MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by _fat_santa | 2025-09-01 14:30:12+00:00
> I have a 50% chance of getting either an expert or an intern writing my code

The way I describe it is almost gambling with your time. Every time I want to reach for the Cline extension in VSCode, I always ask myself "if this gamble worth it?" and "what are my odds for this gamble?".

For some things like simple refactoring I'm usually getting great odds so I use AI, but I would say at least 5-6 times last week I've thought about it and ended up doing it by hand as the odds were not in my favor.

One thing I've picked up using AI over the past few months is this sense of what it can and can't do. For some things I'm like "yeah it can do this no problem" but for other tasks I find myself going "better do this by hand, AI will just fuck it up"
by mothballed | 2025-09-01 14:30:25+00:00
I don't own a phone, but the most shocking revelation came when my child's school required us to use an app to specify how our children will be picked up or ride the bus.

So far I've been able to avoid using apps for pretty much anything, but when the school says "use an app or you won't get your kids" and then also say they will call CPS and have your kids seized if you don't get them in time, that puts you in a real fucked up situation.
by xorcist | 2025-09-01 14:31:42+00:00
Dokuwiki is my go-to tool for internal wikis. Unfortunately it won't help you with the two issues listed above: It's still PHP and there's no conflict resolution to speak of. It also hasn't changed much in two decades.

What it does right is that it's trivial. Trivial to understand, trivial to use, trivial to upgrade, and trivial to write plugins for. These plugins can then suck in data from external systems and CMDBs which is perfect for internal documentation. Mediawiki is designed for another use case and much more complicated.
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-09-01 14:31:51+00:00
There is a way of doing things that sits between autocomplete and vibe coding. If you use these tools effectively, you learn how to prop them up with context, so make sure they won't start imaging how things should work, then you make it plan a solution, and if you have the time, you watch it implement it and approve as you go. Sometimes you stop it, make correction, and you go on. While it's doing its thing, you can plan the next task. Sometimes I do it in larger chunks, where I auto-accept changes/tool uses, but even in that, I only allow it to do one small task as a time, something that takes me minutes to review.
by throw-qqqqq | 2025-09-01 14:33:00+00:00
> My conviction is the complexity of chess is not as high as we think, and that there exist a neural network of less than 10B float32 weights which can encode perfect play

Given the number of possible games (numbers above 10^80) you would need EXTREME sparsity to encode it in less than 10B / 10^10 params. Sounds information theoretically impossible to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Leela Chess Zero has hundreds of millions to few billion parameters AFAIK.

The argument about the game being finite and thus solvable is misguided IMO.

AES encryption is also finite, and you can enumerate all possible combinations, but not before the end of time..
by jokoon | 2025-09-01 14:33:42+00:00
I guess hardware vendors are allowed to make USBC devices that goes outside the USBC specs? Although this seems to be within the USBC spec?

Would be interesting if future hardware standards would not allow to be licensed as "within standard" if they break a few rules.

I could see some hardware vendors using their own implementation of a standard just to fool customers into believing it supports a standard while there are exceptions.

Isn't that what happened to bluetooth?

I am not an apple user, but isn't apple also abusing hardware standards to encourage clients to buy its products?
by amiga386 | 2025-09-01 14:35:11+00:00
It's clearer than you think. Did Dua Lipa hear an obscure Florida reggae band's tune that isn't available on any major platform to listen to any more? It took some time, but eventually the court agreed she'd never heard the song she supposedly copied:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitating_%28song%29
Show HN: We built an open-source alternative to expensive pair programming apps
by konsalexee | 2025-09-01 14:36:11+00:00
My friend and I grew frustrated with the high cost of existing pair programming tools, and of course of grainy screens when we used Huddle or similar tools.

We believe core developer collaboration shouldn't be locked behind an expensive subscription.

So for the past year we spent our nights and weekend building Hopp, an open-source alternative.

We would love your feedback and we are here to answer any and all questions.
by handoflixue | 2025-09-01 14:36:11+00:00
Would you agree with the claim that emacs/vim is an inadequate tool, since it has such a high learning curve?

