MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sph | 2025-10-08 04:53:30+00:00
> I do wish there was a community that encouraged thoughtful positivity over negativity

Yeah, it's called the real world. We have millions if not billions of years of experience in dealing with in-person differences, tentative contacts with members of neighbouring tribes and smoothing out conflicts. One will find the risk of getting smacked over the face for being an absolute idiot to be a very effective motivator to remain on our best behaviour with strangers.

On the internet these days, you can only choose between an echo chamber, or all-out culture war.
by angry_octet | 2025-10-08 04:53:49+00:00
Lady Ada is not impressed:

https://blog.adafruit.com/2025/10/07/qualcomms-latest-ai-pla...

One of their key points is that the AI component is completely tied to the Qualcomm stack, the opposite of Open. Essentially the Arduino brand will live on as a marketing layer over Qualcomm hardware, which you will still need an NDA and significant volume to gain access to.
by nurettin | 2025-10-08 04:54:32+00:00
Brute force:

for i in 1..99999999: if i == 66666654: print(i) break

GA:

for g in 1..100: pop, best = crossover(tournament(pop, heuristic_fn)) print(best.value) if best.fitness < 0.01: break

GA uses a heuristic to converge. If that is brute force, so is binary search.
by mdasen | 2025-10-08 04:55:19+00:00
In some ways, it's more like Disney getting out of silent movies or Microsoft stopping shipping software on floppy disks - or cell phone makers giving up on dumb phones or Apple discontinuing iPods.

The market for DVRs has shifted a lot and while TiVo's system was wonderful, it's hard to get people to pay you a monthly fee for a service that's included for free with your cable package. Companies are often offering networked DVR service with unlimited storage - they record it in their data center and you just stream it later.

TiVo really needed to pivot and simply didn't. TiVo should have become another Roku, but they were probably worried about cannibalizing their DVR revenue. They had the operating system and hardware to beat Roku to the market - or even become the primary alternative to Roku for years after Roku had launched. Roku launched in 2008 and TiVo could have followed. FireTV and AndroidTV launched in 2014 so there was a huge window in there for TiVo (and Chromecast was 2013 so that doesn't change things much).

TiVo was focused on getting individuals to pay them $X per month for service. Roku figured out that it would be a lot easier to get all the streaming companies to give them a cut rather than getting it from the end users as well as being a platform to serve ads to end users.

If TiVo had looked at Roku and said "we can do that even better," they would have had a very different future. TiVo launched a Roku competitor in 2020 based on AndroidTV, but that was way too little and way too late. Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, TiVo had an absolutely amazing OS. They needed to release a Roku competitor stripped of the DVR bit for the cord-cutting streamers. They needed to pivot their business model toward the service-revenue-cut and ad-revenue model that Roku went after. They needed to see that cable and satellite was a dead-end as those companies would try to cut them out of the loop with their internal DVR products (and even if TiVo were better, most customers wouldn't want to pay extra for it).

TiVo should have pivoted 15 years ago and become one of a couple dominant streaming box players. Instead, Amazon and Google followed Roku into the market even though TiVo had 6 years to enter that market and had a polished OS and great reputation at the time. TiVo feels a bit like Nokia. Nokia ignored smartphones long enough that they kinda faded away - and then their effort was too little, too late.
by energy123 | 2025-10-08 04:55:25+00:00
It's lagging behind because energy developers operate on the economic margin. At the margin, solar is more profitable, up until the point that the grid is saturated with solar, then it flips. But only a small proportion of geographical locations are saturated, hence the marginal investment is still primarily in solar. This is not concerning, it is the market working as it should. The demand for storage will come and then the supply will follow only after the demand shows up.
by scuff3d | 2025-10-08 04:55:27+00:00
There's a lot of annoying stuff it can do fairly well without many guardrails. It's a minor productivity boost but it's nice not to have to do.

Doc comments for example. Today I had it generate doc comments for a class I wrote. I had to go and fix every single one of them because it did some dumb shit, but it out all the scaffolding in place and got the basics there so it was a lot quicker.

