MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mwigdahl | 2025-10-14 18:37:00+00:00
Thank you for the thoughtful response. I really appreciate the willingness to discuss what you've seen in your experience. I think your observations are pretty much exactly correct in terms of where agents do best. I'd qualify in just a couple areas:

1. In my experience, Claude Code (I've used several other models and tools, but CC performs the best for me so that's my go-to) can do well with APIs and services that are proprietary as long as there's some sort of documentation for them it can get to (internal, Swagger, etc.), and you ensure that the model has that documentation prominently in context.

2. CC can also do well with brownfield development, but the scope _has_ to be constrained, either to a small standalone program or a defined slice of a larger application where you can draw real boundaries.

The best illustration I've seen of this is in a project that is going through final testing prior to release. The original "application" (I use the term loosely) was a C# DLL used to generate data-driven prescription monitoring program reporting.

It's not ultra-complicated but there's a two step process where you retrieve the report configuration data, then use that data to drive retrieval and assembly of the data elements needed for the final report. Formatting can differ based on state, on data available (reports with no data need special formatting), and on whether you're outputting in the context of transmission or for user review.

The original DLL was written in a very simplistic way, with no testing and no way to exercise the program without invoking it from its link points embedded in our main application. Fixing bugs and testing those fixes were both very painful as for production release we had to test all 50 states on a range of different data conditions, and do so by automating the parent application.

I used Claude Code to refactor this module, add DI and testing, and add a CLI that could easily exercise the logic in all different supported configurations. It took probably $50 worth of tokens (this was before I had a Max account, so it was full price) over the course of a few hours, most of which time I was in other meetings.

The final result did exhibit some classic LLM problems -- some of the tests were overspecific, it restructured without always fully cleaning up the existing functions, and it messed up a couple of paths through the business logic that I needed to debug and fix. But it easily saved me a couple days of wrestling with it myself, as I'm not super strong with C#. Our development teams are fully committed, and if I hadn't used CC for this it wouldn't have gotten done at all. Being able to run this on the side and get a 90% result I could then take to the finish line has real value for us, as the improved testing alone will see an immediate payback with future releases.

This isn't a huge application by any means, but it it's one example of where I've seen real value that is hitting production, and seems representative of a decently large category of line-of-business modules. I don't think there's any reason this wouldn't replicate on similarly-scoped products.
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-14 18:37:00+00:00
Yeah I thought you could issue an exclusive certificate that revokes all others, guess I am wrong.

> In any case if someone can become the thing you're trying to validate

That's kind of the thing that certificate validation is supposed to solve, an attacker posing as you. That's why the article says it's useless in theory. In practice MITM at validation is harder than in use, but it does have issues. That's why Let's Encrypt wasn't the default model.
by tekbruh9000 | 2025-10-14 18:37:04+00:00
Robot AI isn't going anywhere.

These bubble headlines almost always mean LLM services.

They almost always mean US VC backed SaaS.

100% illusory utility propped up by financial layering schemes.

Geometric functions will eventually be baked into energy models and ship with the machine. All users will be able to generate geometric output and customize for intention without software developers structuring lexical objects.
by Nevermark | 2025-10-14 18:37:22+00:00
> If we instead focused on continually steering toward desired, valuable functionality (things people genuinely want or will pay for), more software projects would appear like successes.

Yes! All overbudget, late to complete, successes of course.

I jest a bit. I think the term "deadline" is completely inappropriate for most projects.

I prefer, "target series", for any significant project.

Each word communicates something very important.

The first target should be set via (1) known knowns/unknowns, (2) some wisdom about unknown unknowns, and (3) mindful optimism.

The last should almost always ensure the project misses its first target. Which sounds backwards, until accounting for the considerable creative impact, and absolute time savings, that a time constraint creates. And how much a team can improve its productivity over time, by continually targeting informed optimistic targets.

Improving a teams rate of return has compounding value, for everyone.

But this is a self-imposed, let's see how well we can beat ourselves, time constraint. Never an, OMG I might lose my job / standing / reputation / customer credibility time constraint.

If the first target is missed, or as soon as it is clear it is wildly unachievable, a second target is set the same way, with the new information.

Each target in a series should require less padding. If more padding is added it is a sign to step back and consider what is not being understood.

Over time, a team should develop a pretty good pattern of completion at target 2 or 3, or something like that. In a way that becomes fairly predictable. It doesn't really matter what the number is, just that the team develops a rhythm that actually does provide some predictability based on current knowledge, even if it isn't in absolute time terms.

This is the best path for optimizing both rate of progress, fast recognition of problems with progress, and realistic levels of project arc predictability. In my experience anyway.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-14 18:37:51+00:00
> The US can internally produce: food staples, fossil fuels and nuclear fuel, most (but not all) industrial chemicals and construction material, defense systems and major military equipment, generic drugs and many medical devices.

