MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-09-02 22:56:54+00:00
This is what's so funny about this. In some alternative universe I hope that LLMs never get any better. Because they force so much of good things.

They are the single closest thing we've ever had to objective evaluation on if an engineering practice is better or worse. Simply because just about every single engineering practice that I see that makes coding agents work well also makes humans work well.

And so many of these circular debates and other best practices (TDD, static typing, keeping todo lists, working in smaller pieces, testing independently before testing together, clearly defined codebase practices, ...) have all been settled in my mind.

The most controversial take, and the one I dislike but may reluctantly have to agree with is "Is it better for a business to use a popular language less suited for the task than a less popular language more suited for it." While obviously it's a sliding scale, coding agents clearly weight in on one side of this debate... as little as I like seeing it.
by clumsysmurf | 2025-09-02 22:58:35+00:00
The thing that annoys me the most about this device, if true, is their handling of the Pixel 10 battery. They keep cutting corners. After my 4a and 6a batteries got nerfed, you would think Google might have learned something.

https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-10-battery-hea...

I like the swipe at "post truth cameras" and would prefer AI be limited to suggestions, etc, not so baked into the processing pipeline.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-02 22:58:59+00:00
But the point is that's Microsoft's choice.

They have the money to compete and jumpstart Bing with default placements and reap the ad dollars and build Bing into a serious competitor.

If they don't want to compete because they think investing money in Xbox will have a higher return, that's their decision (and maybe their mistake). It's not Google's fault.
by BeetleB | 2025-09-02 22:59:23+00:00
My point is that if you're trying to demonstrate how unreliable LLMs are, this is a poor example, because the alternatives are almost equally poor.

> If that’s your point, understood, but I don’t think you can assume the average ChatGPT user will have such a discerning ability to determine when and when not using a LLM is appropriate.

I agree that the average user will not, but they also will not have the ability to determine that the answer from the top (few) Google links is invalid as well. All you've shown is the LLM is as bad as Google search results.

Put another way, if you invoke this as a reason one should not rely on LLMs (in general), then it follows one should not rely on Google either (in general).
by TheCondor | 2025-09-02 22:59:24+00:00
I generally like Python. I'm not a hater but I don't treat it like a religion either.

Async Python is practically a new language. I think for most devs, it's a larger than than 2 to 3 was. One of the things that made python uptake easy was the vast number of libraries and bindings to C libraries. With async you need new versions of that stuff, you can definitely use synchronous libraries but then you get to debug why your stuff blocks.

Async Python is a different debugging experience for most python engineers. I support a small handful of async python services and think it would be an accellerator for our team to rewrite them on Go.

When you hire python engineers, most don't know async that well, if at all.

If you have a mix of synchronous and asynchronous code in your org, you can't easily intermix it. Well you can, but it won't behave as you usually desire it to, it's probably more desirable to treat them as different code bases.

Not to be too controversial, but depending upon your vintage and they was you've learned to write software I think you can come to python and think async is divine manna. I think there are many more devs that come to python from datascience or scripting or maybe as a first language and I think they have a harder time accepting the value and need of async. Like I said above, it's almost an entirely different language.
by TranquilMarmot | 2025-09-02 22:59:31+00:00
I've really been loving Astro lately, it's simple enough that it stays out of your way and you can host it yourself easily. Gives you nice backend + frontend with the option to drop in React, Vue, Angular, etc if you need them.

react-router if you just want a simple React frontend, write your backend in something else.
by deepsquirrelnet | 2025-09-02 22:59:49+00:00
> I’ve tried throwing masses of game state data at latest models in pytorch. Unusable. It Makes really dumb moves. In fact one big issue is that it often suggests invalid moves and the best way to avoid this is to implement the board game logic in full to validate it.

It sounds like you need RL. You could try setting up some reward functions with evaluators. I’m not sure what your architecture is, but something to try.
by anonym29 | 2025-09-02 22:59:51+00:00
>PRISM compelled Apple to provide the NSA with access to cloud data they already held under FISA orders.

