MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vacuity | 2025-10-11 17:42:28+00:00
I recently came across a much earlier HN submission[0] to this paper. While the points the commenters made (with excellent citations) are correct, I feel that a charitable reading of the paper finds that it is not in opposition.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11101358

In the paper, Parnas and Clements do reject an "ideal, rational, top-down" design process as being a goal for software development. However, their subsequent claim that project documentation should "fake" this process is more controversial. I interpret the paper's claims as such: when the authors say to "fake" the process, they are not saying to pretend to the world that the top-down design process occurred all along. In fact, they prescribe a document to describe alternative design decisions that were rejected, just so that the ideal view is contrasted with the reality of the design process. They note that, in mathematics education, proofs are "cleaned up" so as to focus on the specific strengths or qualities of the proof. Textbooks are perhaps the ultimate example of this. I have heard mention of this practice elsewhere, before encountering this paper, and I don't find an issue with that. To me, this comes down to being in alternative modes: as an author or as a learner. Designers can and should be both, each at their own times. The point of having polished requirements documents, architecture documents, and so on, is so that other designers can efficiently learn from the documented design. Otherwise, the learners would need to collect information from a myriad of sources, trying to piece together the knowledge, skill, and experience that went into the design.

In concurrence with the citations in [0], I agree that requirements/specifications change, and that a seemingly haphazard design process that isn't top-down still has its own sense. I think of peoples' actions as obeying numerous different systems of logic. Values (taken as axioms) and inference/derivation rules don't have to strictly be "formally logical". If an action seems nonsensical from an economic standpoint, it may not be from an emotional standpoint, and so on. There is no inherent reason to prefer some set of axioms, and agents may hold many different sets (and therefore different logics) for different times. What is important is consistency within a logical system. In fact, during design, people surely have partially-formed requirements documents, and whatnot, in mind. So I say that top-down design is not suitable for someone in the process of designing, but lends itself to someone learning about a design (with the caveat that the roads not taken are also documented). The two approaches are two sides of the same coin. Or: don't require someone to create the universe to create an apple pie, but let the physicists have a slice as they figure it out.
by cruffle_duffle | 2025-10-11 17:43:27+00:00
I’ve personally decided that cursor agent mode is good enough. A single foreground instance of cursor doing its thing is plenty enough to babysit. Based upon that experience I am highly highly skeptical people are actually creating things of value with these multi-agent-running-in-the-background setups. Way to much babysitting and honestly writing docs and specs for them is more work than just writing parts of the code myself and letting the LLM do the tedious bits like finishing what I started.

No matter what you are told, there is no silver bullet. Precisely defining the problem is always the hard part. And the best way to precisely define a problem and its solution is code.

I’ll let other people fight swarms of bots building… well who knows what. Maybe someday it will deliver useful stuff, but I’m highly skeptical.
by einpoklum | 2025-10-11 17:44:14+00:00
I can't quite understand what is actually part of GNU Health:

> Social Medicine and Public Health

> Bioinformatics and Medical Genetics

Are these that a piece of software? scopes? Intents?

> Hospital Management (HMIS)

Ok, now this is software for sure, but what exactly does this mean? There are many things to manage within a hospital. Is this software for managing inventories? Scheduling? Personnel assignments and organizational relations? Patient flow records? And - is most of this stuff really specific to hospitals? e.g. how is this different from managing, say, a hotel?

> Laboratory Management (Occhiolino)

Again not so clear what kind of management we're talking about.

> Personal Health Record (MyGNUHealth)

Ok, this I (think I) understand.

> GNU Health embedded on Single Board devices

What exactly needs to get embedded? And - what kind of device? It could be a Raspberry Pi, that's a single-board device, right? So, just another general-purpose computer, but on ARM-based silicon. Or - it could be an, I don't know, some kind of scanner, like a portable UltraSound.