The US used to produce nearly all of those things and would benefit from having the industrial capacity to process rare earths even if some of the mining happens in Brazil or India or Australia.

> Lastly, what about the remaining 167 countries in the world (195 - US - EU)? 90% of the world's population live outside the US and EU.

They would then have the option to buy any of them from the US, the EU or China instead of having only one of those monopolize global production.
by overfeed | 2025-10-14 18:38:46+00:00
I figured you were agreeing with your parent comment. What I find baffling is you seemingly agreeing with gp in distrusting author of TFA, but supporting your position with a statement in direct conflict to the content of gp's comment.

How I read the thread (paraphrasing)

> Itsnowandnever: author has a questionable reporting record... GDP growth has been consistent since 2022...

>> adastra22: Agreed, an absolute partisan hack! Author even dishonestly claimed GDP grew in 2024.

>>> overfeed: wut?
by placardloop | 2025-10-14 18:38:50+00:00
> One of the benefits of Litestream 0.5.0 is that there’s now an official litestream Docker image. All of my previous Docker containers required a lot of boilerplate to download the correct version of Litestream and make it available in my container, but now it reduces to a single Dockerfile line

There’s been an official Litestream container image for over 3 years at this point (since version 0.3.4, it’s at the same Docker Hub as 0.5.0).
by willis936 | 2025-10-14 18:38:57+00:00
Well, if you're trying to measure DC extremely accurately the old stuff is still golden. Multi-slope is the gold standard and no one will sell you one. Delta-sigma get most of the way there.

https://youtu.be/upTgM_S5rAQ

And if you want to see CERN's multimeter, check this out.

https://youtu.be/D28uSzCs7-k

Marco Reps is a treasure.
by mos_basik | 2025-10-14 18:39:36+00:00
>>>>OutOfHere: Proposal: Imprison anyone who performs child circumcision.

>>>notmyjob: Even if they don’t [perform circumcision]? You're proposing violence to punish thoughtcrime. And violence to punish free practice of religion.

>>OutOfHere: No, I proposed prison to punish realcrime. And violence is not acceptable simply because religion says so.

>notmyjob: Ah, but you've contradicted yourself! You've proposed prison, which is violence, which you just said is unacceptable.

Man, that's twice now you've mischaracterized their statement to argue against it. Could you not? (Or you misunderstood them badly, in which case I apologize.)

OutOfHere's claim was "religion doesn't make violence acceptable."

I assume they'd also claim that violence in the form of "prison for punishing illegal behavior" is acceptable.

But moving on, sounds like the crux of this disagreement is whether a state should be allowed to punish behaviors permitted by a religion practiced by some of its citizens. A classic question. The whole separation of church and state thing in the US, and elsewhere. Easy to agree on the extremes:

"Should the state punish performing infant baptism in the catholic church"? (sprinkling water on baby's head) Probably an easy "naw, go ahead".

"Should the state punish human sacrifice as practiced by [insert least ambiguous historical example on relevant wiki page]"? Probably an easy "yeah, that's murder".

Harder to agree on other cases: Female circumcision? Polygamy? Going on a 2 year proselytizing mission? Male circumcision?

A state reaches those agreements through some political process. A religion reaches those agreements through ??? (process varies by religion; don't think I've heard of a religion that has an equivalent to California's Ballot Propositions--maybe that's a good thing).

(An aside here; a probable contender for ??? is "divine revelation", but that of course leads to the question: how come a decent number of neolithic etc religions condoned human sacrifice, but no modern major religion does (again, according to the wiki page)? Did the divines change up the rules on that for us? or did states exert pressure on religions to comply? or was ??? some human-driven process?)

Assuming the goal of most human organizations (examples: states, religions) is to improve human experience (i guess both now and in the hereafter)...

you know what, lunch break is over and ain't nobody got time to talk about the tensions and similarities between state and religious goals on the internet with random internet people.

might as well drop my 2c on the topic at hand - I consider circumcision a major body modification, similar to tattooing. I think it's reasonable for it to require informed consent, which a minor cannot grant by themselves. I think it's reasonable to allow circumcision of minors with the consent of a guardian. But then my thoughts get less well defined; I don't want infants circumcised period, but also I don't want teens with medical issues fixable by circumcision to be forbidden that option until they're 18. It's tough.
by jasonvorhe | 2025-10-14 18:39:55+00:00
So using a distribution, which bundles different components into a cohesive package is somehow different then an install script which bundles different components into another cohesive package? A distribution provides the base layer that you can customize to your liking. Omarchy is another base layer to customize to your liking.