I also used it to generate json schemas from Python a couple of Python classes the other day. Highly structured inputs, highly structured output, so there wasn't much for it to fuck up. Took care of the annoying busy work I didn't want to do (not that schemas are busy work, but this particular case was).

Still haven't seen a use case that justifies the massive cost, or all the blatant theft and copy right infringement, or the damage to the environment...
by SpicyUme | 2025-10-08 04:56:27+00:00
There's a nearly 450 km photo of the Ecrins from the Pyrenees!

https://beyondrange.wordpress.com/2016/08/03/pic-de-finestre...

That's a cool thing to track, I've been surprised by the places I've seen the Seattle skyline reflected on the water near sundown. No crazy distances, but there's a small time period where it flashes into view.
by janalsncm | 2025-10-08 04:56:39+00:00
Does the EMH state that prices will reflect on the price of a stock instantly? If not, I don’t think there’s a paradox. EMH would just mean it will eventually converge? I guess that makes it pretty toothless in practice then.

I feel like the stock market is pretty divorced from fundamentals at this point i.e. speculation makes it more like a Keynesian beauty contest (picking stocks you think other people will think are valuable).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
by ruszki | 2025-10-08 04:57:02+00:00
I’ve started to read that exact Wikipedia page just two days ago, and its second paragraph contradicts you and itself. It was written by somebody who consumes a lot of Chinese propaganda. The first sentence tells, that it was never that bad as written in Western media, then the rest of the paragraph tells that the Chinese government didn’t like that it was that bad. The cited sources are the exact same thing: Western media lied about that it’s that bad, but the Chinese government was right when it said that it had been really that bad.

It’s completely orthogonal that the government didn’t want to be that bad, that they changed it, or that they ditched the plans to implement nationwide in its (according to the government) bad form at the time.

I cannot understand how Chinese news consumers cannot see this. The doublespeak is so obvious, that I cannot think of anything else, that it’s just propaganda.
by somenameforme | 2025-10-08 04:57:49+00:00
It's brand advertising itself, precisely to give the impression of 'being funded by listeners like you.' NPR has navigated trust far better than average for the media. A quick search shows some 54% trust in them, contrasted against 28% for the media at large.

When media runs non-stop pharmaceutical ads you obviously question their motivation when reporting on pharmaceutical adjacent topics, which are almost invariably neutral to positive. Yet when NPR runs non-stop Walmart articles [1], often in a neutral to positive fashion, most are unaware that they've received millions of dollars from the Waltons.

And FWIW those millions the Waltons have given aren't that much relative to their overall funding, but if you saw an equivalent amount of annual advertising from the Waltons on NPR, you'd certainly be looking at those articles from a different perspective than somebody who's unaware of said funding.

[1] - https://www.npr.org/search/?query=walmart&page=1
by insane_dreamer | 2025-10-08 04:58:57+00:00
> we don't know that yet

this is always the answer that the hopeful give: "previous revolutions of this kind, i.e., the Industrial Revolution, created a host of new professions we didn't even know existed, so this one will as well." Except that it was obvious quite early on what the professions created by those revolutions were. Factories were springing up immediately and employing those who had been working in the fields. The pace of change was much slower too; it took about 150 years in the US for the transformation from an agrarian society to an industrial one to happen. That provides time for society to adjust.

I have yet to see anyone demonstrate even an idea of new professions -- that may employ millions of people -- that are likely to emerge. So far, the "hope" is a pipe dream.
by simonw | 2025-10-08 05:03:05+00:00
I'm really sorry to hear this, because part of my goal here is to help push back against the idea that "programming skills are useless now, anyone can get an LLM to write code for them".

I think existing software development skills get a whole lot more valuable with the addition of coding agents. You can take everything you've learned up to this point and accelerate the impact you can have with this new family of tools.

I said a version of this in the post:

> AI tools amplify existing expertise. The more skills and experience you have as a software engineer the faster and better the results you can get from working with LLMs and coding agents.

