MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ProfessorLayton | 2025-09-23 18:16:29+00:00
>If a community wants to remain SFH-only, that is their right, even if other people who can't afford to live there or would just like to see higher density would really like them to change their mind.

The only reasonable way for them to be entitled to prevent density is for them to own the property and not build anything.

>If a community wants to remain SFH-only, that is their right, even if other people who can't afford to live there or would just like to see higher density would really like them to change their mind.

Well then those people should buy the land and keep it low density. Can't afford it? Too bad. Pro-housing folks aren't trying to force people to do something with their property, it's the other way around.
by mehdibl | 2025-09-23 18:16:33+00:00
this issue is not even MCP at the core. Claude Code/ Gemini CLI were opening "url's" without sanitization and validation. That's the core flaw. There is a second issue with an XSS flawed package too in the bridge that is easy to patch.

So there is a chain of issues and you need to leverage them to get there and first pick an MCP that is flawed from a bad actor.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-09-23 18:17:31+00:00
I'm not dismissing the problems of the past. I just don't think they were as big problems as you make them out to be. It's not like I wasn't around or unaware, I just didn't let it bother me - and was happy with how things were developing despite some arguments around the fringes as in any community.

> I'm not sure what corner of the Ruby world you've been hiding in.

I did say that I haven't been involved for the past dozen years. Before that I was definitely there when Rails burst onto the Ruby scene and its early years. I realize the overlap but they were still pretty distinct -- though maybe that's changed in the past decade.
by shmolyneaux | 2025-09-23 18:17:42+00:00
Instant startup times are really nice. You definitely notice the difference. It also means that you can be a bit lazier when creating wrappers around those tools (running 1000's of times isn't a problem when the startup is 1ms, but would be a problem with 40ms of startup time).

Distribution can also be a lot easier if you don't need to care about the user having a specific version of Python or specific packages available.
by chankstein38 | 2025-09-23 18:18:53+00:00
I once, probably 4-6 years ago, used exports from Slack conversations to train a Markov Chain to recreate a user that was around a lot and then left for a while. I wrote the whole thing in python and wasn't overly well-versed in the statistics and math side but understood the principle. I made a bot and had it join the Slack instance that I administrate and it would interact if you tagged it or if you said things that person always responded to (hardcoded).

Well, the responses were pretty messed up and not accurate but we all got a good chuckle watching the bot sometimes actually sound like the person amidst a mass of random other things that person always said jumbled together :D
by estebank | 2025-09-23 18:18:57+00:00
> But it doesn't address all kinds of other logic errors/bugs. It's like closing one door to the barn, but there are six more still wide open.

Could you point at some language features that exist in other languages that Rust doesn't have that help with logic errors? Sum types + exhaustive pattern matching is one of the features that Rust does have that helps a lot to address logic errors. Immutability by default, syntactic salt on using globals, trait bounds, and explicit cloning of `Arc`s are things that also help address or highlight logic bugs. There are some high level bugs that the language doesn't protect you from, but I know of now language that would. Things like path traversal bugs, where passing in `../../secret` let's an attacker access file contents that weren't intended by the developer.

The only feature that immediately comes to mind that Rust doesn't have that could help with correctness is constraining existing types, like specifying that an u8 value is only valid between 1 and 100. People are working on that feature under the name "pattern in types".
by jmkni | 2025-09-23 18:19:09+00:00
My problem is it keeps working, even when it reaches certain things it doesn't know how to do.

I've been experimenting with Github agents recently, they use GPT-5 to write loads of code, and even make sure it compiles and "runs" before ending the task.

Then you go and run it and it's just garbage, yeah it's technically building and running "something", but often it's not anything like what you asked for, and it's splurged out so much code you can't even fix it.

Then I go and write it myself like the old days.
by 0xblacklight | 2025-09-23 18:19:58+00:00
> Context has never been the bottleneck for me. AI just stops working when I reach certain things that AI doesn't know how to do.

