MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nikcub | 2025-09-30 00:29:00+00:00
> but these types of prompts and approaches are why I believe so many people think these models aren't useful.

100% agree. The prompt is a 'yolo prompt'. For that task you need to give it points in what to do so it can deduce it's task list, provide files or folders in context with @, tell it how to test the outcome so it knows it has succeeded and closing the feedback loop, and guide it in implementation either via memory or via context with which existing libs or methods it should call on.

For greenfield tasks and projects I even provide architectural structure, interfaces, etc.

After reading twitter, reddit and hn complaints about models and coding tools I've come to the same conclusion as you.
by geuis | 2025-09-30 00:29:37+00:00
I'm working on an audiobook service (currently for myself) that will fill in major missing features for platforms like Audible.

- Ignore AI voiced books

- Show me unread books in series that I have in my library

- Experimenting with better search. I have experience with building semantic search systems and have been highly disappointed with Audible's extremely sub-par search capabilities. I want results that are actually based on books, authors, and narrators that I have already purchased, read, or listened to.

- Get automatic notifications when new books from authors and narrators that I subscribe to become available.

There's at least a few more gripes I want to address, but these are the high priority ones that come to mind right now.
by gerdesj | 2025-09-30 00:29:42+00:00
Old English is generally considered to have arisen post Roman conquest of what we now call England. It is largely an amalgam (my term) of quite a lot of other languages extant at the time and then it took a life of its own.

Prior to the Roman invasion (55,54BC and 43AD) and subsequent conquests, the predominant languages here were Brythonic or Brittanic. I believe that the last Cornish only speakers (a pair of sisters) passed away in the 1960s or 70s. The language has thankfully been revived somewhat and West Wales (Kernow) is rediscovering its roots. I also believe that shepherds across quite a lot of the modern UKoGB used to count their sheep in Cumbric numbers - the language of Cumbria (note how Cumbric looks suspiciously similar to Cwmru).

Discussions about Indo-European languages is paleontology for language! I'm not so good with me Greek to work out the correct term.

The notion of IE languages is analogous to fossils. We are talking about languages that are living, breathing and spoken. Obviously we must allow a bit of slack when ascribing certain attributes but I doubt any language scholar is going to get upset at Welsh being described as older than English.

The history of these islands has involved invasion after invasion after invasion. How on earth that history has resulted into only a few nationalistic identities and one empire is quite something. Bear in mind that sea travel is far quicker than land when you don't have roads so being islands means easy access and not hard access.
by dekhn | 2025-09-30 00:29:43+00:00
Likely any early implementation of ML would have been on a mainframe or minicomputer, not a 6502. A mainframe/minicomputer would have had oodles of storage (both durable and RAM), as well as a compiler for a high level language (which fits what I can see in https://smlfamily.github.io/history/ML2015-talk.pdf and other locations).
by olcarl75 | 2025-09-30 00:29:55+00:00
Scriptwriting require specific formatting (set by Hollywood ages ago). Doing this in google docs is really painful. Besides that, people who work in this industry are already used to the format, so if you wanna pitch something to studios, they expect to be in industry format.

ref: https://www.dramatistsguild.com/sites/default/files/2020-01/...
by jfengel | 2025-09-30 00:30:12+00:00
I'm not so crazy about "keep trying". I tried at my business for long after it was obvious to everyone that I should have quit. I wasted well over a decade of my life, and I learned no lessons other than "don't". But they won't be writing articles about me.

As the poster says, "Winners never quit and quitters never win. But those who don't win and don't quit are idiots." This idiot affirms that advice.
by bloomca | 2025-09-30 00:30:34+00:00
I have been working on my terminal editor, but I parked that for now -- https://github.com/bloomca/love. It is possible to load a file and edit it, copy/paste works, you can select text, etc. The next step is to integrate with the tree-sitter for syntax highlighting and then with LSP, but it took a bit more time than I wanted.