A brand new vibe coder may be able to get a cool UI out of ChatGPT, but they're not going to be able to rig up a set of automated tests with continuous integration and continuous deployment to a Kubernetes cluster somewhere. They're also not going to be able to direct three different agents at once in different areas of a large project that they've designed the architecture for.
by lelanthran | 2025-10-08 05:03:56+00:00
> Each of the main providers could easily use 10x the compute tomorrow (albeit arguably inefficiently) by using more thinking for certain tasks.

That's true for everyone with regard to any resource.

The question is whether the 10x increase in resources results in 10x or more increase in profit.

If it doesn't then it doesn't make sense to pay for the extra resources. For AI right now, the constraint is profit per resource unit, not number or resource units.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-10-08 05:04:10+00:00
Regards " stability issues with Explorer", I doubt it is Explorer itself.

2 thoughts:

1. Possibly something hooked into Explorer. Not necessarily malicious but could be like an acrobat extension or image editor extension or similar that helps to make thumbnails/previews. Or a context menu hook in.

Use Sysinternals Autoruns [0] to have a look. It is a free diagnostics tool from MS that shows everything that loads on startup. It looks at Start menu Startup folder, registry run and runonce keys and a bunch more places where things are hooked in. No restarts or anything required simply to look. It will show plugins/addons to Explorer too. Easy disable/re-enable process allows for somewhat easy troubleshooting. You'll have to restart Explorer after a "disable" step to see the results though.

Be sure to use the "hide microsoft entries" option if you want to narrow it down some.

2. Filesystem filters - things like antivirus "scan on read". If a "scan on read" goes to an antivirus that is not playing ball it will halt the "file open" request for example.

The command "fltmc" will list filesystem filter drivers. But making sense of which one belongs to what software is a further exercise. Which is why I suggest this investigative path as number 2...

[0]:https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/aut...
by Loic | 2025-10-08 05:04:50+00:00
Do not worry, I am mentoring a young engineer in my team. It is painfully hard to get him to improve his code, because it works. It is badly structured, lot of small "impedance mismatches", lot of small security issues, all that in 3 Python files.

I have a team of 10 engineers, the quality of the code they produce together with the LLM of the day correlates even more with the experience.

My impression over the past 6 months - before we had no "official" access to LLM, is that they increase the gap between junior and experienced developers.

Note that this is my limited impression from a team of 10 engineers. This matches with Simon's feeling in a good way for you!
by apsurd | 2025-10-08 05:07:45+00:00
The "manage a fleet of massively parallelized agents" gets me uneasy too. It sounds uber powerful on its face. And where all the nerd interest lies.

It sounds stressful, like the ultimate manager job. Not what I signed up for.

But I also still hold onto this idea that shipping tons of iterations of "stuff" was never really the problem. Early in my dev experience I wanted to code everything all day every day. And I did and that's how I learned. And now in my second decade I switched to "why code anything?". In a business sense I mean, coding the thing is almost never the missing piece.

I joke in meetings that the answer is always "yes" whenever cross-functional teams ask "can we do this?". "How hard would x be?". For tech teams the answer _is_ always YES! I get that out of the way because that's never the right question to ask.
by tdeck | 2025-10-08 05:08:42+00:00
> Lawful interception requires things like paperwork, warrants, probably cause, and some kind of reason why you need to tap cellular comms in the first place.

In case folks hadn't been paying attention, probable cause isn't even worth their trouble when arresting someone these days.

> “DHS law enforcement uses ‘reasonable suspicion’ to make arrests,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to The Associated Press

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-admin-race-baiting-lawsuit-wo...
by baobun | 2025-10-08 05:09:35+00:00
Why not follow up on the feedback you received last time you submitted this before submitting again?