It's context all the way down. That just means you need to find and give it the context to enable it to figure out how to do the thing. Docs, manuals, whatever. Same stuff that you would use to enable a human that doesn't know how to do it to figure out how.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-09-23 18:20:00+00:00
Hinges on you definition on truly decentralized. ETH is not truly decentralized (and never will be since their shift to proof-of-stake) as there is no way of not-knowing that the majority stake is not in a single force (or a conspiring group) - which in theory could already be the case. Absence of the counterproof and presence of a case where it would be centralized can never make it truly decentralized.
Show HN: Evercurrent – AI platform of record for hardware teams
by ideadibia | 2025-09-23 18:20:36+00:00
Hey HN!

If you work in hardware, you know that context gets lost when moving from CAD to email and other tools we use.

At EverCurrent, we're using AI to empower hardware development teams by building a platform of record for hardware teams, one that's integrated with their tools, stores their processes, shows anticipated risks, and surfaces decisions made previously.

We’re backed by a16z speedrun and the E14 Fund to build an AI-native platform of record for hardware teams and have already begun working with incredible hardware partners on our pilots.

[Watch our launch video](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:73762399...) and [join the waitlist to learn more](https://evercurrent.ai/).
by AlotOfReading | 2025-09-23 18:20:44+00:00
The thing I wish we would remember, as developers, is that not all programs need to be so "safe".

"Safety" is just a shorthand for "my program means what I say". Unsafety is semantic gibberish.

There's lots of reasons to write artistically gibberish code, just as there is with natural language (e.g. Lewis Carroll). Most programs aren't going for code as art though. They're trying to accomplish something definite through a computer and gibberish is directly counterproductive. If you don't mean what you write or care what you get, software seems like the wrong way to accomplish your goals. I'd still question whether you want software even in a probabilistic argument along these lines.

Even for those cases where gibberish is meaningful at a higher level (like IOCCC and poetry), it should be intentional and very carefully crafted. You can use escape hatches to accomplish this in Rust, though I make no comment on the artistic merits of doing so.

The argument you're making is that uncontrolled, unintentional gibberish is a positive attribute. I find that a difficult argument to accept. If we could wave a magic wand and make all code safe with no downsides, who among us wouldn't?

It doesn't change anything about Super Mario World speedruns because you can accomplish the same thing as arbitrary code execution inputs with binary patching. We just have this semi-irrational belief that one is cheating and one is not.
by xg15 | 2025-09-23 18:21:55+00:00
> MESH is based on a simple principle: one component = one endpoint. This is a powerful idea - it allows us to write a HTML-first back-end in such a way that it feels like writing an SPA.

Gotta admit, I'm still not completely grasping the hype around HTMX, but I thought one of the core ideas was that it decidedly should not feel like writing an SPA, but more like old-style PHP or ASP scripts again. (In the sense that the front end is driven by the back end instead of the other way around)

So wouldn't this give you sort of the worst of both worlds? The modeling overhead of SPAs + the tight coupling of HTMX?
by mcny | 2025-09-23 18:22:08+00:00
I seriously dislike adding a package source for a single application. It feels dirty to me. I can't explain it but it makes me feel like I need to take a shower.

I don't use arch but this looks cleaner than whatever Debian or fedora (both of which I use) have going on

https://tailscale.com/kb/1036/install-arch
by philipp-gayret | 2025-09-23 18:22:24+00:00
Can't agree with the formula for performance, on the "/ size" part. You can have a huge codebase, but if the complexity goes up with size then you are screwed. Wouldn't a huge but simple codebase be practical and fine for AI to deal with?

The hierarchy of leverage concept is great! Love it. (Can't say I like the 1 bad line of CLAUDE.md is 100K lines of bad code; I've had some bad lines in my CLAUDE.md from time to time - I almost always let Claude write it's own CLAUDE.md.).
by bruce511 | 2025-09-23 18:22:30+00:00
I'm not sure I'm mythologizing the past, more I think pointing out that it was different.