Cloud data that's supposedly encrypted with encryption keys Apple pinky promises they don't have, right?

>Apple was not installing spyware on people's devices as you seem to be implying. I am very clearly not implying this is currently happening - just that there is nothing theoretically preventing this from happening, and the company already has a history of secretly cooperating with illegal government surveillance programs to provide cleartext user data - user data that they love to present an image of protecting vigorously.
by chongli | 2025-09-02 22:59:54+00:00
A little bit disappointed that there was no mention of the Frame Problem [1], a major challenge with world models. The issue arises when you're building an AI agent with the ability to move through and act in the real world, updating its world model as it does so.

The challenge comes from the problem of finding a set of axioms that tell you how to make predictions about what changes a particular action will cause in the world. Naively, we might suppose that the laws of physics would be suitable axioms but this immediately turns out to be computationally intractable. So then we're stuck trying to find a set of heuristics, as alluded to in the article.

Without being a neuroscientist, I think it's likely that at least some of the axioms of our own world models (as human beings) are built into the structure of our brains, rather than being knowledge that we learn as we grow up. We know, for example, that our visual systems have a great deal of built-in assumptions about the way light works and how objects appear under different lighting conditions, a fact revealed to us by optical illusions such as the checker shadow illusion [2]. Building a complete set of heuristics such as this does not sound impossible, just somewhat obscure and unexplored as an engineering problem, and does not seem to be related whatsoever to currently popular means of building and training AI models.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frame-problem/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion
by TZubiri | 2025-09-02 23:00:19+00:00
Oh for sure, you are seeing the small pictures, but those are objective facts.

Big picture for virtualization? There's many, it's a complex emerging phenomenon which placed a lot of asterisks on computation, is it used for security? Or to patch tech debt? or to provide backwards compatibility? Yes. What is the limit between isolation and efficiency? No one knows yet and there's many answers, you can activate shared cpu caching or disable Spectre mitigations for efficiency, or you can just forego virtualization as a whole and depend on application level multitenancy, which is not a separate topic at all in terms of virtualization, as you can see with tech like containers, and t1/t2 hybrids, it's a spectrum of virtualization, there is no hard line separating the virtualized from the bare metal.
by tylerhou | 2025-09-02 23:00:25+00:00
> You can end up writing nearly the exact same code twice because one needs to be async to handle an async function argument, even if the real functionality of the wrapper isn't async.

Sorry for the possibly naive question. If I need to call a synchronous function from an async function, why can't I just call await on the async argument?

def foo(bar: str, baz: int): # some synchronous work pass async def other(bar: Awaitable[str]): foo(await bar, 0)
by karim79 | 2025-09-02 23:00:25+00:00
I'm still "clinging" to my Pixel 6 Pro. I have an unboxed pixel 8 pro from 2 years ago. My corporate contract subsidizes a new phone every two years from the time of contract renewal.

I really think the phone update cycle needs to be lengthened, and that updates are so slightly incremental.

I would like to dip my toes into the fold phone pond, but that seems excessive. In November, Vodafone will call me and ask me which phone I want. It all seems ridiculous. I haven't noticed a difference in photo quality nor performance for years now have I felt the need to upgrade to the two-generations-later sitting in a drawer just meters way from me.

The only comment/complaint I have about newer software updates is the f*king voice which kicked in while taking a photo. "One pet cropped, move phone slightly down".

</uselessRant>
by hopelite | 2025-09-02 23:01:32+00:00
I don’t disagree with that perspective and would even go further to say that its structure offers systemic advantages over the indigenous beliefs. That does not preclude being regretful that this meme from the Middle East along with all the other memes don’t that region have devastated the natural ecosystem of the whole world like any other invasive species wrecks natural habitats and ecosystems.

