MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lll-o-lll | 2025-09-21 11:16:47+00:00
It doesn’t make seniors shine. It makes some of them fucking delusional. Sure, once in a while a LLM does something impressive and you are left thinking “holy shit, the future is now!”. However, this does not make up for the mass of time that you spend going “what is this shit?”, and saying “that’s not what I intended, gentlemen robot, please correct x, y and z.” And then gentlemen robot will go ahead and FUCK IT UP WORSE THAN BEFORE. Never work with kids, animals or AI. This shit is the worst, who came up with this? I can code! I’m bloody good at it! If I wanted to deal with some useless no-hoper having a crack and constantly needing to have their head kicked to do anything useful, I would have gotten you to do it.
by dimal | 2025-09-21 11:16:51+00:00
Autocomplete on iOS is a shit show. It regularly autocompletes non-grammatical text, which is unforgivable in 2025 when we have AI that can write coherent sonnets and code. Dictation is still at the same level it was at 10 years ago - complete shit. Carplay sometimes randomly starts playing music when I get in the car, other times it doesn't. My Apple Watch regularly can't find my heart rate, for long time periods. The HomePod app and Watch display incorrect information about what's playing on HomePods about 50% of the time. There's no way to filter text spam. The Messages app on MacOS doesn't let you filter by known senders. If you delete a text thread on iOS, it doesn't delete it on MacOS, so my desktop messages are cluttered with fucking donation requests from PACs. Try to do anything with Siri, even simple things like playing a song. It still makes bizarre mistakes. It can't answer basic questions about my calendar.

The list is endless, really. Everything looks "delightful" as fuck. Mac and iOS fonts, colors and text padding are immaculate, so it gives the impression of solidity and competence that isn't really there. A lot of things "mostly work" but aren't reliable, so I can't rely on them. They can list them as "features" but if I can't rely on them, I can't use them, because I don't want to deal with constant frustration. They act like all their systems are this one integrated whole that works well together, but it doesn't.

I don't think that everything will "just work" on Linux, but at least I won't be paying a premium for the privilege of having my needs as a disabled person ignored. I'll be able to customize my experience to meet my basic accessibility needs without fighting against a company that seems to hate me.
by grafmax | 2025-09-21 11:17:04+00:00
It’s worth considering the famine in India at the end of the 19th century. The British integrated India into the world capitalist system in a way that directly led to famine: promotion of cash crops which led to vulnerability when drought struck; speculators hoarding food during famine (some stores of food even rotting while people starved); building of railways and ports (which were used to export food out of famine stricken areas for profit); and laissez faire relief policies. The death toll was in the millions. I found Mike Davis’ book Late Victorian Holocausts to be a good resource on this subject.
by badpun | 2025-09-21 11:17:58+00:00
> This is simply because public university does not look on student like on a customer who put some good money on the table to get the final paper.

Even 10 years ago, this used to be the case in Poland. But now, with demographic decline (current generation of students significantly smaller than previous ones), universities are desperate to fill the seats. If they don't, they lose public funding, which means layoffs - and no one wants that (the university, as any institution, first and foremost serves its employees).

One approach used is to attract foreigners (mostly students from Asia and, to lesser degree, Africa - the main draw is the EU visa), another one is to keep lowering expectations.
by sfn42 | 2025-09-21 11:20:24+00:00
You don't need to. One if statement to check that is not a problem. The problem occurs when you have a bunch of other ifs as well to check all kinds of other stuff that a type system would handle for you like nullability, incorrect types etc.

Personally I just write JS like a typed language. I follow all the same rules as I would in Java or C# or whatever. It's not a perfect solution and I still don't like JS but it works.
by Ferret7446 | 2025-09-21 11:20:28+00:00
Kinda, basically. Swap is a cost optimization for "bad" programs.

Having more RAM is always better performance, but swap allows you to skimp out on RAM in certain cases for almost identical performance but lower cost (of buying more RAM), if you run programs that allocate a lot of memory that it subsequently doesn't use. I hear Java is notoriously bad at this, so if you run a lot of heavy enterprise Java software, swap can get you the same performance with half the RAM.