Prior to LLMs, my impression was "high learning curve, high results" was a pretty popular sweet-spot with a large portion of the tech crowd. It seems weird how much LLMs seem to be an exception to this.
by somenameforme | 2025-09-01 14:37:23+00:00
> "If there is a mate in 1, but lots of possible moves, then complexity of the position is also very low for a player with any familiarity with the game"

This is one reason I think the concept of complexity will probably never be formalized. Because even when a position is mate in 1, the complexity varies wildly. For instance here [1] is a game between Carlsen and Nakamura where Carlsen, perhaps the strongest player of all time, failed to see a mate in 1, and for that matter Nakamura, not exactly a weaker player himself, help-mated himself by playing one of the only moves that allowed Carlsen a mate in 1! And both players still had tons of time on their clock.

But to understand how they both missed it you need to go back in the position and see that both saw black's queen was defending against the mate, and Nakamura's blunder interfered with that protection in a rather unusual way. So you can't even assess it on a positional basis, since it's dependent upon what was played before, let alone all of the poorly defined terms I'm using like 'rather unusual.'

[1] - https://www.chess.com/events/2024-titled-tuesday-blitz-may-7...
by raxxorraxor | 2025-09-01 14:37:54+00:00
Also the latest economic buzz to declare dept as something positive and not at all just a often blind defense for aching economic systems facing some pressures and problems, it would still not align too well with this anology.

And before someone tries to refute the "debt is mostly bad for the debt holder"-statement by some coked up economist in his first semester, I know how money is created today. I also know about the opportunity new debt can open. Doesn't make debt something positive, the field really lacks structured thought... I forgive you if you are the lawyer of Greece, but ffs... Some concepts are simple and fundamental.

I guess the author tried to connect debt and technical debt and there are certain similarities. In both cases work has to be done without direct compensation aside from working of the debt. Perhaps that is why it is called debt.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-09-01 14:38:16+00:00
I’m seeing this second hand at the Fortune 500 my spouse works for.

They are an enterprise SaaS company in SV. Where they have machine learning software that they have been selling for more than a decade, it’s all been rebranded as AI. That’s fair enough from a sales perspective, I guess. What’s odd is that their C-suite and SVPs are pressuring everyone to use LLMs everywhere, for pretty much everything, and none of them seem to understand why it’s only that level of employee that’s seeing any benefit or expressing any interest. My spouse has reported that the running joke across the company is that the executives have jobs that can be done by LLMs, but no one else does. The ICs could not be less interested, and even if they were, legal promulgated a policy against actually putting anything confidential into any LLM other than Copilot in Azure, which the whole workforce reportedly only really uses for summarizing the increasing number of meetings that are perceived as a waste of IC time. A lot of those meetings are “let’s use AI”.

It’s absolutely insane.
by cxr | 2025-09-01 14:38:31+00:00
Remarkable sells hardware reading devices. Web browsers, just like offline PDF and EPUB viewers, are a form of reader software.

There really isn't any mismatch here; why does it seem odd for someone to (want to) be able to address and access their desired reading material—like texts produced by Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks, or dictionary entries like the author mentions—through the wildly successful system for identifying resources with URLs?
by thomasmg | 2025-09-01 14:38:32+00:00
Which compile options do you recommend for best performance, but such that it is still memory-save? (I assume you use memory-save, right?) Currently I use "nim c --opt:speed". Compared to other languages (Go, Rust mostly) the runtime performance (for my use cases) is a bit slower, for some of the cases. Hm, it might be that you disable memory safety, if you compare against C++...
by furyofantares | 2025-09-01 14:38:38+00:00
I'm just shy of 30 years experience. I think I've spent more time learning how to use these tools than any other technology I've learned, and I still don't know the best way to use them.

They certainly weren't a time-saver right away but they became one after some time giving them a real shot. I tested their + my limits on small projects, working out how to get them to do the whole project, figuring out when they stop working and why, figuring out which technology they work best with, figuring out the right size problems to give them, figuring out how to recognize if I'm asking them something they can't do well a ask something different instead, guide them into creating code that they can't actually continue to be successful with.