I may not agree with things like Aztec practices, but it would clearly be a far more interesting world if they had been able to served against the Hispanics and were over there still doing mass human sacrifices and rolling heads down pyramid stairs and were replete with gold.
by nitwit005 | 2025-09-02 23:01:46+00:00
The root conversation began with:

> Coding as such is seldom a bottleneck to begin with. How many times have you been in a conversation along the lines of "we have every detail of the product figured out, but we need another month for the coders to finish writing the code"?

And you quoted "how many times" contradicting it.

Yes, the art department plans the art and draws it, but an AI tool for generating art could only help with the actual drawing. The possible productivity improvement directly relates to the portion spend actually making art.

Your department or job-role style view of things doesn't make sense for this conversation.
by godelski | 2025-09-02 23:01:51+00:00
Keep with it! And that reorganization between editions is a good reminder that things don't have to be perfect and can always be improved upon. We call these things "soft skills" but I think we've made a terrible mistake in implying that communicating is easy lol. Often it can be harder than the work itself! I think you got a good attitude and it'll take you far. So good luck on your submission! And FWIW, Monte Carlo Integration confused the hell out of me until I figured out how beautifully simplistic it is. If it hasn't clicked, keep with it. It eventually will.
by wg0 | 2025-09-02 23:01:56+00:00
Why in the world I would buy a phone (any not just Google) that costs north of $800 is beyond me unless I want to signal my purchasing power. If utility is my metric and not outward signalling and flex, I find this worst deployment of my funds.

So called "budget" phones these days have OLED screens some even come with 120Hz displays (beyond me why someone would want that) and plenty of compute and memory.

You want camera, buy a camera. You want gaming, buy a console or gaming machine.
by makeitdouble | 2025-09-02 23:02:16+00:00
Google being allowed to pay Firefox or Apple whatever they want makes the exclusivity restriction pretty moot.

If Google pays Apple 3x more than OpenAI and Apple sets Google as default "because of market research, not because of the money", we're firmly in the status quo. So much as Google can modulate how much it pays Apple depending on how friendly they've been to Google in the last round.
by jaggederest | 2025-09-02 23:03:40+00:00
The key is prompting. Prompt to within an inch of your life. Treat prompts as source code - edit them in files, use @ notation to bring them into the console. Use Claude to generate its own prompts - https://github.com/wshobson/commands/ and https://github.com/wshobson/agents/ are very handy, they include a prompt-engineer persona.

I'm at the point now where I have to yell at the AI once in a while, but I touch essentially zero code manually, and it's acceptable quality. Once I stopped and tried to fully refactor a commit that CC had created, but I was only able to make marginal improvements in return for an enormous time commitment. If I had spent that time improving my prompts and running refactoring/cleanup passes in CC, I suspect I would have come out ahead. So I'm deliberately trying not to do that.

I expect at some point on a Friday (last Friday was close) I will get frustrated and go build things manually. But for now it's a cognitive and effort reduction for similar quality. It helps to use the most standard libraries and languages possible, and great tests are a must.

Edit: Also, use the "thinking" commands. think / think hard / think harder / ultrathink are your best friend when attempting complicated changes (of course, if you're attempting complicated changes, don't.)
by wilg | 2025-09-02 23:03:56+00:00
It's the government's role to serve everyone generally, so they should provide reasonable accommodations for people. I suspect there are such accommodations, but it's hard to say without looking at a specific, real scenario.

Also, not always elective? I'm not so sure about that. You decide where you live. If you're a minor, your parents decide where you live. That's elective in a meaningful sense. You might have reasons you are personally weighing that make sense for you to live in a certain place, but accessibility of services should be part of that calculation, and ultimately it is still up to you.

The government isn't obligated to pay for your gas or provide you a car to get to the nearest post office to pay your taxes, for example. If you choose to live in such a way where it is difficult or impossible for you to comply with the law, there is not much the government can or should do about it.
by everforward | 2025-09-02 23:04:13+00:00
I don't know what Intellij's AI integration is like, but my brief Claude Code experience is that it really chews through tokens. I think it's a combination of putting a lot of background info into the context, along with a lot of "planning" sort of queries that are fairly invisible to the end user but help with building that background for the ultimate query.