I started professionally circa 1990, so that's the era I most remember.

Yes, big organizations had a head-start with computers. My wife went off to work for an insurance company on a mainframe.

My path was different. We built software for small businesses to run on a PC. Ironically I did go door to door at one point to find work.

We settled into our niche though, and gradually expanded our product range. We had salesmen drumming up customers.

Marketing was hard. I traveled a lot, circling the earth multiple times from 1997 to 2011. Lots of in-person meetings, lots of customer relationships.

It took a decade, or two, but we've built something that now employs 50 people, and makes a profit. It's not Google, but it's still satisfying.
by bluecalm | 2025-09-23 18:22:52+00:00
There are many positively skewed coin flips as well which we don't take because of various biases, fears, habits or our upbringing. I like a quote from Magnus Carlsen (the chess player): "The correct mindset in chess is somewhere between optimist and delusional". I think it applies to life as well.

I am naturally pessimistic I think I lost a lot of opportunities because of it. Thankfully I also get those periods where I am blindly all-in on something. Some of those made me very good at useless things but some resulted in very good opportunities and then outcomes.

Energetic optimists who avoid very dumb choices do very well in life in my experience. People who talk about luck a lot usually can't produce a decently long list of things they tried or keep making blunders (smoking, alcohol, associating with destructive and apathetic people).
by renewiltord | 2025-09-23 18:23:15+00:00
Okay that's a cool feature. This is a good place to use this technology.

It is interesting, though, that Google's products have suffered so much regression as AI has advanced. In the past I could search my images with "Subaru" and reliably get photos. Now it's clearly a subset.

Same with Google's voice assistant which was actually more capable 5 or 6 years ago.

I get it. It's probably easier to maintain with a general purpose LLM or diffusion model behind the scenes or whatever. It's just a pity that the PMs and engineers who made the good stuff have either lost their positions or have changed their minds.
by simianparrot | 2025-09-23 18:23:17+00:00
And Iran has waged proxy wars on Americans, civilians and military personnel alike, for four decades.

The countries are at war. It's just not kinetic, ie. with troops on the battlefield. That is reality. I know it sucks, but you can't expect the US to just let the threat be. It's not like US is alone in wanting to suppress Iran's threat anyway; you can blame most European countries for aiding in that suppression.

I won't get into the religious underpinnings but they are significant. This isn't resolved by the US just letting Iran be.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-09-23 18:24:03+00:00
> everyone is assigned a pay band that corresponds to their title

Hilariously, some big companies work around this by having several entries in the HR systems for a single official title, each with independent pay bands, since the title was not required to be unique within the database. I remember one company had around a thousand different independent entries for a much smaller number of technical titles accumulated from making individual exceptions.

Even if someone had the same title as you on the same team, there would be no correlation with pay bands. They liked to use this to hide the fact that new hires were being paid significantly more than people that had been hired a few years prior.
by hellovai | 2025-09-23 18:24:18+00:00
if you haven't tried the research -> plan -> implementation approach here, you are missing out on how good LLMs are. it completely changed my perspective.

the key part was really just explicitly thinking about different levels of abstraction at different levels of vibecoding. I was doing it before, but not explicitly in discrete steps and that was where i got into messes. The prior approach made check pointing / reverting very difficult.

When i think of everything in phases, i do similar stuff w/ my git commits at "phase" levels, which makes design decision easier to make.

I also do spend ~4-5 hours cleaning up the code at the very very end once everything works. But its still way faster than writing hard features myself.
by toss1 | 2025-09-23 18:24:32+00:00
Umm, that claim is literally a cut-and-paste quote from the US Secret Service announcement (which is why I inserted the ">>" at the beginning of the paragraph to signify the quotation).