Another project of mine is to play music from my audio CDs by myself. I built a simple Rust library to read TOC and raw PCM data from a CD drive -- https://github.com/Bloomca/rust-cd-da-reader (works on Windows, macOS and Linux), and a ripper -- https://github.com/Bloomca/audio-cd-ripper, which rips all tracks and encodes it as FLAC and fetches metadata from MusicBrainz.

The next step is to play it. I looked into using cpal (https://github.com/RustAudio/cpal), but I feel like using low-level audio API for each platform is a better approach for learning.
by Gigachad | 2025-09-30 00:30:42+00:00
Social media is probably somewhat responsible, but I don't think it's the biggest problem here. It's the fact that Gen Z is checking out on life, for many people there is no hope of owning a house even if you give up all luxury spending and grind, it's impossible for many on a typical job.

It's also getting increasingly more expensive to hang out with friends in physical spaces. Every business needs to pay increasingly high rents, and charge increasing amounts. You could go out to the bar and spend $100, or you could stay at home and play video games for free.

We are living in an era where the old and rich have taken over and continue to extract every last drop of wealth from the people who have the least.
by kennymeyers | 2025-09-30 00:30:43+00:00
I am working on Sweet Shop.

https://sweetshop.app

It's a digital comic book store. Letterboxd with a buy button. It's really fun. We've got a lot of great publishers signed, and a great team. It's such a thrill to work in a space where people work their ass off to create art, in spite of the fact that the rewards are minimal. Our job, we feel, is to make them more money to make more art.
by magicalhippo | 2025-09-30 00:30:51+00:00
We had a case where a single OR was a massive performance problem on MSSQL, but not at all on Sybase SQLAnywhere we're migrating away from. Which one might consider slightly ironic given the origins of MSSQL...

Anyway, the solution was to manually rewrite the query as a UNION ALL of the two cases which was fast on both. I'm still annoyed though by the fact that MSSQL couldn't just have done that for me.
by mcgrath_sh | 2025-09-30 00:31:35+00:00
I use a combination of stow and make to manage my dotfiles. I added a makefile well after using stow for a decade. The makefile is more for new system setup than day to day management. I might try out replacing stow with make based on this blog, more for fun than anything. I'm a bit reluctant to replace what has been working so well for a decade, but I'm very intrigued by this. Make has always interested me. It seems like it could be incredibly powerful in the right hands.
by stavros | 2025-09-30 00:31:45+00:00
I think I made the wrong point when I wrote about nostalgia. I don't mean so much "you're remembering the work as better than it was", but more "you remember the zeitgeist that made the work great".

I watched Macgyuver (my favourite childhood show) recently, and it was terrible, twenty minutes of filler for one cool engineering scene, way worse than I remembered it. However, it's not the show that's changed, it's that I forgot what the 90s were like and how cool Macgyuver was in that zeitgeist.

Similarly, it's not that the Matrix isn't great, it's that, if you watched it in its era, you may remember how unlike anything else it was. You can't know how groundbreaking it was unless you remember that era, otherwise it's just one movie of many.

I can't speak to your later points as I don't know what Deus Ex is about or how it's used to vindicate conspiracy theorists, unfortunately.
by labrador | 2025-09-30 00:32:07+00:00
I'm sympathetic, but it occcured to me that ccording to my amatuer studies, Germany lost WW2 in part because it had a craftsman mentality to manufacture war machines and ended up with a bazillion different part requirments and a shortage of skilled craftsmen, while America used Henry Ford's assembly line process to stamp out hundreds of thousands of identical machines sharing the same parts.

Now we are at the assembly line stage of software production with AI. Us craftsmen will have to find other ways to enjoy our crafts.
by inkyoto | 2025-09-30 00:32:48+00:00
AIX uses XCOFF that has diverged from COFF so much that it is easier to treat it an entirely separate lineage – not entirely different from the Windows' PE object/executable format, which is also a COFF derivative.

XCOFF is pretty cool, actually, e.g. it does not require for two sets of the same library to exist, i.e. one to use for static linking and another for dynamic loading – the same .a archive can be used for both.