Aider felt similar when I tried it in architect mode; my prompt would be very short and then I'd chew through thousands of tokens while it planned and thought and found relevant code snippets and etc.
by hopelite | 2025-09-02 23:04:23+00:00
Frankly, I’m not even sure of the “brotherly love” story was not always a political force or tool more than anything else. It’s a rather convenient story to manage people rather than people who idolize and get inspiration from self-respecting, powerful, forceful, vengeful gods that demand you sell what you are owed. The religion we follow is the kernel or OS upon which all else is based.
by mattnewton | 2025-09-02 23:04:42+00:00
Even in the US which has those systems, they are not robust enough for me to trust handing over the state this kind of power over all modern communication. Never have the police had this power before, even with warrants.

Backdoored encryption makes everyone unsafe while not stopping bad guys from using actual encryption. And when the bad guys use real encryption, the police can still catch them- see the case of Ross Ulbricht.

The point doesn’t stand because the magic system that only lets the good guys decrypt if only the engineers would think harder simply does not exist, and framing it this way obscures that fact and paves the way for ChatControl or encryption bans, not user freedom. We had this debate before with the Clipper chip, and reason mostly prevailed. Now we’re having it again with even higher stakes and people are arguing to give in to a framing that assumes defeat.
by dragontamer | 2025-09-02 23:05:14+00:00
My mom was looking up church times in the Philippines. Google AI was wrong pretty much every time.

Why is an LLM unable to read a table of church times across a sampling of ~5 Filipino churches?

Google LLM (Gemini??) was clearly finding the correct page. I just grabbed my mom's phone after another bad mass time and clicked on the hyperlink. The LLM was seemingly unable to parse the table at all.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-09-02 23:05:17+00:00
Looks like bitwarden supported this since May 2024, and vaultwarden as well. Can be self-hosted, but you're looking for something that doesn't sync at all / local-only?

https://bitwarden.com/blog/bitwarden-passkeys-mobile/

https://vaultwarden.discourse.group/t/passkeys-in-bitwarden-...
by CamperBob2 | 2025-09-02 23:05:24+00:00
StackOverflow is dead because its rules are nonsensical and many of its users are dicks.

It's going to be a real problem going forward, because if AI hadn't killed them something else would have, and now it's questionable whether that "something else" will ever emerge. The need for something like SO is never going to go away as long as new technologies, algorithms, languages and libraries continue to be created.
by matt_s | 2025-09-02 23:06:03+00:00
There's no way getting around needing to install the patched versions of the compiler or runtime. Someone has to do it and in my opinion it should be done internally so its controlled and has verified/known sources.

I think option/bullet 2 keeps things as streamlined as possible - base standard image for java apps that apps then use as their base when they build their container images to run in k8s containers. Maybe there's a way to tag base images with major.minor so that apps just pull that image and if its cached its faster and if there was a major.minor.patch just applied and you're the first app to deploy then that app pays the penalty of waiting for the underlying base image to be rebuilt.

A volume is an interesting idea but are there possible issues for OS library dependencies like openssl, database drivers, etc. that might not be the right version for a JDK mounted on a shared volume?
by sho_hn | 2025-09-02 23:06:05+00:00
For me it was "want camera", and I chose the top SKU (P8 Pro) because I wanted maximum camera.

"Buy a camera" doesn't work because (a) I don't want to pocket two devices, (b) most point-and-shoot dedicated cameras that are actually better are more bulky, too, (c) even entry-level good digital cameras are >$500 (e.g. a ZV-1F or something), so even the combo with a midrange phone often comes out more expensive and (d) a seperate camera makes it really annoying to send photos anywhere on the go.