I started last December in Cursor's agentic mode and have been in Claude Code ever since probably March or April. It's definitely been a huge boost all year for side projects - but only in the last couple months have I been having success in a large codebase.

Even with all this experience I don't know that I would really be able to get much value out of the chat interface for them. They need to be proposing changes I can just hit accept or reject on (this is how both Claude Code and Cursor work btw - you don't have to allow it to write to any file you don't want or execute any command you don't want).
by spacebanana7 | 2025-09-01 14:39:10+00:00
Gas complements renewables really well because gas can readily be tapped “on-demand” whilst renewables can only be tapped “on supply”.

It’s relatively easy to turn off gas when renewables are supplying energy to the grid at near zero cost marginal cost. But also easy to turn on gas when the renewables aren’t supplying energy, or when demand spikes in a manner uncorrelated to renewable generation.

Batteries are a more elegant solution long term, of course.
by whstl | 2025-09-01 14:39:44+00:00
Agree.

These comments sound super absurd to me, because RDS is difficult as hell to setup, unless you do it very frequently or already have it in IoC format, since one needs setting up a VPC, subnets, security groups, internet gateway, etc.

It's not like creating a DynamoDB, Lambda or S3 where a non-technical person can learn it in a few hours.

Sure, one might find some random Terraform file online to do this or vibe-code some CloudFormation, but that's not really a fair comparison.
by DanielHB | 2025-09-01 14:40:50+00:00
I have had a bad time with PMs and UX designers not actually understanding how the product works _right now_. How can you ask for changes if you don't understand how it works currently?

Like I am saying how the current behavior of the app downright needs a big flowchart to explain and I get asked: "Add X, but keep it working for all existing users" when that means the whole freaking flowcharts needs to be redrawn from scratch. When I suggest to remove some things to make things simpler (because the users don't understand it either) I get denied because it would be too much hassle to communicate the changes.
by tastyface | 2025-09-01 14:41:26+00:00
Israel has successfully conflated “being Jewish” with “embracing Israeli politics.” What a PR coup! I wonder, though, what they expect to happen when they lose their last remaining allies, as the world gapes in horror at the situation in Gaza. After all, most people have an intuitive sense that blasting a terrorist through their hostages is a morally indefensible action, unless you don’t really see the hostages as people.
by Deuter8 | 2025-09-01 14:41:31+00:00
Good.

True, I've done nothing, but that's still a lot less damage than you have done. I only wish you had been as lazy.

We will never forget the censorship and gas-lighting that you orchestrated. You did stop good people from making positive change in the world. I won't appeal to your conscience - I don't believe it's there - so I'll settle for hoping that you are hounded rather than haunted for the rest of your life. You deserve that much and more.
by netbioserror | 2025-09-01 14:42:57+00:00
I just use -d:release, along with a bunch of other options related to static compilation with musl-libc. I've tried -d:danger before and the reliability of my calculations went completely out the window. I think Datamancer and Arraymancer are dependent upon some of those checks and guarantees. The --opt flag didn't make enough of a difference in my case.
by pietjepuk88 | 2025-09-01 14:42:59+00:00
> The 300MW Thurrock Storage project, developed by Statera Energy, is now energised and delivering electricity flexibly to the network across London and the south east.

> With a total capacity of 600MWh, Thurrock Storage is capable of powering up to 680,000 homes, and can help to balance supply and demand by soaking up surplus clean electricity and discharging it instantaneously when the grid needs it.

Unless they updated the original post, that all sounds correct to me. It's a 2-hour battery, rather common in the industry.

EDIT: Ah, you mean the https://stateraenergy.co.uk/news/thurrock-energisation is wrong, with the fantastically outrageous statement of "delivering its full output of up to 600MWh within seconds."
by jibal | 2025-09-01 14:43:16+00:00
> I think, you're right that chess probably quite interesting in terms of abstract maths

They said it's not interesting.