Bottom line: I'm sure it's a collection of useful software but very difficult to figure out exactly what, and how it's specific to healthcare.
by yoyohello13 | 2025-10-11 17:44:29+00:00
The post reads like the someone throwing bones and reading their fortune. That part where Claude did its own journaling was so cringe it was hilarious. The tone of the journal entry was exactly like the blog author, which suggests to me Claude is reflecting back what the author wants to hear. I feel like Jesse is consumed in a tornado of llm sycophancy.
by ojosilva | 2025-10-11 17:44:32+00:00
Yeah, that's really sad and totally undermines my UX on iOS (my iPad particularly). On my Android phone and macOS FF is my go-to browser, a delightful, irreplaceable experience. Sometimes people are amazed by the experience when I show them, look, no ads. But then they go back to their phones and just use whatever crap they use.

I was hoping that the EU directive [1] would give FF a chance of using their own engine, at least in the EU, but no word from that camp, so... I guess not.

1. https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...
by mchusma | 2025-10-11 17:44:42+00:00
Home prices do have a demand side component to pricing…but making it easier to add supply at lower cost is by far the best way to address housing issues.

Most importantly: as a society we can either encourage homeownership as a good investment (appreciating faster than inflation) or have more affordable housing (prices decreasing or increasing less than inflation). There is no way to have both at a large scale. I believe affordability is a better goal, there are many other ways to store wealth.
by burnerRhodov2 | 2025-10-11 17:45:16+00:00
Sun microsystems was mainly selling to startups, who could go bankrupt. Nvidia is selling to Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, Xai and to some extent Google. Excluding potential bubbles here which are coreweave, OpenAI, Antrhopic, etc.

And by "these companies" I mean all the companies i just listed excluding the potential bubbles.

They are all making heaps of cash, buying from a company who is also making heaps of cash on each sale. You also have to price in the geopolitical influence of controling such a important piece of tech.
by ttiurani | 2025-10-11 17:45:50+00:00
> the moment I can get a project up on its legs, to where I can interact with some substantial part of its functionality and refine it, I'm off to the races. [...] This is the part where I simply don't understand the objections people have to coding agents.

That's what's valuable to you. For me the zero to one part is the most rewarding and fun part, because that's when the possibilities are near endless, and you get to create something truly original and new. I feel I'd lose a lot of that if I let an AI model prime me into one direction.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-11 17:46:23+00:00
I would also prefer having a large number of high capacity SSDs so I could replace my spinning hard drives.

But even the cheapest high capacity SSD deals are still a lot more expensive than hard drive array.

I’ll continue replacing failing hard drives for a few more years. For me that has meant zero replacements over a decade, though I planned for a 5% annual failure rate and have a spare drive in the case ready to go. I could replace a failed drive from the array in the time takes to shut down, swap a cable to the spare drive, and boot up again.

SSDs also need to be examined for power loss protection. The results with consumer drives are mixed and it’s hard to find good info about how common drives behave. Getting enterprise grade drives with guaranteed PLP from large on-onboard capacitors is ideal, but those are expensive. Spinning hard drives have the benefit of using their rotational inertia to power the drive long enough to finish outstanding writes.
by tombert | 2025-10-11 17:46:23+00:00
> [citation needed]

Come on man, do you genuinely think that anyone has ever wanted, on a phone, to have all their tabs running at full power in their pocket? I really don't think this "needs citation".

> It wasn't. It was possible to work the intended meaning out, but not without initial confusion, which is far from "pretty obvious".