It's not really honest to advertise as "zero-server architure" when you have google ICE/STUN servers hardcoded.

https://github.com/SecureBitChat/securebit-chat/blob/60db79d...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45400318

Also your code doesn't build because of missing sources for session/PayPerSessionManager.js (???)

https://github.com/SecureBitChat/securebit-chat/blob/75fa1cd...
by cowboylowrez | 2025-10-08 05:11:25+00:00
oooh look who's punching down now haha yes sir, I have an extremely unfortunate life, I'm the sort of individual who does not have good luck. I try not to bring it up because its simply not on topic for hn, me circling the drain is really nobody's business but mine and the drain, oh yeah, yours too I guess. questions?
by nurettin | 2025-10-08 05:12:07+00:00
For me, claude churns like 10-15 python scripts a day. Some of these could be called utilities. It helps with debugging program outputs, quick statistical calculations, stuff I would use excel for. Yesterday it noticed a discrepancy that lead to us finding a bug.

So yes there is a ton but why bother publishing and maintaining them now that anyone can produce them? Your project is not special or worthwhile anymore.
by tabbott | 2025-10-08 05:13:35+00:00
I predict that people will end up using the term "vibe engineering" to refer to development processes that involve asking an LLM to build their entire app: UI design, database schema, architecture, devops, QA, debugging, etc, without any of the careful effort to understand and be able to proudly own the resulting code that Simon is imagining.

And I think that is actually the most natural meaning for "vibe engineering", actually: Parallel to "vibe coding" where you serially prompt the AI to write the code for you, "vibe engineering" should be serially prompting the AI to do the entire engineering process for you.

I also predict that a precisely defined term for what Simon is describing will inevitably end up being primarily used by people who are actually doing "vibe engineering". Being disciplined and careful is hard.

People and organizations love to claim/pretend they're doing expensive, mostly invisible work like "building secure software". Given nearly every organization claims they use security best practices no matter what their actual practices, I imagine it will be that way with "actually reading and verifying what the LLM generated for me".

Certainly I've been disappointed how often someone presents something they've "written" in recent months that turns out, on inspection, to be AI slop that the "author" hasn't even read every sentence of carefully.
by mlsu | 2025-10-08 05:14:12+00:00
the huge demand exists right now because the cost of a token is near zero. and companies have figured out one weird hack to gaining value in the stock market, which is to brag about how many tokens are being crammed into all manner of places that they may or may not belong.

customer value must eventually flow out of those datacenters in the opposite direction to the the energy and capex that are flowing in

do people actually want all this AI? I see studio ghibli portraits, huge amounts of internet spam, workslop... where is the value?
by buu700 | 2025-10-08 05:16:22+00:00
I love programming, but it turns out I love building useful stuff even more than I love programming. Agentic coding helped me fall in love with development all over again. If a team of junior engineers suddenly showed up at my door and offered to perform any tasks I was willing to assign to them for the rest of my life, I'd love that too.

Agentic coding is just doing for development what cloud computing did for systems administration. Sure, I could spend all day building and configuring Linux boxes to deploy backend infrastructure on if the time and budget existed for me to do that, and I'd have fun doing it, but what's more fun for me is actually launching a product.
by godelski | 2025-10-08 05:16:38+00:00
Autocrats also had thousands of years and generations to give their citizens freedom of expression, the freedom to innovate, to eat, have access to clean drinking water, to solve child mortality, to extend life expectancy for those who lived through childhood to be past 60, to put a man on the moon. Yet the progress of civilization was far slower before democracy.

Similar to what you suggest, many say history is written by the victors. But instead history is written by those who can write and survive. There's not much written from the perspective of a commoner for most of history. But where those writings survive, the situations do not appear pleasant.
by mkhalil | 2025-10-08 05:17:43+00:00
I always felt TiVo really did a great job at identifying how important good UX and UI are for consumer products. Partially, the monopolies/cable companies knew/know they were able to get away with poor UI since consumers didn't really have a choice when it came to cable providers/cable boxes so it wasn't hard to beat them, but TiVo did actually do a good job.