The .loader section keeps import and export symbol tables (what the binary provides to others, and what it needs resolved), library search paths and dependencies, and relocation and fix-up details. If the .a is being used for static linking, the .loader section is simply ignored.
by tmilard | 2025-09-30 00:33:35+00:00
Improving my 'Video game generator from photos'. The bottleneck of this kind of generator is 'how much time to obtain the video game". I managed on my last vacation (it's a side project) to reduced it to 2 hours. This is an example of one FPS made by my tool : https://free-visit.net/fr/demo01
by mullingitover | 2025-09-30 00:33:47+00:00
> If you've been told your whole life that you're inherently evil for your gender

I'm sorry, I'm nowhere near an expert on gender theory but even I know this is BS: nobody is telling young men they're "evil for their gender."

What they are told is the fact that they live in a patriarchy. Nobody is held personally responsible for being born into the patriarchy, and the patriarchy is just as toxic to young men as it is to women. The main people who get held responsible are the ones who enthusiastically perpetuate the system and plug their ears when they hear evidence that it might not be super great for everyone.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-09-30 00:34:19+00:00
>I do feel bad for the devs working there... but them having to find new jobs is genuinely the only negative aspect in all of this.

In this job market, that's a pretty big negative. And EA was one of the biggest employers in the US. This is this industry's equivalent of Wal Mart leaving the market. The damage will be felt for years.

I think you're also downplaying the last extinguishing of hope for any non-sportsball IP's to be revived. Those wishing for Need for Speed, Mass Effect, Burnout, Dragon Age, and many many more IP's over the last 40 years aren't just going to say "good riddance".
by rhetocj23 | 2025-09-30 00:34:24+00:00
Its kinda bizarre really.

How does Alexa ever compare with the rich experience of interacting with a store through the various senses? Its typical that technologists tend to come up with this stuff and what happens in reality is wildly off compared to what was expected.

Buying stuff means spending money. it turns out most people don't have a lot of money (something that Mr Altman would never be able to understand given his privileged background) so they want to see and experience the transactions that take place. Same reason why this agent nonsense is not going to work from an economic stand point.
by knowaveragejoe | 2025-09-30 00:34:31+00:00
I appreciate what you're doing here. I think it's really important to have this kind of high level overview of these species. I have a little feedback based on clicking around the site.

When you click on a country in the map view(under Elephants, for example), I think the map still has focus instead of the card. So this means you can't highlight text, click on links, etc within the card. Also if you scroll using the scroll wheel, you end up zooming in and out on the map.

I wonder if it would be good to have a "see more" link or some such here, so you can view the same information in the card, but on its own discrete page for each country?
by SQLite | 2025-09-30 00:34:43+00:00
Yeah, but who ever writes "x=0.9" as a constraint on a partial index? Really? Don't you know you aren't suppose to compare floating point quantities for equality?

If P is the expression on the partial index and Q is the WHERE clause of the query, then the partial index is only usable if Q implies P for all possible assignments of variables. A theorem prover is needed to establish this. Every RDBMS has one. The one inside SQLite is not terribly bright, true enough. It leans toward usually little memory and few CPU cycles. It does not do a good job if P contains "x=0.9". On the other hand, SQLite's theorem prover is decent if P contains "x IS NOT NULL", because in actual practice, probably about 90% of partial index WHERE clauses are some variation on "x IS NOT NULL".

The partial index expression does not always have to be exactly the same as what is in the WHERE clause of the query. SQLite will always find the match if P is a subset of Q; if Q can be rewritten as "R AND P". But if P is "x IS NOT NULL" and Q does anything that restricts x from being NULL, for example if Q contains "x>0", then SQLite's theorem prover will find that match too, even if "IS NOT NULL" never appears in Q.