It actually was pretty obvious, especially since I said it didn't "properly background tabs", implying that I think things should, you know, be backgrounded, almost as if I know that things run in the background. Saying "closed" was a linguistic shorthand and while I am not going to conduct a broad survey I think most people on this particular forum actually knew what I meant immediately.
by hoechst | 2025-10-11 17:46:58+00:00
Much of it is just "put this magic string before your prompt to make the LLM 10x better" voodoo, similar to the SEO voodoo common in the 2000s.

just remember that it works the same for everyone: you input text, magic happens, text comes out.

if you can properly explain a software engineering problem in plain language, you're an expert in using LLMs. everything on top of that people experimenting or trying to build the next big thing.
by gosub100 | 2025-10-11 17:47:16+00:00
Forgive my ignorance about AI, but had anyone tried a "nondeterministic" language that somehow uses learning to approximate the answer? I'm not talking about the current cycles where you train your model on a zillions of inputs, tune it, and release it. I mean a language where you tell it what a valid output looks like, and deploy it. And let it learn as it runs.

Ex: my car's heater doesn't work the moment you turn it on. So if I enter the car one of my first tasks is to turn the blower down to 0 until the motor warms up. A learning language could be used here, given free reign over all the (non-safety-critical) controls, and told that it's job is to minimize the number of "corrections" made by the user. Eventually it's reward would be gained by initializing the fan blower to 0, but it might take 100 cycles to learn this. Rather that train it on a GPU, a language could express the reward and allow it to learn over time, even though it's output would be "wrong" quite often.

That's an esoteric language I'd like to see.
by dotnet00 | 2025-10-11 17:48:15+00:00
It seems to just be Marcus' usual clickbaity style. It's just about the test flight on Monday, which is supposed to be the last one for Block 2. After that they'll be on to Block 3 with significantly improved engines (they should fare better through re-entry, particularly on the booster), and some big tweaks to the booster and ship control surfaces.

After proving they can successfully catch boosters, they haven't been bothering with it so far because they're all already obsolete, and with the Ships, they only ironed out the major flaws with block 2 at the last test flight. So, one more test to gather more data, then on to some more downtime putting the next block upgrade through all the ground testing again.
Show HN: I built a desktop app to prompt multiple LLM web interfaces at once
by czhou578 | 2025-10-11 17:48:29+00:00
As someone who didn't want to pay exorbitant prices for api access, I decided to use the magic of JavaScript to inject my questions directly into the HTML bodies of the LLM webpages. The app leverages Electron's ipc API to pass messages between the app context itself and the browser instances that are loaded, allowing for real-time prompting when a key is pressed down.

The result is a fully functional desktop app that allows you to simultaneously prompt multiple LLMs at the same time through their browser interfaces!

Right now, the app supports multiple LLM's like

- ChatGPT - Gemini - Claude - Grok - DeepSeek - Copilot

In addition, you can save a frequently asked question or prompt in the app, and easily access it later, all in one place. This saves time and energy!

- Demo video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxqWUp0Wmi0

- Code Walkthrough is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkSRSUMsh10

The project is open source and runs locally. I would love any feedback or new features to possibly add!

Thank you for reading!
by nightshift1 | 2025-10-11 17:49:06+00:00
I think that letting an LLM run unsupervised on a task is a good way to waste time and tokens. You need to catch them before they stray too far off-path. I stopped using subagents in Claude because I wasn't able to see what they were doing and intervene. Indirectly asking an LLM to prompt another LLM to work on a long, multi-step task doesn't seem like a good idea to me. I think community efforts should go toward making LLMs more deterministic with the help of good old-fashioned software tooling instead of role-playing and writing prayers to the LLM god.
by techjamie | 2025-10-11 17:49:17+00:00
I can't speak for Gemini, but when I found out about Gopher I read the specification and made a very simple server implementation for myself. If you're looking for a quick project to play with, it's not a bad one to try.

It didn't support everything, mostly just basic browsing and linking. But it was cool to build something mostly compliant to a spec that quickly.
by hannofcart | 2025-10-11 17:49:21+00:00
I see a lot of comments here expressing disapproval about assisted suicide.

I'd like to quote from the HN guidelines:

> Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

With that said I urge you those who disapprove to ask whether you are being "rigidly negative" about this.

1. Is this disapproval perhaps coming from your religious context? If so, please pause and consider why that may not apply to the rest of us. And also whether you really think that your religious beliefs must be forced on the rest of us.