So YES, there is a specific claim, and it came directly from the USSS, in the exact article heading this topic. The USSS does not merely toss in observations without a basis in their working threat model (unless they've changed since I worked adjacent to them). It may indeed turn out to be unrelated, but the USSS is publicly stating they are treating it as more than a coincidence.
by Tepix | 2025-09-23 18:24:57+00:00
In general, if all you do is inference with a model that’s in VRAM, you’re right. OTOH it’s simply a matter of picking the right mainboard. If you have one of those sweet new MoE models that won‘t completely fit in your VRAM, offloading means you want PCIe bandwidth, because it will be a bottleneck. Also swapping between LLMs will be faster.
by surgical_fire | 2025-09-23 18:25:10+00:00
Measuring commit rates is a bad metric. It varies depending on the scope and complexity of what I am doing, and the size of individual commits.

I can increase dramatically my number of commits by breaking up my commits in very small chunks.

Typically when I am using AI I tend to reduce a lot the scope of a commit to make it more focused and easier to handle.
by bdhe | 2025-09-23 18:25:17+00:00
I think reasonable people will agree that Bitcoin's energy consumption had huge impacts on costs of power with very little to show for, at least for the average user.

What are ways in which we can incentivize investments and place societal guardrails so that something similar doesn't happen with AI data centers.

Do governments need to invest in nuclear power?

Scale up energy generation in other ways through renewables?

Insulate or subsidize the average non-corporate electricity consumer through something like rent control?
by petsfed | 2025-09-23 18:25:44+00:00
Sure, but part of the point of in-effect racist zoning policies is that the affected population is predominately the targeted minority. It would be more effective and more equitable to address the actual issues created by flophouses.

Single-family zoned areas by definition only have single-family homes, and only some families will be able to afford those homes. The designers of such policies are often well-aware that the only families affluent enough to purchase or rent a home in such an area is of the preferred race (thanks to the strong racial correlation to socioeconomic class, as well as historic explicit racist policies like redlining, employment and education segregation, etc etc).

To be clear, I don't believe that single-family zoning is necessarily racist, especially with the continued democratization of the middle class. Single-family zoning is bad for a lot of reasons. Its just that it is absolutely the case that historically single family zoning was deliberately used in several cases as a racist policy, but in such a way that it would pass muster in court.
by thewebguyd | 2025-09-23 18:25:46+00:00
> but lately it really seems like they are cramming in AI functionality in a way that does not consider the whole experience and it truly feels bolted-on.

I feel that everywhere, not just Google. Windows is probably one of the most egregious with copilot being jammed into every app.

None of this "AI" stuff feels integrated or even thought out at all. The whole thing is just bolted on and it feels like the only reason is so they can say "see, we have AI too! Now give us money" to investors.
by timschmidt | 2025-09-23 18:26:05+00:00
You can find plenty of jumping off points for research here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt

Along with this lovely graph captioned: "Exponential growth of supercomputer performance per watt based on data from the Green500 list." (note the log scale): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt#/media/Fi...

From the section about GPU performance per watt, I'll quote:

"With modern GPUs, energy usage is an important constraint on the maximum computational capabilities that can be achieved. GPU designs are usually highly scalable, allowing the manufacturer to put multiple chips on the same video card, or to use multiple video cards that work in parallel. Peak performance of any system is essentially limited by the amount of power it can draw and the amount of heat it can dissipate. Consequently, performance per watt of a GPU design translates directly into peak performance of a system that uses that design."
by leakycap | 2025-09-23 18:26:21+00:00
"it didn't affect me so I didn't care" is a common and valid feeling up until you are aware of what is happening

I developed with Ruby from the beginning and loved Ruby on Rails for many reasons. The community's backstabbing nature and callousness toward people who put a lot of work in was not something I ever admired and it's led us here.
by __erik | 2025-09-23 18:26:31+00:00
(x402 author here) Thats actually exactly what the intention with x402 is. Merchants express to the buyer multiple ways that they accept payment and the buyer chooses the one they prefer. As of right now stablecoins on various crypto rails are the major form (largely because they're the easiest to start with from a development standpoint), but as Cloudflare indicated in their blogpost, they're proposing a scheme that uses deferred payment via credit card or ACH https://blog.cloudflare.com/x402/.
by programmertote | 2025-09-23 18:26:46+00:00
I'm approaching mid-forties. As a former Buddhist (up to like the age of 13) turned atheist, I find all the points the author shared in this PDF agreeable.