> like surely there are ways to represent the pawns (pawn structures?) as well as the pieces (knights, bishops, etc.) in terms of some supersymmetry.

No, absolutely not. The confusion between pawns and pawn structures highlights how completely off base this is. The attack vectors of the various pieces are easily represented, but there's no generalization to "knight structures" or "bishop structures", and "supersymmetry" is completely irrelevant to chess.

> If they were to get to that point, we could say that chess would be solved...

No, solving a game has a specific meaning and that's not it.
by sam_goody | 2025-09-01 14:43:36+00:00
In the news, everything is polarized and negative.

On the streets, in my anecdotal experience of 1, everyone is happy, friendly, and things are good. There is disagreement but tolerance about politics, and in most cases a assumption of "not bad" faith.

My high school principal once told me - you cannot be happy, nor by extension do anything productive, within 1 hour of reading the news.

I don't own a smartphone, and I suspect that has to do with my narrow experience. But, I really wonder how much the various media outlets are negatively shaping reality.
by BarryMilo | 2025-09-01 14:43:38+00:00
The "vibe coding" in the title is almost invisible for me on mobile (Firefox). I immediately thought "yeah, that tracks". I'm not saying this is fair but I think the first order of business for any such initiative should be to differentiate "vibe coding" and "bad coding", as they are pretty inextricably linked in my mind (and I dare say most devs' minds).
by frabcus | 2025-09-01 14:44:03+00:00
I use that tariff, with no home battery or home solar or electric car. Saves about 1/3rd off my electricity bill. My only behaviour change has been to not run the washing machine 4pm-8pm.

It's great! I assume I'll get hit by a price spike at some point, hasn't happened for a couple of years so far.

Average unit cost for me yesterday was 4.35p/kWh.
by angled | 2025-09-01 14:44:13+00:00
I’ve arrived at something similar:

* brainstorm all the ideas, get Claude to write docs + code for all them, and then throw away the code

* ask it to develop architecture and design principles based on the contents of those docs

* get it to write a concise config spec doc that incorporates all the features, respects the architecture and design as appropriate

* iterate over that for a while until I get it into a state I like

* ask it to write an implementation plan for the config spec

* babysit it as I ask it to implement phase by phase of the implementation plan while adhering to the config spec

It’s a bit slower to than what I’d hoped originally, but it’s a lot better in terms of end result and gives me more opportunity to verify tests, tweak implementation, briefly segue or explore enhancements, etc.
by cvoss | 2025-09-01 14:44:15+00:00
It doesn't it matter for this article whether there exist possible executions other than the one the author inquires about.

The point of weak memory models is to formally define the set of all possible legal executions of a concurrent program. This gets very complicated in a hurry because of the need to accommodate 1) hardware properties such as cache coherence and 2) desired compiler optimization opportunities that will want to reason over what's possible / what's guaranteed.

In this case, there was a conflict between a behavior of Power processors and an older C++ standard that meant that a correct compiler would have to introduce extra synchronization to prevent the forbidden behavior, thus impacting performance. The solution was to weaken the memory model of the standard in a very small way.

The article walks us through how exactly the newer standard permits the funny unintuitive execution of the example program.

The exercise is academic, sure. A lot of hard academic research has gone into this field to get it right. But it has to be that precise because the problems it solves are that subtle.
by tbrake | 2025-09-01 14:44:19+00:00
Kinda but kinda not.

I'd agree that 75% you speak of is generally hostile to the mere concept of PMs, but that's usually from a misapplication of PMs as proxy-bosses for absentee product owners/directors who don't want to talk to nerds - flow interruptions, beancounting perceived as useless, pointless ceremonies, even more pointless(er) meetings etc, and the further defiling of the definition of "agile".

But a deep conceptual product and roadmap understanding that helps one steer Claude Code is invaluable for both devs and PMs, and I don't think most of that 75% would begrudge that quality in a PM
by netbioserror | 2025-09-01 14:45:48+00:00
I try to keep it simple, using Make to build, and so have ran into issues with Nimble. The upcoming Atlas is supposed to fix these issues, but I don't know enough about it yet. But I remember running into conflicting name resolution with Nimble when multiple versions of a package were installed; I believe it was trying to choose betweeen a Nim 1.x package version and a Nim 2.x, which are kept in separate Nimble folders (pkgs and pkgs2).