(It is also a "GC strategy", or stopgap for memory leaks. Rather than managing memory, you "could" just never free memory, and allocate a fat blob of swap and let the kernel swap it out.)
by kiwicopple | 2025-09-21 11:22:20+00:00
An alternative viewpoint which we are pretty open about in our docs:

> our technological choices are quite different; everything we use is open source; and wherever possible, we use and support existing tools rather than developing from scratch.

I understand that people get frustrated when there is any commercial interest associated to open source. But someone needs to fund open source efforts and we’re doing our best here. Some (perhaps non-obvious) examples

* we employ the maintainers of PostgREST, contributing directly to the project - not some private fork

* we employ maintainers of Postgres, contributing patches directly

* we have purchased and open sourced private companies, like OrioleDB, open sourced the code and made the patents freely available to everyone

* we picked up unmaintained tools and maintained them at our own cost, like the Auth server, which we upstreamed until the previous owner/company stopped accepting contributions

* we worked with open source tools/standards like TUS to contribute missing functionality like Postgres support and advisory locks

* we have sponsored adjacent open source initiatives like adding types to Elixir

* we have given equity to framework creators, which I’m certain will be the largest donation that these creators have (and will) ever receive for their open source work

* and yes, we employ the maintainers of Vitess to create a similar offering for the Postgres ecosystem under the same Apache2 license
Ask HN: Side project has traction. I don't get get it
by moocow21212 | 2025-09-21 11:27:13+00:00
Hi all,

I ran a side project for the last few years. It's a hybrid me + SaaS. I spend time doing the initial data engineering to get the data in, and the SaaS is then used to manage the function.

Over the last year, thanks to word of mouth, I now have 3 clients and almost 7k in monthly revenue. The catch is, I'm reaching my personal capacity and any more and I will have to either spend more time on it, or start outsourcing various components and work.

Has anyone gone through a similar inflection point and could provide any tips or other advice?

Edit: One of the key things holding me back is it's in a way consulting + some tech. Not sure how that scales at all, if at all.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-21 11:27:46+00:00
I must be misunderstanding.

I still don't know what you're saying about this knife. All you say is:

> Similarly this isn’t “new technology” aside from the packaging of industrial technology into a chefs knife.

Which, yes that's the new part. That's not a trivial thing. It's a significant engineering achievement that took them years to figure out.
by kleiba | 2025-09-21 11:29:05+00:00
Posted here multiple times before:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42943973 (02/2025, 473 comments)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083315 (11/2020, 382 comments)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31042304 (04/2022, 239 comments)
by JdeBP | 2025-09-21 11:29:54+00:00
I've been telling people about this since the days when there were operating systems still around that actually did swapping (16-bit OS/2, old Unix, Standard Mode DOS+Windows) rather than paging (32-bit OS/2, 386 Enhanced Mode DOS+Windows, Windows NT). I wrote a Frequently Given Answer about it in 2007, I had had to repeat the point so many times since the middle 1990s; and I was far from alone even then.

* http://jdebp.uk./FGA/dont-throw-those-paging-files-away.html

The erroneous folk wisdom is widespread. It often seems to lack any mention of the concepts of a resident set and a working set, and is always mixed in with a wishful thinking idea that somehow "new" computers obviate this, when the basic principles of demand paging are the same as they were four decades ago, Parkinson's Law can still be observed operating in the world of computers, and the "new" computers all of those years ago didn't manage to obviate paging files either.
by dxdm | 2025-09-21 11:32:21+00:00
Oh yes, people could be more level-headed and write more level-headed comments instead of emotional knee-jerk ones. But you know what? In this thread, you are one of them.

I read what you wrote and I see pre-conceived notions about what is or is not going on at Slack, about the motivations of your fellow commenters and the worth of their contributions, no openness, but dismissal wrapped in an increasingly generous portion of vitriol. Take a look at your words, and tell me you're not even outdoing many of them. It's just your sympathies are aligned differently.

That in turn annoys me. Some part of me really wants to blame you, but I actually don't. What'd be the point? We're just getting caught up in this crap. I get it, it's frustrating! I'm frustrated, you sound frustrated, and if you want to give them that, the people you are complaining about are frustrated, too.

Isn't it interesting how these things perpetuate themselves in online discussions? Somebody manages to piss us off, and the first reflex is to piss right back. Does it make anybody feel better? No. It sucks.

