MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WalterBright | 2025-09-29 17:38:22+00:00
I have another example. I have a '72 Dodge Challenger. I've taken the thing apart, and put it back together. I never cease to be surprised at how well-engineered it is in its simple, direct, and inexpensive solutions to making an amazing car.

For example, consider the instruments. They run off of 5 volts, while the system voltage of the car is anywhere from 10-18 volts. How to get 5 volts? It has a sort of buzzer which is an electromagnet. When the voltage is above 5 volts, it breaks the circuit, when it is below 5 volts, it closes the circuit. It happens fast enough that the result is a rough 5 volts.

Many restorers of these cars decide to replace it with an electronic voltage regulator, that gives it a rock solid 5 volts.

Then they discover the instruments don't work.

It turns out that the (mechanical) instruments tend to get stuck. The roughness of the 5 volts keeps them from getting stuck. So now the the electronic voltage regulator needs another circuit added to make the 5 volts rough.

That little, simple voltage regulator hidden inside a can is a marvel of simplicity and effectiveness.
by dylan604 | 2025-09-29 17:38:36+00:00
Formal training with something like a CS course definitely starts with limited systems progressing to larger systems. So if you've been through that pain, I could see the bitterness. However, I'd wager the vast majority of coders did not take a CS course, and are self taught or boot camp grads. It's not really their fault they don't know assembly. It's just not something they've ever or will most likely never need to deal with for they day job.
by wslh | 2025-09-29 17:38:44+00:00
It's interesting that you mentioned being younger. One thing I've noticed is that as people accumulate different experiences and social groups (not necessarily just because of age), they often develop different "personas" depending on the environment. In one setting, you might be an enthusiast sharing a video about a hobby, while in another you might be a CEO interacting with your team, shareholders, partners, or customers where you naturally behave differently. The challenge is managing these "many worlds" without them colliding. One solution that's becoming more feasible now is the ability to modify your appearance and voice depending on the context.
by hunter2_ | 2025-09-29 17:38:50+00:00
I'm not so sure that the family gathering scenario is well-defined, though. If I'm at a gathering in someone's house, and I'm in a room with only the person/people that I'm actively talking to, then I feel reasonably private in the sense that my words are falling only on the ears of intended recipients. But if I'm in a room with the people I'm talking to and also people I'm not talking to, then I acknowledge that ears beyond those involved in the conversation can catch wind of what I'm saying, which roughly equates to the absense of expectations of privacy.
by renewiltord | 2025-09-29 17:38:59+00:00
gpt-5 command line use is bizarre. It always writes extraordinarily complicated pipelines that Claude instead just writes simple commands for.

My use case does better with the latter because frequently the agent fails to do things and then can't look back at intermediate.

E.g. Command | Complicated Grep | Complicated Sed

Is way worse than multistep

Command > tmpfile

And then grep etc. Because latter can reuse tmpfile if grep is wrong.
by falcor84 | 2025-09-29 17:39:02+00:00
Thanks for clarifying. I understand your perspective now, but just want to say that this is really different from mine, which might be influenced by my having a relatively strong Need for Closure[0]. I've been a life-long gamer, and have almost never had any interest in replaying a game (at least not until it's been perhaps a decade). When I finish a good game and get to the credits, I have a very strong sense of catharsis, which leads me then to enjoy clicking on that Delete button and starting on the next game. And just to be clear - it's not that I am trying to rush things and be done with the games; I take my time with most games, and I do think a lot about the good ones after, but it's pleasant memories of my time with them, rather than any desire to go back into the fray.

As you can imagine, I mostly enjoy single-player narrative games with exploration and some RPG elements, rather than multi-player ones, or open-ended ones with infinite-replayability mechanics. For reference, some of my favorite game franchises include: LBA, Zelda, The Last of Us, Mass Effect, The Witcher, Portal, Talos Principle, GTA, Kotor, Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(psychology)
by doctoboggan | 2025-09-29 17:39:16+00:00
I do it as well. I have a Claude code instance running in my backend repo, and one running in my frontend repo. If there is required coordination, I have the backend agent write a report for the front end agent about the new backend capabilities, or have the front end agent write a report requesting a new endpoint that would simplify the code.