2. Is this disapproval coming from a sense of deep unease that this post causes? If so, know that this unease is shared by most of us. But try and muster the fortitude to go past that unease and consider the decision from a place of compassion.
by JimDabell | 2025-10-11 17:49:27+00:00
> As long as you pass Apple's arbitrary rules, you can make your own browser for iOS. Ladybug uses Apple's test suite as an arbitrary measure of completeness.

The browser is called Ladybird and it isn’t Apple’s test suite, web-platform-tests is a collective effort all the major players contribute to. Almost two thousand people have contributed to it:

https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/graphs/contributor...
by dangus | 2025-10-11 17:50:34+00:00
American Suburbia should actually look more like the pre-automobile streetcar neighborhoods. That development style is far more sustainable, pleasant/walkable, reduces car dependency (biggest drag on individual wealth), etc.

I find that Americans want affordable homes but they also have a crazy list of demands that turns all “modest starter homes” into luxury homes by global standards.

The “must-have” checklist gets crazy. I’m not going to share a bathroom, I’m not going to share walls, I need a big yard, and I need a big garage to park my cars because I need to be far away from everyone/everything, I need a separate room for storing all the stuff I bought from Target and don’t use anymore, I won’t share walls, I won’t share outdoor space, the list goes on.
by rawgabbit | 2025-10-11 17:50:52+00:00
Sorry. Nice try.

The author claims that 30 year mortgages are a "scam" like student loans. Student loans are a scam because they are not dischargeable even in bankruptcy proceedings; this distorts the true cost of student loans. They are financial millstone for life. Meanwhile, with a mortgage, the worst that can happen is Chapter 7 liquidation. You lose the house but are no longer liable.
by khamidou | 2025-10-11 17:51:30+00:00
Sorry to self-promote but I did exactly that a few months back: https://khamidou.com/gpt2/

Generally, I think the Karpathy tutorials are a good starting point but they're very mathy (despite people telling you you only need high school math to understand llms, a lot of the abstractions and concepts he uses are a bit foreign to programmers).

I found out rebuilding inference of a known model taught me a lot more than passively sitting through the videos and maybe retyping his code. You should try it with something simple, like a model from a few years back!
by csdreamer7 | 2025-10-11 17:52:09+00:00
I really do not understand the arguments of this article (or the libertarians in the comments complaining about it). It is so vague it offers little benefit to the discussion. The article makes it seem like the government pays a direct subsidy for mortgages. The GSAs do not do that; it insures the 30 year loans to provide market stability and makes money with guaranty fees. Just FDIC and NCUA insurance on private deposits-it is self funding and provides a positive to the market-stability. Same for FHA. This is exactly what the government should do. Private actors otherwise would have to find their own insurance and cyclical changes in the market would likely to higher fees to manage it than what the government is offering.

Nor does the article talk about the direct subsidies because it is very unpopular and the paper may lose readers. Like the mortgage interest deduction or VA loans.

Also, the paper picks out 30 year mortgage loans but leaves out other government incentives; like Trump's recent 20% tax deduction on non-owner operated business income... which really can only be claimed by a REIT as far as I know?

I specifically point out REITs as REITs led to their own share of property speculation.

The government benefits from these mortgages as it helps it develop underdeveloped regions in the nation-allowing them to reach that critical mass to support modern infrastructure and grows the middle class through home ownership. Your views on a community change when you have a decade of your wages invested in a part of that community.