So yeah, this thread is not a great example of the good aspects of humanity. Let's not perpetuate it. Let's do better. Let's do something nice. It's fall here, the leaves are turning red. There's the possibility of cake. Hopefully there's something pleasant waiting for you, too. I wish you a nice Sunday, wherever you are.
by DrewADesign | 2025-09-21 11:32:29+00:00
Nobody in this space cares about anything except wowing the investors. They would willingly sap every ounce of joy out of every single knowledge worker’s professional lives and leave us being either AI process overseers or scrubbing toilets if some MBA could envision using that technology to lay people off. From where I’m standing, it looks like it’s just going to kill the demand for labor in a bunch of fields, tanking previously reliable salaries, and transfer the savings directly to shareholders.
by jasonni | 2025-09-21 11:34:43+00:00
I uploaded a picture of handwritten note. Why doesn't it return latex code? Below is the output(source code part) of your website:

二. 毕萨伐尔定律: B=∫dB = ∫(μ₀I dl × eᵣ)/(4πr²)

1. 载流长直导线. [图示：三角形，角度θ₁、θ₂，电流方向向里（叉号）] B = (μ₀I)/(4πr₀) (cosθ₁ - cosθ₂) = (μ₀I)/(4πr₀) [cosθ₁ + cos(π - θ₂)] 无限长直导线: B = μ₀I/(2πr) 半无限长直导线: B = μ₀I/(4πr₀)

推导: dB = (μ₀)/(4π) · (Idz sinθ)/r² B = ∫(μ₀I dz sinθ)/(4πr²) 由于各电流元产生的磁场方向相同 z = r₀ ctg(π - θ) = -r₀ ctgθ dz = r₀ dθ/sin²θ r = r₀/sin(π - θ) = r₀/sinθ B = ∫(μ₀I r₀ dθ sinθ)/(4π r₀²/sin²θ · sin²θ) = ∫(μ₀I sinθ dθ)/(4πr₀) = (μ₀I)/(4πr₀) ∫_{θ₁}^{θ₂} sinθ dθ = (μ₀I)/(4πr₀) (cosθ₁ - cosθ₂) = (μ₀I)/(4πr₀) [cosθ₁ + cos(π - θ₂)]

载流圆线圈在轴线上: 注 若有N匝则 需要乘以N [图示：圆线圈，轴线上点P，半径R，距离x，电流元Idl，磁场方向沿x轴] Bₓ = (μ₀p²I)/[2(p² + x²)^(3/2)] ① x=0, 即电流环中心的磁感应强度: B = μ₀I/(2R) ② x≫a, (p² + x²)^(3/2) ≈ x³, B = (μ₀Ip²)/(2x³) 引入磁矩, \(\vec{m} = I\vec{S} = IS\vec{e}_n\) 对任意形状的平面载流线圈都适 轴线上的磁感应强度, \(\vec{B} = \frac{\mu_0 I p^2 \vec{e}_n}{2x^3} = \frac{\mu_0}{2\pi} \frac{\vec{m}}{x^3}\)

推导: 由图和右手定则可以判断出磁场只有沿x的分量 dB = (μ₀I)/(4πr²) dl cosα = p/r = p/√(p² + x²) Bₓ = (μ₀I cosα)/(4πr²) ∮dl = (μ₀I p)/(4πr² r) · 2πp = (μ₀I p²)/(2r⁴) = (μ₀I p²)/[2(p² + x²)^(3/2)]
by michaelt | 2025-09-21 11:36:22+00:00
> The question is, is it necessary? Many systems can live with processes performing a little bit poorly for some minutes and I wouldn't do it.

The outage ain't resolved until things are back to operating normally.

If things aren't back to 100% healthy, could be I didn't truly find the root cause of the problem - in which case I'll probably be woken up again in 30 minutes when the problem comes back.
by mft_ | 2025-09-21 11:36:27+00:00
We can disagree.

1) In the grand scheme of world literature, JKR’s books are comparative trash. It’s also well-established that the first book was not successful until the real identity of the author was shared.

2) Harry Potter (and all of the related activity) is still hugely popular, despite JKR’s unpleasant views and behaviour related to trans people. Most people in the world aren’t locked into the online zeitgeist.
by quickthrowman | 2025-09-21 11:36:45+00:00
Please do not save money by using unlisted electrical equipment. Spend the extra $20 for a product that is tested and listed by UL/CE/ETL, it’s not worth burning a building down over $20.