Lots of other people also follow the architect and builder pattern, where one agent architects the feature while the other agent does the actual implementation.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-09-29 17:39:16+00:00
An engineer that does nothing but foundations can still be a damn good geotechnical engineer.

A foundation that isn't useful to build atop is just a shitty foundation. Everyone is taking it for granted that building a good foundation is impossible if you haven't built a shitty foundation for the same building first, but that's not the only way to do things.
by joz1-k | 2025-09-29 17:40:12+00:00
> Rust was designed to facilitate incremental rewrites of an existing C++ library

Do you have a source for this claim? Rust is a fine language (though its advocates can be a bit belligerent sometimes). But, as a matter of fact, Rust was not designed for a easy interoperability with C++ or to make gradual rewrites easy.
by lawlessone | 2025-09-29 17:40:13+00:00
>Unless you speak for F-Droid, I think you're reading far too much into their statement that isn't there.

Bad faith commenter.

If you actually reach far into their statement you would have gotten to this part

>Regulatory and competition authorities should look carefully at Google’s proposed activities, and ensure that policies designed to improve security are not abused to consolidate monopoly control. We urge regulators to safeguard the ability of alternative app stores and open-source projects to operate freely, and to protect developers who cannot or will not comply with exclusionary registration schemes and demands for personal information.

>If you are a developer or user who values digital freedom, you can help. Write to your Member of Parliament, Congressperson or other representative, sign petitions in defense of sideloading and software freedom, and contact the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) team to express why preserving open distribution matters. By making your voice heard, you help defend not only F-Droid, but the principle that software should remain a commons, accessible and free from unnecessary corporate gatekeeping.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-09-29 17:40:59+00:00
> multiple indices

Yes, sqlite uses only one index per table in FROM clause... Except for when it can use the OR optimization [1]

> Left to right, no skipping, stops at the first range

I don't know if we need a soundbite for this, nor is it sqlite specific. This is a direct consequence of the fact that indexes are basically just sorted lists you can binary search over. They are sorted left to right (you have to choose some order anyhow) meaning all the other orderings cannot avail of the speedup, and thus sqlite chooses to not use it.....

Except if left column of index is measured to be low cardinality by ANALYZE [2]'s output in the sqlite_stats table, in which case it is ok to scan over it and then binary search right column. More at skip-scan optimization [3].

[1] https://www.sqlite.org/optoverview.html#evaluating_or_constr...

[2] https://www.sqlite.org/lang_analyze.html

[3] https://www.sqlite.org/optoverview.html#the_skip_scan_optimi...
by jMyles | 2025-09-29 17:41:09+00:00
> Young girls are killing themselves every day over something you're saying "who cares" about

...I think this advances the point GP makes. We have allowed obsession over body image to take on religious proportions (falling off both ends of the spectrum, toward tiktok swimsuit edition on one end, and the burka on the other).

Part of this obsession is the claim of ownership of every photon that bounces off one's skin until it is eventually captured by someone else's eye (biological or electronic).

A healthy internet age is one in which we find comfort in our bodies, fitness in our habits, and security without needing to control every depiction of us.
by gregsadetsky | 2025-09-29 17:41:48+00:00
a few more sites (rather than aggregators):

- https://cargo.site/templates/samples-specimens and https://cargo.site/templates in general (scroll down and then scroll horizontally to see a lot more)

- https://html.energy/html-day/2025/index.html

- a few inspiring friends and friends of friends: https://julipode.net/ , https://katarinamazur.com/ , https://kotc.life/ , https://suneinyneeenan.github.io/Enhydrax/
Ask HN: Why LLMs confidently hallucinate instead of admitting knowledge cutoff?
by cryptography | 2025-09-29 17:42:33+00:00
I asked Claude about a library released in March 2025 (after its January cutoff). Instead of saying smth like "I don't know, that's after my cutoff," it fabricated a detailed technical explanation - architecture, API design, use cases. Completely made up, but internally consistent and plausible.