That said: I came away fairly unhappy with the Pixel 8 Pro camera, which my book has a too editorialized post-processing look that I simply don't like. In retrospect, I think I should have gone for the Xperia in that generation, which appears to have been the last phone with high-end smartphone camera gear that took neutral-looking shots. My S21, despite having a worse sensor and optics, took subjectively nicer photos.

I've now updated my definition of "maximum phone camera" to be more choosy ...
by kcplate | 2025-09-02 23:06:29+00:00
But is it though? My nearly 90 year old mother wouldn’t necessarily make that connection on her iPhone or iPad. I’d reckon that for many folks over 50 it would not necessarily be obvious without seeing @ used beyond email.

I agree the latest rev does require familiarity with the old one more than it should, but a weeble, to me, is a better universal iconographic symbol to denote a contact than an @ (just in general)
by jMyles | 2025-09-02 23:07:14+00:00
So you're presuming that there is an exploit that allows a remote attacker to install "Graphite" via a text message? That is not stated here - or anywhere - as it was over and over again in the case of Pegasus (and similarly, the trumpets sounded when the patch was fixed a couple weeks later).

The reporting here is markedly more imprecise, and it's frustrating.
by zmmmmm | 2025-09-02 23:07:37+00:00
Youtube is fascinating to me because it never made any sense. At the time they were starting bandwidth was expensive. How the hell did they pay the bills for that? And then every single rational piece of logic said they would be sued to oblivion due to copyright violations. Logically, Youtube should have been impossible, but here it is.

I often think about that when trying to evaluate forward looking tech. Even though 99% of the time logic like that proves to be correct, it's also true that most of the time the winners in a race did that exactly because they defined some piece of the standard framework of logic that everybody else played by. Uber is similar - they shouldn't exist, they basically broke the law in most countries they moved into, brazenly violated all kinds of barriers that kept taxi industry completely entrenched for decades. But now they are dominating in most of these countries.
Show HN: Game UI Generator
by lyogavin | 2025-09-02 23:08:10+00:00
I built an AI agent that generates complete game UIs.

Creating game interfaces isn't technically hard—it's just painfully tedious. When you're dealing with dozens of scenes and hundreds of interactive elements, the repetitive work adds up fast.

What it does:

* Generates buttons, panels, icons, etc. if needed and build the complete working UIs automatically * Creates multi-scene flows with proper navigation between screens * Provides diverse visual styles to match your game's aesthetic * One-click export directly to Unity

Intro video is here: https://youtu.be/Tkl5dj0StTw

Feedbacks are welcome!
Ask HN: Short term housing for founders / entrepreneurs in the Bay Area / SF?
by eggbrain | 2025-09-02 23:10:18+00:00
I've been searching for the past month for short term housing in the San Francisco / Bay Area, especially where I can live with fellow founders / hackers / engineers, but everything I find feels unideal:

- There's Furnished Finder, but the site was set up initially for travelling nurses (and it shows), so there's no real way to search for places with other engineers / founders, or any other features that matter (e.g. fast internet).

- There's a few hacker houses out there, but some take equity in your startup, while others are invite-only, and still others are just so huge (e.g. 30+ people) that it feels more like a hotel than a group of people with shared interests.

- There's DirectorySF, but the amount of places listed there is pretty low, so you have to get lucky for a place to overlap timing / requirements / price wise.

- I know Bookface / Y Combinator has some resources for housing for founders that have gotten into YC, but that won't apply to me.

On top of the search aspect, it's a bit frustrating as even if I wanted to rent an apartment traditionally, places will require you to submit proof of income, which as a founder who is focusing on building a startup may not be available (even if you have good resources saved up).

I think the closest "fit" has been DirectorySF in terms of what I'm looking for, but I'm just surprised there's not better websites out there to help entrepreneurs / founders / engineers moving to the SF area, unless I've been missing something.

Any thoughts / ideas? Would love to understand how to better find housing for like-minded startup people.