You couldn’t pay me enough money to plug this into a building’s electrical distribution system, it’s drawing ~3A at 120V (60W at 5V plus inefficiency) and in a very small form factor, I sure hope the engineering and QA of that $5 charger is up to par. Did they include an internal fuse or did they forego that to save $0.03? Who knows!
by glimshe | 2025-09-21 11:38:01+00:00
Thank you for being respectful.

Europe is nice. But I would never want to live in European cities unless I was a gazillionaire and could afford a large, modern property with a garage for a good car (which wouldn't be used as often but still used sometimes).

With that much money, anyone could be fine anywhere. The European lifestyle wouldn't be bad during retirement, but still not ideal because I would want the peace of a smaller town anyway.
by roenxi | 2025-09-21 11:39:02+00:00
> Not sure quoting the guy’s literal words is “smearing”

A literal quote involves, at some point, quoting what he said literally. Something you haven't and can't do to support your claim. Lying harder isn't going to get you out of that one - you tried your best and are unable to find a literal quote. You now know you can't. It appears he did not, in fact, "literally advocated for, e.g., stoning gay people".

I don't know why you think doubling down on baseless smears is helping you, but a tip on politics - when you look foolish because your claims are that easy to disprove, just to stop and slink away. And maybe as a more general rule don't try to smear the dead with things they didn't say, they aren't around to defend themselves. You'd be able to get away with it before videos existed but these days it just looks like you're being slimy.
by Leftium | 2025-09-21 11:39:04+00:00
You can fill the gaps with more "Vibe Coding."

While one agent is busy, you can start another agent on a different task. (Or maybe even the same task with a variation in the prompt. To hedge against the unlikeliness of the first agent always one-shotting acceptable code.)

Even if you aren't verifying the resulting code, prompting six different agents and confirming their results should keep you busy. (I guess you could even do more if you wanted...)

I have seen various descriptions of this type of workflow. Most recently: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/45180353

> Now I see him spending most of his time doing what product managers traditionally do: talking to users, understanding their problems deeply, figuring out what's actually worth building. Coding has become maybe 20% of his job, and even that 20% is mostly about understanding requirements and translating them into clear specifications. The actual implementation work that used to consume 80% of his time is now handled by machines.

Also here is a short video of this type of workflow in action: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tP1fuFpJt7g
by sebazzz | 2025-09-21 11:40:04+00:00
I agree. I asked it for some help refactoring a database and some of the SQL is quite broken. It also doesn't help that their streaming code is broken so LLM responses sometimes end up broken in the web browser (both Firefox and Edge so it is not a browser issue), so you need to refresh after a response to make sure the LLMs response was not an indication of a drunk LLM.
by Yoric | 2025-09-21 11:41:06+00:00
I agree with you. There is an advantage to being first on market, but the "damn the consequences" part is very much VC-fueled. Start-ups going to market (and failing) as fast as possible is very much in the financial interest of the VC, but generally good neither the startup nor its employees nor the ecosystem.

I've lived through several semi-disastrous VC-pushed early product launches, and have seen some being sufficiently bad to entirely destroy a product, despite it being extremely useful.
by thecupisblue | 2025-09-21 11:42:10+00:00
Yeah, tried similar things.

The issue is that having them learn that on it's own is currently an inaccurate process with a lot of overlooking. I recently tried doing some of the techniques that fared well on smaller repositories on a giant monorepo, and while sometimes they did yield improvements, most often things got overlooked, dependencies forgot about, testing suites confused. And it wastes a ton of compute in the end for smaller yields.

It will get better, that I am sure of, but currently the best way is to introduce it an architecture, give it some samples so it can do what it does best - follow text patterns. But people are mostly trying to one-shot things with this magical AI they heard about without any proper investment of time and mindshare into it.