So using a distribution is for nerds but using something like Omarchy is for lower class geeks? What was the difference again? Can you elaborate on that? It feels like rage baiting but that wouldn't be constructive so I assume that you're acting in good faith and that you explain this line of thinking in more detail.

So someone who uses someone's zsh config and adapts it to their liking is a geek as well because someone else (a nerd) did the heavy lifting already?

Who even says that everyone installing Omarchy doesn't bend it to their will afterwards? Is everyone using the same tools and web apps as DHH? Then why should something like Omarchy even provide writable configs to customize it?

I'm confused.
by vidarh | 2025-10-14 18:40:05+00:00
Most younger devs just have no concept on how limited hardware we ran services on...

I used to run a webmail system with 2m accounts on hardware with less total capacity (ram, disk, CPU throughput) than my laptop...

What's more: It was a CGI (so new process for every request), and the storage backend spawned separate processes per user.
by constantcrying | 2025-10-14 18:40:08+00:00
>Reviewers are strongly encouraged to verify all information against the applicant’s official PDF transcript. This reminder is also displayed directly within the product.

This is not how this works. You know people will not do this. In fact the whole value proposition hinges on people not doing this. If the information needs to be verified by a human, then it takes more time than just going through the document.

If your product can not be trusted, then it can not be used to make important decisions. Pushing the responsibility to not use your product on the user is absurd and does not make your actions any less negligent.
by mrguyorama | 2025-10-14 18:40:11+00:00
America voted for Ronald Reagan in the biggest landslide victory the US had seen in a very long time.

Reagan promised "deregulation" and "get government out of business" etc, and had a very clear mandate to execute, which he did, IMO to our detriment, by doing things like telling the FTC to just let companies do whatever, and outright not enforce anti-competitive laws if you couldn't show "consumer harm", which explicitly meant you had to show prices going up before you could prevent the monopoly from forming.

What did people expect?
by Hasz | 2025-10-14 18:40:30+00:00
I have done this a bunch of different times, mostly to resolve sourcing disputes. Dissolving in boiling sulphuric acid/nitric acid will make quick work of most epoxy packaging

IMO, I have mostly seen mislabeling, rebinning, and passing off obvious QC rejects.

example from many years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6DfBuPwAAA
by sgt101 | 2025-10-14 18:40:31+00:00
1. OP and me were talking about the US government.

2. It's quite possible you are right about Chinese EUV capabilities - I don't have a clue myself as I don't work for NSA or CIA. On the other hand it's one more very big challenge in a field of big challenges and despite what the CCP says Chinese resources are very far from infinite and the clock is ticking demographically.

3. A set of EUV test runs would not impress me to be honest - a full blown production line of EUV generated chips would. The issue doesn't seem to be in doing EUV, the issue is to build systems that can sustain quality at volume.
by mellosouls | 2025-10-14 18:40:37+00:00
In at least two ways, which you might see as alternatively positive and negative wrt whether expertise in programming languages is useful.

Firstly, when using them to create software it's pretty obvious that experienced devs and people who understand theory have a greater ability to guide, curate and control them.

Secondly, as they improve in ability we can see a paradigm change for people using them at least as significant as the jump from assembly to high level languages. Most programmers would have no need to study assembly these days.

Either way, their omission (while appropriate for the year, if somewhat lacking in foresight) is a significant one that renders it somewhat dated already.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-14 18:40:47+00:00
Global warming just isn't harmful enough to pose a credible extinction risk.

The damage is too limited and happens far too slowly. Even the unlikely upper end projections aren't enough to upend the human civilization - the harms up there at the top end are "worse than WW2", but WW2 sure didn't end humankind. At the same time: the ever-worsening economics of fossil fuel power put a bound on climate change even in a "no climate policy" world, which we are outperforming.

It's like the COVID of global natural disasters. Harmful enough to be worth taking measures against. But just harmless enough that you could do absolutely nothing, and get away with it.

The upper bound on AI risks is: total extinction of humankind.

I fucking wish that climate change was the biggest threat as far as eye can see.
by j45 | 2025-10-14 18:41:30+00:00
Because when the cloud initially came out 2000-2010, linux had a few things to improve including networking, virtualization.

The public cloud provided a way to avoid all of this headache.

Once it got figured out, the cloud wasn't the only way to scale anymore.

Except, more people than not might not know that today about the cloud.