My speculation is some think tank paid from the wealthy is paying for articles to find ways to raise revenue to keep the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy.
by Standards1 | 2025-10-11 17:52:47+00:00
We have a static site what we wanted to be able to create shareable links that captured the page as it was. We found an excellent solution using LZMA here: https://github.com/topaz/paste/tree/master . Take a look at our "Share this Fit as a URL" Button. It copies a URL to your clipboard that has the data and current fit you are on all encoded. No backend required to share large amounts of data.
by jmward01 | 2025-10-11 17:53:05+00:00
This was close to DYI with me and the local handyman figuring out a good way to tie my house to its foundation. Not a full retrofit but pretty good for my 100yo house with nothing remotely close to modern design. Here are some resources I found useful though.

https://dnr.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2025-03/ger_homeowner...

https://www.wabo.org/earthquake-home-retrofit
by pstuart | 2025-10-11 17:53:11+00:00
I recall various tech/data initiatives during that admin and my search came up with this: https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/press-releases/hhs-announces-ne...

I don't work in healthcare but I do use their services and every intake interaction is the same paperwork dance, so it doesn't seem to have impacted providers themselves.

There's another element that needs address as well, which is the controlled dissemination of one's medical history. It should be easy peasy technology wise, with the only blockers being political/entrenched players sabotaging it.
by jltsiren | 2025-10-11 17:53:13+00:00
Home ownership becomes more accessible when homes are cheaper.

Financial instruments that aim to make home ownership more accessible tend to become subsidies to people who don't need them. If people can afford to pay more, homes become more expensive. But those who don't need a mortgage pay less for the same home. Those who can afford a shorter mortgage pay less. Those who can afford an adjustable rate pay less than those who pay a premium for a fixed rate.
by l5870uoo9y | 2025-10-11 17:53:27+00:00
Everyone talks about Alzheimer's and dementia, but Daniel Kahneman has neither. He chose to commit suicide because he wanted to avoid “natural decline.” That's an unexpected statement from a 90-year-old. I'm more surprised by his lack of will to live and that he just “gives up” and throws away the most valuable thing he has.
by charcircuit | 2025-10-11 17:53:52+00:00
Mobile Firefox constantly gets bugged and stops rendering pages until you restart it. It also has issues with scrolling on some pages where it won't let you scroll sometimes. Github is notoriously bad, you can't read code if you can't scroll through the file. As a developer not being able to use Github is a deal breaker. The browser itself is also missing features like webgpu. While extentions are nice, the browser engine itself being this broken for years makes it a painful choice.
by jleyank | 2025-10-11 17:54:26+00:00
I grew up in a 1200 sq ft house with 3 br, one bath and a 1-car garage. Built in 1940. Typical small home for a middle class ish family (us). Now, they’d want a 2200+ sq ft home with 3+ baths, a 2-car garage and parking pad. And people are surprised when much more house costs much more money. Not factoring in the entry of private equity for airbnb or rental. Same amount of land as the lot sized for the older homes were good. Kids had to play somewhere.

When people go on about the need for affordable housing, they’re not asking for the 1940 model described above nor for 200 sq ft urban rabbit warrens. They want the big house/good lot house with a good commute for little money. And probably a pony.
by jmclnx | 2025-10-11 17:55:01+00:00
>Created by Depression-era reforms

Like eliminating Depression Era regulations have worked so well. Savings/loan crisis, 2008 housing crashes, Enron to name a few helped along by removing or tweaking these regs.

>In response to higher prices, lenders gradually extended terms, lowered down payments

That is because of elimination Regulations. I remember a person had to put down 20% in order to buy a house. Also the loans were written by a local Savings and Loan Bank or a Credit Union. These loans were not sold to a Wall Street but funded locally and used to improve the local area.

>In the 2000s the game was in full swing: subprime, adjustable-rate, interest-only and no-money-down loans flooded the market

Again, regulations were eliminated to allow this.

Sorry, I am done reading this crazy article :)
by dismalaf | 2025-10-11 17:55:06+00:00
This isn't a problem with open source. For many of us with startups that have low stakes (worst we can do is have no users) a lack of support is fine, we can do it ourselves and save the money.

And there's plenty of consultancies which will support OSS and give you support if you need it and be your scapegoat. Red Hat, Suse, IBM come to mind and there's many others...