While some might say "oh that wont work well in legacy repositores, we got 6 architectures here", pointing that out and adding a markdown explaining each helps a ton. And not "hey claude generate me an architecture.md" but transferring the actual knowledge you have, together with all the thorny bits into documentation, which will both improve your AI usage and your organisation.
by metalman | 2025-09-21 11:44:54+00:00
alternate title, Ant break the definition of species. They also challenge the definition of cloning, and push forward the concept that our future is not goverened by technology so much as biology. Ants have been at this much longer than we have, and along with termites show a wide range of skills and abilities to survive that achive outcomes similar to our technologys, but until now were limited to specific behaviors and adaptations in indivdual species.And perhaps what we call "castes" in ants and termites are the result of species comingling and "cloning"
by david-gpu | 2025-09-21 11:46:05+00:00
I began writing GPU drivers in 2006 and had to support some legacy fixed-function chips from the late 90s at one point.

I think you and other commenters pretty much summarized what it was like. Documentation was often poor, so you would sometimes have to reach out to the folks who had actually written the hardware (or the simulator) for guidance.

That is the easy part of writing a driver, even today. Just follow the specification. The code in a GPU driver is relatively simple, and doesn't vary that much from one generation to the next. In the 90s some features didn't have hardware support, so the driver would do a bunch of math in the CPU instead, which was slow.

I'm contrast, the fun part are the times when the hardware deviates from he specification, or where the specification left things out and different people filled in the blanks with their own ideas. This is less common nowadays, as the design process has become more refined.

But yeah, debugging hardware bugs essentially boils down to:

(1) writing the simplest test that triggers the unexpected behavior that you had observed in a more complex application, then

(2) providing traces of it to the folks who wrote that part of the hardware or simulator,

(3) wait a few days for them to painstakingly figure out what is going wrong, clock by clock, and

(4) implement the workaround that they suggest, often something like "when X condition happens on chips {1.23, 1.24 and 1.25}, then program Y register to Z value, or insert a command to wait for module to complete before sending new commands".

It was more tedious than anything. Coming up with the simplest way to trigger the behavior could take weeks.

Well, that's what it was like to write user mode drivers. The kernel side was rather different and I wasn't directly exposed to it. Kernel drivers are conceptually simpler and significantly smaller in terms of lines of code, but much harder to debug.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-21 11:46:10+00:00
How has this been upvoted to over 40 points when, judging by the comments, literally not a single person has been able to read this paywalled article?

I know HN is fine with paywalled articles, but usually they're from major sites that at least some people have access to, and somebody is able to post a non-paywalled link.
by Hackbraten | 2025-09-21 11:46:40+00:00
The pictures I shoot on my Librem 5 look nothing like the (pretty good) ones that you regularly post to the Fediverse. My photos are just a faded, grey, blurred, grainy mess. I can take the time and manually set focus (autofocus never works) but the manual focus slider and button are so difficult to read that by the time I figure out whether or not the slider is enabled, the photo opportunity is long gone.

When I look at your photos, I often wonder what I might be doing differently than you. But after two years of daily driving my Librem 5, I decided to no longer care, and just stopped making photos altogether.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-09-21 11:46:54+00:00
>> I will take those knives to a pro and he will sharpen them for me, as in a rental I stay in, I don't have the tools to do that and as I said in another comment - I don't have a pain free process to do that as I don't do it often

Do you also replace your elderly relatives' Windows XP with linux distros, because linux is a better OS?

The moment you return the sharpened knives to your partner and she starts using them, she'll cut herself, with a small probability for a serious cut that will leave permanent damage to her hand.

Think carefully.
by liampulles | 2025-09-21 11:47:02+00:00
In the long term, software development is about theory building more than coding. And these are theories that need wrestle with wholly imperfect external systems, as well as business departments whose desires and needs are in conflict with each other and with themselves from day to day.

LLMs are still too sycophantic. The ideal agent needs to say no increasingly as time moves on, explaining why new requirements would conflict with existing commitments, and grunt awkwardly and emit enough noxious fumes so that business people only come forward with their most pressing needs rather than wavering whims.
by pdimitar | 2025-09-21 11:49:06+00:00
This only happens if you want it to one-shot stuff, or if you fall under the false belief that "it is so close, we just need to correct these three things!".

Yes I have encountered it. Narrowing focus and putting constraints and guiding it closer made the LLM agent much better at producing what I need.

It boils down to me not writing the code really. Using LLMs actually sharpened my architectural and software design skills. Made me think harder and deeper at an earlier stage.