Being self-reliant (being able to find happiness even when alone); being self-aware; being aware of others (including others' feelings, motives, perspectives); focusing on the journey; acknowledging that 'luck' has a non-negligible role in one's life; preparing our minds for inevitable death with calm acceptance; so many things the author's view resounded with in my opinion and experience.
by thrownaway561 | 2025-09-23 18:26:55+00:00
if it wasn't for DHH, Ruby would be a hobby programming language at best. The community can say what it wants, but it and frankly, most of the web programmers in the world, owe DHH some thanks. If it weren't for him, Yehuda Katz and John Resig, 90% of the web would still be written with Perl, CGI and VBScript.
by 0xblacklight | 2025-09-23 18:26:55+00:00
In many cases (though not all) it's the same thing that makes for great engineering managers:

smart generalists with a lot of depth in maybe a couple of things (so they have an appreciation for depth and complexity) but a lot of breadth so they can effectively manage other specialists,

and having great technical communication skills - be able to communicate what you want done and how without over-specifying every detail, or under-specifying tasks in important ways.
by gdbsjjdn | 2025-09-23 18:27:01+00:00
In my experience these hacky changes are usually a consequence of some impedance mismatch in the codebase. Something is poorly factored, the interface (whether technical or personal) isn't suitable for purpose.

It's easy to push back on a hacky change if there's an elegant solution close at hand. But often the business needs and the architecture of the codebase are at odds with each other.
by iambateman | 2025-09-23 18:27:15+00:00
I built a package which I use for large codebase work[0].

It starts with /feature, and takes a description. Then it analyzes the codebase and asks questions.

Once I’ve answered questions, it writes a plan in markdown. There will be 8-10 markdowns files with descriptions of what it wants to do and full code samples.

Then it does a “code critic” step where it looks for errors. Importantly, this code critic is wrong about 60% of the time. I review its critique and erase a bunch of dumb issues it’s invented.

By that point, I have a concise folder of changes along with my original description, and it’s been checked over. Then all I do is say “go” to Claude Code and it’s off to the races doing each specific task.

This helps it keep from going off the rails, and I’m usually confident that the changes it made were the changes I wanted.

I use this workflow a few times per day for all the bigger tasks and then use regular Claude code when I can be pretty specific about what I want done. It’s proven to be a pretty efficient workflow.

[0] GitHub.com/iambateman/speedrun
by immibis | 2025-09-23 18:27:22+00:00
All you need is a time machine and then you can prevent the holocaust. All you need is a philosopher's stone and then immortality is within your grasp. All you need is an infinite source of energy and then the finiteness of the universe need not concern you. All you need is a magic genie granting infinite wishes and you can end world hunger.

If all you need to solve a problem is something impossible, then you haven't solved it.
by elcritch | 2025-09-23 18:27:27+00:00
> Maybe. My point wasn't that one was better or worse, and I did try to add some "balance" to that by including both W and O examples of presidential immunity :)

For sure, president's from both major parties in the US have done those things. My point was that by some standards Trump hasn't been worse (or better) but different.

If you step back and consider just the actions that violate the US constitution, then Clinton, Bush Jr, Obama, Trump, Biden have all done it. Their parties justified it at the time, but nonetheless it grows the scope of the presidential power each time.

> All systems are flawed in some ways, but this seemed to make sense to me. Prosecutions are brought to courts by the executive branch, so having the executive prosecute itself has a fundamental problem.

Good point, though without congress stepping up and keeping the president in check it means a president can accomplish a lot. Good or bad depends on someone's perspective.

Hopefully that's a current cultural issue which could change if / when folks realize that that's not a good thing. For example congress members start pushing back on executive power.