Will the theorem prover in SQLite get better someday? Perhaps. It has gotten better over the years. The question becomes, how much more code space and query-planning CPU cycles are you willing to spend to get a slightly better query planner? This trade-off is different for a client/server database engine. With SQLite being embedded, the trade-off tends to fall more on the side of "keep it simple". If you have followed SQLite over many years, you might have noticed it is shifting toward more complex decision making as memory becomes cheaper and CPUs get faster. It's a tricky balancing act to find the sweet spot.
by tempaccount421 | 2025-09-30 00:34:57+00:00
Good point. British people don't really exist. What are even English or Scottish people? French people? European people? Where does it start, where does it end? We don't know.

We don't know what a white person is. No idea, no clue. Where could we even start?

Funnily enough, though, those considerations never seem to apply to Palestinians, native Americans, indigenous Australians, etc. There is only a certain group that is somehow impossible to define precisely, yet is the primary target of those considerations.
by CommenterPerson | 2025-09-30 00:35:09+00:00
Found this fascinating, not just due to the plans of another billionaire. One, even if that project seemed more feasible, it shows the risks of depending on one person's whims for a very large project. What if they, you know, changed their mind? Two, a sum of 100 million was regularly mentioned, however the actual money spent was a small fraction. This seems to have parallels with talk of "billions" being invested, or spent, or earned -- the actual may be in funny money. People are entranced until the next distraction, and the next.
by paulhebert | 2025-09-30 00:35:11+00:00
Thanks! I experimented with this but struggled making it feel natural on mobile.

I ended up implementing an alternate solution that I’m hoping solves for the same paint point.

My current dev build “merges” tiles when you connect them to complete a word. This allows you to move them as

I’m going to release a demo with that feature soon. My core playtesters seem to like it but I want to get more feedback on it from a larger group!
by int_19h | 2025-09-30 00:35:28+00:00
I think a lot of it has to do with the super long context that it has. For extended sessions and/or large codebases that can fill up surprisingly quickly.

That said, one thing I do dislike about Gemini is how fond it is of second guessing the user. This usually manifests in doing small unrelated "cleaner code" changes as part of a larger task, but I've seen cases where the model literally had something like "the user very clearly told me to do X, but there's no way that's right - they must have meant Y instead and probably just mistakenly said X; I'll do Y now".

One specific area where this happens a lot is, ironically, when you use Gemini to code an app that uses Gemini APIs. For Python, at least, they have the legacy google-generativeai API, and the new google-genai API, which have fairly significant differences between them even though the core functionality is the same. The problem is that Gemini knows the former much better than the latter, and when confronted with such a codebase, will often try to use the old API (even if you pre-write the imports and some examples!). Which then of course breaks the type checker, so then Gemini sees this and 90% of the time goes, "oh, it must be failing because the user made an error in that import - I know it's supposed to be "generativeai" not "genai" so let me correct that.
by madrox | 2025-09-30 00:37:02+00:00
I don't see how what you're saying is at odds with the author. At no point did they say Vonnegut was a failure before Slaughthouse Five. Only that he, like many others, didn't produce their opus until later in life. This isn't just limited to writing. There are examples in all fields if you look, both creative and commercial. This idea is definitely at odds with a lot of current SV rhetoric.
by drweevil | 2025-09-30 00:37:49+00:00
>U.S. trade authorities also say that, by protecting consumer data that PIX collects, the Brazilian government is hurting American companies that use such information...

OMG. Everyone knows that companies steal our data. But to demand that American companies should be able to do so shows just where they stand on this. I guess we shouldn't expect any laws protecting data privacy anytime soon.
by iandanforth | 2025-09-30 00:37:59+00:00
I found and purchased a hand-made toy for my son this evening using ChatGPT searching Etsy. The search results were good and made it easy to pick from the many options. The checkout process using my stored CC hit an error (it didn't tell me what error) but when I switched to Google Pay it completed successfully. Overall a pretty nice experience as shopping goes.
by jonpurdy | 2025-09-30 00:38:10+00:00
This might be what I've been looking for. On the first of every month I have Hazel put everything in ~/Downloads/yyyy-mm (previous month), with the intent to move each file to the correct project/area folder in my actual file structure. But I'm about 1.5 years behind on that...