What's confusing: the model clearly "knows" its cutoff date when asked directly, and can express uncertainty in other contexts. Yet it chooses to hallucinate instead of admitting ignorance.

Is this a fundamental architecture limitation, or just a training objective problem? Generating a coherent fake explanation seems more expensive than "I don't have that information."

Why haven't labs prioritized fixing this? Adding web search mostly solves it, which suggests it's not architecturally impossible to know when to defer.

Has anyone seen research or experiments that improve this behavior? Curious if this is a known hard problem or more about deployment priorities.
by SilentM68 | 2025-09-29 17:42:37+00:00
In my experience, incompatibilities like that have for the most part been due business partnership decisions. Let me give you an example. A company that designs motherboards may state that one board should be compatible with a full range of other hardware in the market, e.g. RAM, PCIe, M.2, etc. The reality is that they usually partner and/or are locked into certain vendors, contractually, that supply them with their products for the board. You can see this in their products spec pages, in a section titled, "Support List," with a warning that should you deviate from this list, they will not guarantee 100% functionality. Basically, the company tests each product that they list, and if does not work properly, they either tweak the board, its firmware, or communicate this to the third-party vendor to see if they can provide a solution. Most companies that sell these boards or devices more often than not, are small, do not have enough R&D funds, or manpower to do the proper research, testing and adjustments to their products, since devices are already 6 months behind current technology when they are released into the wild. Usually, customers can call into the company's support line and report the problem. The company may or may not address the incompatibility of their board with the third-party product if they see that there is potential for increased sales should the third-party device prove to be a trending product, or the customer is a high-volume order customer. More often than not, the incompatibility is not properly addressed.

Just my thoughts :|
by Aspos | 2025-09-29 17:42:46+00:00
There is a difference in the way it went for Saudis and Iranians. Saudis, not having the tech, capital, knowledge at the time, still retained ownership. Iranians did not. Saudis had enough bargaining power (and balls), Iranian Shakh agreed to exploitative concessions.

Those who had the tech, capital and expertise in the end just lined up in front of Saudis to be hired.
by Nevermark | 2025-09-29 17:42:57+00:00
Also, if you hold onto control, you maintain control. People respect control. Even when it is pervasively used against them. Perhaps more so.

If you give away control, people quickly forget and lose respect for you, for what you did. After wall, what have you done for them lately?

It isn't fair, but it is how people are wired.

People respond to today's marginal forces. Not much else.
by sumtimes89 | 2025-09-29 17:42:59+00:00
Why are you trying to dehumanize the idea of taking a picture of someone and possibly posting it publicly by referring to it as photons? Yes we are all just atoms moving around in 3D space but it doesn't take away the fact that people should be allowed to exist outside their house without some random person recording them and possibly posting it to the internet. You don't care and that is totally fine but some people do.
by nikeee | 2025-09-29 17:43:00+00:00
I use the mental model of nested maps for "column order matters". For example, an index "published, low_quality_probability, lang" is just a Map<date, Map<number, Map<lang, rowId>>> in my mental model. These maps are ordered by the order the index possesses. That explains why column order matters and why one cannot skip columns and why it stops at range queries.

Just imagine getting a final rowId from these nested maps and you'll see why the index works for some queries and doesn't for others.
by ComputerGuru | 2025-09-29 17:44:11+00:00
Not a great article; I clicked expecting something super technical about SQLite internals and found a mix of rdbms basics and some misconceptions. The limitations in the blog post aren't really specific to SQLite (for the most part), they're just how indexes (indices) and database engines work across the board. And some of the things phrased as "SQLite [can't] do this" is stuff that wouldn't make sense to do in the first place.

