rapid prototyping, and easy extensibility.
by scrlk | 2025-09-13 11:09:59+00:00
> Because they had built the tsunami-wall to spec.

If you're referring to the Onagawa plant, one engineer (Yanosuke Hirai) pushed for the height of the wall to be increased beyond the original spec:

> A nuclear plant in a neighboring area, meanwhile, had been built to withstand the tsunamis. A solitary civil engineer employed by the Tohoku Electric Power Company knew the story of the massive Jogan tsunami of the year 869, because it had flooded the Shinto shrine in his hometown. In the 1960s, the engineer, Yanosuke Hirai, had insisted that the Onagawa Nuclear Power Station be built farther back from the sea and at higher elevation than initially proposed—ultimately nearly fifty feet above sea level. He argued for a seawall to surpass the original plan of thirty-nine feet. He did not live to see what happened in 2011, when forty-foot waves destroyed much of the fishing town of Onagawa, seventy-five miles north of Fukushima. The nuclear power station—the closest one in Japan to the earthquake’s epicenter—was left intact. Displaced residents even took refuge in the power plant’s gym.

https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/12/06/were-design...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanosuke_Hirai
by sunaookami | 2025-09-13 11:10:23+00:00
Building "reputation" and building yourself a "brand" are the worst things from the forum-era. I will not miss power-tripping mods and users with 20,000 posts writing the dumbest replies possible into every thread asking "why would you do this?", "have you used the search function?", etc. Just because you have many posts doesn't mean the posts are good. Many users ignored high-quality posts from new accounts for example.
by strken | 2025-09-13 11:10:41+00:00
That's blatantly wrong. Hydro stands out in the data as being the cheapest reliable carbon neutral option (wind and solar aren't reliable, and when you factor in storage to make them reliable then they're not cheap).

Hydro requires large sums of capital to get started, destroys entire valleys, is only viable in a limited number of places, has significant risks if not maintained, and isn't energy dense in the slightest. Nevertheless, it's cheap and it's carbon neutral.
by lazide | 2025-09-13 11:10:42+00:00
Notably, many of those dudes are fanatical about their OWN digital security, however.

Just like many cops (and thieves) invest pretty heavily in physical security.

And why the first thing a cop does if another cop starts hassling them (and won’t back down) is get a lawyer. Because they know.

It’s often less about what you did or didn’t do, and sometimes more about what someone wants/needs to nail you on.
by apercu | 2025-09-13 11:11:56+00:00
I wrote a couple python scripts this week to help me with a midi integration project (3 devices with different cable types) and for quick debugging if something fails (yes, I know there are tools out there that do this but I like learning).

I’m could have used an LLM to assist but then I wouldn’t have learned much.

But I did use an LLM to make a management wrapper to present a menu of options (cli right now) and call the scripts. That probably saved me an hour, easily.

That’s my comfort level for anything even remotely “complicated”.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-13 11:12:00+00:00
The uranium reserves does not help when a winter storm rolls through and grid usage spikes. That is "emergency reserves" or the completely black and white "must work 100% or completely unusable" statement you led with.

Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.

What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.

Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.

> BEV will make the storage problem worse because they consume more in winter and you can't tell people how to use their own cars.

I don't think you quite get how the grid works? BEVs are like the ultimate consumers for a renewable grid since they can utilize surpluses matching supply and demand.

Everyone I know with a BEV and an hourly contract times their charging to perfection to reduce costs.

They are of course willing to pay a premium to charge now if their schedule demands it, but that is a tiny tiny subset of the household BEV fleet.
by Earw0rm | 2025-09-13 11:13:08+00:00
I got to six figures by assuming that a human taxi driver makes maybe $30-40k at a guess, and an autonomous car can work 24/7. 6 figures is $100k minimum.

So yeah, right now they'd have to be at ten cities x 300 cars each to hit 300M revenue, but there's still plenty of room for growth. Or should be, assuming the Waymo model isn't maxed out supporting the current handful of cities.

But I'm not convinced they have to hit cost parity with personal cars, because the huge advantage is you can work and drive (or be driven). If NYC and LA rush-hour congestion time becomes productive time, there's your billions.

I drive but prefer to take transit for this reason - some of my colleagues are able to join work calls effectively while driving, but for whatever reason my brain doesn't allow that. Just paying attention to calls is enough, you want me to pay attention to the road AND the call?