Have you looked at competitors? If so, what are they? I haven't found anything that does this as elegantly as Fallinorg.
by 6510 | 2025-09-30 00:38:22+00:00
What beautiful table in how it is seems sorted both by time and latency with the exception of some systems that are ahead of their time in slowness.

If you put a bit of load on the modern hardware things get dramatically worse. As if there is some excuse for it.

I had this thought long ago that the picture on the monitor could be stitched together from many different sources. You would have a box some place on the screen with an application or widget rendered in it by physically isolated hardware. An input area needs a font and a color scheme. The text should still be send to the central processor and/or to the active process but it can be send to the display stitcher simultaneously.

You could even type a text and have it encrypted without the rest of the computer learning what the words say.

I look at and click around KolibriOS one time, everything is so responsive it made me slightly angry.
by nighthawk454 | 2025-09-30 00:38:29+00:00
This study manages to find that drinking exponentially more per week is probably bad for you. I think that falls under 'no shit'.

The main aim seems to be to refute previous "U-shaped" and "J-shaped" studies that suggested a moderate amount of drinking was good because there was a dip in the distribution. Going so far as to suggest that moderate drinking must somehow be 'protective'. The explanation for that seems to be that those studies collected _current_ drinking use only, when presumably a history of binge drinking would still be quite relevant. This would artificially inflate the 'non-drinking' category with people who actually did have a history of drinking, while also deflating the moderate category. Apparently to the point that the moderate drinking levels looked even safer than non-drinking - which probably should've been a clue. In other words the data was probably pretty flawed, and garbage-in garbage-out.

As for this study...

"Genetically-predicted drinks per week" - are we serious with this?? Maybe they're claiming that their 'predicted models' align well with the smaller amount of surveyed self-reported data but that's hard to find in the paper.

They seem to bend over backwards to make alcohol causal, even going so far as to suggest that a decline in drinking behavior over the years may just be reverse-caused by the future dementia. And for higher incidence of dementia in non-drinkers - seemingly the opposite of the conclusion - that's explained away by suggesting those people may have just had a hypothetical prior heavy use, therefore the "reverse causation is further supported". Pretty circular...

I'm not sure how much more can be reasonably concluded from this other than health risks probably scale with drug use in some fashion. The data, methodology, and modeling seem far far too hand-wavy to suggest any kind of definitive explanation. The results barely even exclude 'no effect' in a 95% CI.

I would not be surprised for a second if effects like early cognitive decline correlate with decreased drinking habits, but I just don't see how you can conclude any of that from this.

I suppose if we're getting off the apparently very loosely suggested 'moderate drinking is good' myth, that's still progress, but...
by johnnyanmac | 2025-09-30 00:38:51+00:00
Vibe coding absolutely does not work at the scale of an EA Sports game. Even if it could get to a compileable state, there will be loads of performance and memory issues. The kind of code needed for these codebases aren't exactly going to be scraped on Github.

And then there's console code rooted in NDA's. Throwing that into an LLM is a great way to be blacklisted as a publisher.
by varispeed | 2025-09-30 00:39:20+00:00
This is incorrect. Copyright protects the artistic layout of the schematic, not the functional circuit itself. The circuit design is an uncopyrightable 'system'.

A competitor can legally use the information to build their own product; they just can't reproduce the drawing.

The schematic is also incredibly valuable. It's a blueprint to Apple's design philosophy and the only public map of how their custom silicon actually functions in the real world. That's priceless information for any competitor.
by agar | 2025-09-30 00:39:59+00:00
Reading the comments, this is both a "nothing burger" and a reason to geoblock California.

It does too much, and too little. The costs are too high, and too low. It's an example of corruption, but also a good first start at regulations. It will drive AI companies out of California, but also attract more companies with a lower bar for edge innovation.

Can anyone link to an actual informed and nuanced discussion of this bill? Because if it exists here, I haven't found it.