If you understand what (multi-column) indexes are at the lowest level (i.e. what data structure they represent, how they are used by the database, what the code reading them would look like) then all of this makes immediate and natural sense. Indexes aren't magic. They're just a shortcut to help the the db engine find your data more effectively.

This doesn't require super complex understanding of data structures, btw. The same limitations and advice would apply if you were trying to, for example, search a stack of resumes sorted by one or more attributes. If you have them sorted by position, years of experience, and applicant's last name; you wouldn't be able to quickly grab all resumes for the HR Manager position that have a last name starting with J - after all, you sorted them by years of experience first! It's physically not possible! You can only use the first part of that index, the position, to jump to HR Manager resumes; then you would need to manually go through them one-by-one to grab only the ones starting with J for each years-of-experience subgroup (if any).
by cloverich | 2025-09-29 17:44:47+00:00
Please y'all, when you list supportive or critical complaints based on your actual work, include some specifics of the task and prompt. Like actual prompt, actual bugs, actual feature, etc. I've had great success with both ChatGPT and Claude for years, am around 3x sustained output increase in my professional work, and kicking off and finishing new side projects / features that I used to simply not ever finish. BUT there's some tasks I run into where it's god awful. Because I have enough good experience, I know how to work around, when to give up, when to move on, etc. I am still surprised at things it cannot do, for example Claude code could not seem to stitch together three screens in an iOS app using the latest SwiftUI (I am not an iOS dev). IMHO for people using it off and on or sparingly, it's going to seem either incredible or worthless depending on your project and prompt. Share details, it's so helpful for meaningful conversation!
by array_key_first | 2025-09-29 17:45:13+00:00
I think this just fundamentally does not track, because the vast, vast majority of phone users are not regularly using a spreadsheet app.

When we imagine phone applications, we think messaging, social media, web browsing, and email. That's 99% of stuff people do on their phone.

The statistic of "how many people have this app installed" is fundamentally flawed. Why? Most apps are worthless. Throwaways, single purpose.

Its entirely possible, and dare I say extremely likely, that people install (or it came installed!) Google sheets for one document that was shared one time, then forgot about it.
by unshavedyak | 2025-09-29 17:46:06+00:00
Interesting, in the new 2.0.0 claude code they got rid of the "Plan with Opus then switch to Sonnet" feature. I hope they're correct in Sonnet being good enough to Plan too, because i quite preferred Opus planning. It wasn't necessarily "better", just more predictable in my experience.

Also as a Max $200 user, feels weird to be paying for an Opus tailored sub when now the standard Max $100 would be preferred since they claim Sonnet is better than Opus.

Hope they have Opus 4.5 coming out soon or next month i'm downgrading.
by WorldMaker | 2025-09-29 17:46:15+00:00
> Anthem... man that game had potential but just was not ready to ship. Was a ton of fun to play and I loved the bits of story we got but it really was just a tease of a story sadly.

Anthem came across to me that it had most of its story "filed off" at the last minute. I can't prove it, but Bioware was said to have been working on a Mandalorian game for years and so much of Anthem from the KOTOR-like macguffin that gives the title of the game to the underutilized Cantina in the main hub to the fact that AT-ATs (under a slightly different name) just show up in the middle of plot like you should have already been expecting them feels like Bioware in the very last minute had to pull every Star Wars character and Star Wars reference out of a game that was designed to be a Star Wars Mandalorian simulator.

At least as a player of Anthem, I think it's a tale of weird timing that EA was afraid of losing access to the Star Wars license in the wrong week, and also didn't anticipate that Disney would heavily promote a Mandalorian themed TV show not soon after the expected release date. As an officially licensed Star Wars Mandalorian simulator, just as or just before the first couple of seasons of The Mandalorian were premiering could have been incredible. Anthem hints that it was almost that in such weird ways it's hard not to wonder if EA and Bioware just got Anthem's timing wrong.