Linux has gotten orders of magnitude more efficient and effective, so has the public cloud, and by extension, so has scaling (and self hosting)..
by jacquesm | 2025-10-14 18:41:45+00:00
What is interesting here is that for obvious reasons the Chinese do not seem to understand - or be able to understand - that NL actually has an independent institute for handling such disputes that will operate with a fairly high degree of impartiality. Abusing funds of one company and jeopardizing its existence in order to prop up a non-related entity abroad is precisely the kind of situation why we have this institution in the first place. Mismanagement is - regardless of who the shareholders are - also something that we frown upon here and there actually is a mechanism to directly intervene in the case of such actions. Seeing the 3 top financial people replaced with strawmen and funneling large amounts of money abroad to buy things the company does not need is a surefire recipe for intervention. This would have also happened if the CEO had been dutch and the shareholders had been dutch, we actually had such a case in the last few years where the top guy (founder, even) at one of our larger IT companies lost his marbles.
by Animats | 2025-10-14 18:41:49+00:00
You can get an awful lot done with Go, MySQL or MariaDB, FCGI, Apache or Ngnix. You start with one server on shared hosting for a few dollars a month. Then scale up to a dedicated server, if the load appears. Then scale up to multiple servers with a load balancer. Replicate the database.

On the load side, if you're accumulating "statistics" about user behavior, do you really need them for every user? Maybe only one user in a hundred. Or a thousand.

When you exceed the limits of that, you're a big company and can afford AWS.

A few years ago, we had those guys with the liquid meal (not Jucero, the Soylent guys) boasting about their "infrastructure". Not for making the product, for their web site. From their financials, you could calculate that they were doing about four sales a minute. Their "infrastructure" could run on an Raspberry Pi.
by throwaway894345 | 2025-10-14 18:42:51+00:00
On the flip side, I've seen a project fail because it was built on the unvalidated assumption that the naive architecture would scale to real world loads only to find that a modest real world workload was exceeding targets by a factor of 100X. You really do need technical leadership with good judgment and experience; we can't substitute it with facile "assume low scale" or "assume large scale" axioms.
by stuffn | 2025-10-14 18:42:51+00:00
> If law enforcement or spy agency asked for a dragnet warrant like "find me all of the people that might be guilty of XYZ" or "find me something this individual might be guilty of"; tech companies have a moral obligation to resist, in the best interest of humanity.

There is more evidence they will do this rather than that they won't. ChatGPT is a giant dragnet and 15 years ago I would've argued it's probably entirely operated and funded by the NSA. The police already can obtain a "geofenced warrant" today. We're not more than one senator up for re-election from having a new law forced down our throat "for the children" that enables them to mine OpenAI data. That is, if they don't already have a Room 641A located in their HQ.

People pour their live out into these fuzzy word predictors. OpenAI is holding a treasure trove of personal data, personality data, and other data that could be used for all kinds of intelligence work.

This is objectively bad regardless of how bad the criminal is. The last near 40 years of history, and especially the post 9/11 world, shows that if we don't stand up for these people the government will tread all over our most fundamental rights in the name of children/security/etc.

Basic rights aren't determined by how "good people" use them. They are entirely determined by how we treat "bad people" under them.
by CooCooCaCha | 2025-10-14 18:42:53+00:00
I don’t understand the issue with the word “hallucination”.

If a model hallucinates it did do something wrong, something that we would ideally like to minimize.

The fact that it’s impossible to completely get rid of hallucinations is separate.

An electric car uses electricity, it’s a fundamental part of its design. But we’d still like to minimize electricity usage.
by whstl | 2025-10-14 18:43:56+00:00
That was the reality of the fintech I worked at.

The schema wasn't really a problem, but the sheer amount of queries per request. Often a user opening a page or clicking a button would cause 100-200 database queries, including updates. This would prevent strategies such as "just replicating the data somewhere". It was so badly architected that every morning the app would stop responding due to users doing their morning routine operations. And they only had around 300 employees.

And this was just an internal app, the B2C part was already isolated because we couldn't afford to be offline.

The solution I started working on was doing similar to the strangler fig pattern and replacing parts of the API with new code that talked directly to the ORM. Naturally this didn't made the people who wrote the legacy code happy, but at least the outages stopped.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-14 18:44:11+00:00
De ondernemingskamer is not a paper tiger. Ask Sanderink about that.

They rarely make decisions that I disagree with, even if I realize I usually don't have all of the facts. Business continuity, employees, shareholders, customers. Those are the priorities and management is definitely not acting with impunity. The shareholder angle here is an interesting one, that route has been stopped off preemptively it seems.
by nialse | 2025-10-14 18:44:24+00:00
Also remember that the Mx Ultras have 2-3x the memory bandwidth. Looking at the benchmarks even Strix Halo seems to beat the Spark. Buying a 200 Gbps switch is $10k-$100k+ so don't imagine anyone actually will use the interconnect. The logical thing for Nvidia would be to sell a kit with three machines and cabling, and make it a ring with the dual ports per machine. Helps for some scenarios but not others with the 10 times slower network than memory bandwidth.