I felt like they had consumer awareness at one point. Maybe if they went with there own premium streaming service, as oppose to only trying ad-based streaming services (like Pluto) OR continuing to try to make money charging people monthly for a subscription to use a device they first have to purchase.**

Instead they kept the old business model and went to more of a business-to-business service oriented offerings. Selling metadata, APIs, TV Guides, Car infotainment, all oddities IMO as most IPTV providers like to use turn key solutions.

I actually use the Tivo Stream 4K as my smart device. Works great, gives me 4K, can download Android TV apps, and is cheap $35.

Not a fan of ad-based TV (which is the Tivo+ thing, like Pluto, etc...), but I use it mostly for YouTube, Plex, etc.

--

*: My Plex server uses my HDHomerun for live tv; TiVo could have been both if it was more open. A TiVo competitor to Plex's Pass + Live TV service could of been there subscription revenue, and a TiVo competitor to HDHomeRun's devices could of replaced their DVR revenue. They could take the Tivo Edge, open it way up (as the HDHomeRun takes cable and give you actual m3u8's; this lets you decide where you view or record TV, and makes the device actually useful for commercial deployments as well (offices, restaurants, dorms, hotels, etc...). Pretty much: add features similar to Plex (i.e. combining my OTA/Cable recordings with my local media) + Plex's Live TV (Tivo already has the richest data and a sleeker guide) and combine the Tivo Edge CableCard and OTA in one device. This would appeal to many users, bring the hardware price down as it's one model, and provide them with both revenue streams like they are used to.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-08 05:17:49+00:00
If you're arguing that the market dynamics are driven by the existence of a cap on consumption, in contrast to other goods, your argument must fail if the cap isn't actually restricting anyone.

There is an infinitely high cap on the consumption of every good. That can't distinguish anything from anything else.

So...

> Would a figure of 60 books per year change the argument? 100? 200?

Yes, that's the difference between the argument being theoretically able to work on its own terms, or not.
by mindslight | 2025-10-08 05:18:30+00:00
That makes two of us!

When I got my first Android phone in 2010 or whatever, I skipped setting up a phone book because I wanted a secure solution for syncing contacts instead of uploading plaintext names to Google (how quaint of a threat model). I still haven't gotten around to it. The biggest inconvenience is when I want to text/call someone I haven't spoken two in a year or two, don't know their exact number, and I've got to scroll way down the list until I see it.

Then there are the funny coincidences like my usual Fedex Freight guy's phone number is one digit off from a friend's. That one really threw me the first time.
by sph | 2025-10-08 05:18:30+00:00
Keep your head up, the gravy train is not gonna run forever, and they will need serious engineers to untangle the piles of bullshit creates in these past few years.

But also yes, look into moving into a different field. Professional software engineering is gonna be infected with AI bullshit for a long while. Move into a field where hand-crafted code can make a difference, but not where you're paid for the line committed or have to compete with "vibe coding" KPIs.
by toast0 | 2025-10-08 05:19:10+00:00
> FaceTime is blocked because Apple has not figured out how to prevent an incoming FaceTime call from silently spying on you, which has already happened a couple times.

There's also the codec problem. Apple doesn't trust itself to write secure codecs for message attachments, realtime codecs are at least as suspect. Codecs are tricky, and many vendors mess them up, so I'm not picking on Apple.
by Mengkudulangsat | 2025-10-08 05:19:15+00:00
"The later versions of M365 copilot (or whatever it is called today) are wildly better than the original ones."

I find AI agents work very poorly within the Microsoft ecosystem. They can generate great HTML documents (because it's an open source format maybe?) but for word documents, the formatting is so poor I'd had to turn it off and just do things manually.
by hvb2 | 2025-10-08 05:19:27+00:00
Doesn't

> And FWIW those millions the Waltons have given aren't that much relative to their overall funding

Contradict

> precisely to give the impression of 'being funded by listeners like you.'

Here you have one of the biggest companies in the country and one of the richest families and while they do donate they are still only a sliver?

Isn't that what we would want, or are there better models you can suggest?