I'm probably going to sit down and give Atlas a try soon, and migrate my dependencies.
by christina97 | 2025-09-01 14:46:03+00:00
My apartment, smack bang in the middle of Manhattan, has a single coax cable opened by Spectrum, and is the only option for me to get reliable internet connection. I have no choice but to (1) sign whatever their ToS are, (2) pay whatever they want to charge, and (3) have them do what they want with my metadata. I’ve decided it’s not the hill I want to die on, but no, I don’t have many ISPs to choose from.
by flohofwoe | 2025-09-01 14:46:04+00:00
Have there been any successful attempts yet of translating 'idiomatic' C++ to 'idiomatic' Rust for a large codebase that has been developed over 30 years? What does the output look like? Does the code look maintainable (because mechanical solutions to translate from other languages into Rust exist, the result is just not what a human would write or ever want to work on). Are the prompts to guide the LLM shorter than the actual code base to be translated? Etc etc... eg the idea to use LLMs for migration is quite 'obvious', but the devil must be in the details, otherwise everybody would be doing it by now.
by wiz21c | 2025-09-01 14:46:18+00:00
you are obviously not past 50 years old. At that age, eventhough I "train" (as you imply it) a lot (I code about 50 hours a week, 40 at work, the rest for my own projects; not of them easy, my job is writing numerical code for simulation and my pet project is writinga very accurate emulator (which implies physics modelling, tons of research, etc)). I can definitely feel I'm not as productive as before (before I could sustain 60 hours a week) eventhough I do feel I'm using my brain to the maximum...

So yeah, past a certain age, you'll be happy to reduce your mental load. No question about it. And I feel quite relieved when Claud writes this classic algorith I have understood long ago and don't want to re-activate in my brain. And I feel quite disappointed when Claude misses the point and I have to code review it...
by wahnfrieden | 2025-09-01 14:46:23+00:00
It is also the only good way to use LLMs to manage projects/workspaces

You can use it for non-Apple platforms btw. Swift on Linux, Android, Windows, WASM. Projects like https://swiftcrossui.dev (with major contribution from Miguel de Icaza recently) and https://skip.tools for instance make this all the more productive
by Bender | 2025-09-01 14:46:30+00:00
Anonymous age verification already exists but is not legally implemented or required.

RTA headers [1] tell the client the URL may contain adult content or user generated content which can be adult in nature and then the client can detect the header and prompt for a local password if parental controls are enabled. A simple law to require client applications to look for the header and triggering parental controls would handle this in an anonymous manor. Not perfect, nothing is, but would address much more than 70% of use cases for actual small children. Small children would be restricted to whatever browsing agents are installed as they do not have administrative permissions. If this was done in error the parent can reset the device.

Teens will bypass any method anyone can think of as current centralized methods do not even apply to most of their current methods of downloading and sharing porn.

[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single
by KallDrexx | 2025-09-01 14:46:37+00:00
I wonder by your last comment if this is just is talking past each other.

I try very hard to keep my PRs very focused on one complete unit of work at a time. So when the squash happens that single commit represents one type of change being made to the system.

So when going through history to pinpoint the cause of the big, I can still get what logical change and unit of work caused the change. I don't see the intermediary commits of that unit of work, but I have not personally gotten value out of that level of granularity (especially on team projects where each person's commit practices are different).

If I start working on one PR that starts to contain a refactor or change imthat makes sense to isolate, I'll make that it's own pr that will be squashed.
by ziml77 | 2025-09-01 14:46:48+00:00
Interestingly, there don't seem to be limitations the other way around. I saw a video of someone running a USB-C extension cable into the dock and using that to hook up a Steam Deck to it. It seemed to be fully capable and interestingly even exposed VRR, something that the Switch 2 itself gives you no option for when docked.