(It's also not hard to blame Anthem's weird timing for messing up Andromeda by consequence. Andromeda's team got retasked away from story DLC to help Anthem in whatever its last weird rush was, which in my theory is the "removing Star Wars from it" and I still think Andromeda was only one good story DLC from being among the best of the series.)
by inopinatus | 2025-09-29 17:46:25+00:00
The painful thing is when someone describes themselves as a “full stack developer” but lack any mechanical sympathy for what the processor, memory, and I/O buses are actually doing.

This doesn’t require a formal education. I was self-taught long before studying CS institutionally. And per the article I am super grateful to the 6502 for being the platform that I learned from.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-29 17:46:53+00:00
For phones, it wouldn't make a difference to most repairs. The repair shops that work at PCB level swap major components between PCBs. It's rare that one of the passive components is the cause of a failure on a PCB at this density. Even with the schematic it would be hard to diagnose many failure modes without a lot of trial and error. So they don't waste their time, they just swap the major ICs into a different board that has been salvaged from something and try that.

Schematics for high-density boards like this are not as informative as you might expect. It's mostly connections between balls of ICs and the values of passives here and there. The values of those passives can be measured from parts salvaged from boards if necessary. More likely, the technician would simply steal the part from another PCB that has been scrapped.
by WalterBright | 2025-09-29 17:47:16+00:00
Another example. The V2 rocket engineers had a problem with the nozzle. It would burn through. The flame was just way too hot for any known metal.

The solution was simple and pure genius.

The nozzle was composed of tubes welded together. The liquid oxygen was run through the tubes, which pre-heated the oxidizer and cooled the nozzle. But that still wasn't enough. Then the engineers simply drilled tiny holes in the tubes, so some of the oxygen would leak out into the nozzle. The gas would form a barrier between the flame and the nozzle, and would carry away the heat. (This is known as boundary layer cooling.) If you ever get a chance to look at a rocket nozzle, you'll see the tubes and the holes.
by nerdsniper | 2025-09-29 17:47:57+00:00
I’d vote for politicians willing to champion something like this. I fail to see why this shouldn’t extend to owners of scientific and industrial equipment as well (and the owners should be able to provide these schematics to others for purposes of repair, effectively meaning I would like schematics to be as public to view as GPL code is).

However, some schematics are for products only used internally - like Google TPU’s or some cellular radio access network equipment. I think that there exist FCC-approved devices for which the public does not have any interest in the schematics and can remain private.

The schematics aren’t really “secret” in the sense of a recipe. There’s not really a way to precisely determine the recipe for a particular food product, it’s more of a process than just a list of ingredients.

Schematics are right there inside the physical circuit board for anyone to inspect. You already give them away with every product. It’s just expensive to reverse engineer.

Personally I also think most material compositions should also be made public by similar logic. I think consumers should be able to know what’s in their blankets, dishware, and alcoholic beverages as well. Apparently beer/liquor isn’t required to list ingredients either, which is mind-blowing to me in 2025.
by blurbleblurble | 2025-09-29 17:47:58+00:00
The only exaggeration is in that the way I asked GPT-5 to leave claude to do its thing was to say "why don't we just let claude cook"? I later checked with ChatGPT about the whole exchange and it confirmed that it was well aware of the meaning of this slang, and it's first reaction was that whole thing just sounded like a funny programmer joke, all in jest. But then I reminded it that I'd explicitly pushed back on a hard reset twice.

To be clear, I don't believe that there was any _intention_ of malice or that the behavior was literally envious in a human sense. Moreso I think they haven't properly aligned GPT-5 to deal with cases like this.
by scottlamb | 2025-09-29 17:47:59+00:00
> The problem is not that they were playing a childish game, it's that they were over-estimating their own abilities by a lot.

Why not both?

In an interview, you need to impress, and that's true for both the job-seeker and the hiring team. So yeah, you need to talk a bit about your accomplishments, and it's hard to do that without being a little braggy. But you can let your work be measured on its own. If you directly measure your accomplishments against the other person's, and especially if you put their accomplishments down, you're not selling them. You're showing off your personality flaws, even if you "win" the pissing contest.