MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Building the Cursor UI selector but for back end
by imilev | 2025-10-31 16:46:00+00:00
Hey all, Me and my friends building CodeBoarding, an easy way to visualize and understand your codebase. Cursor 2.0 showed how now you can drag context for your agent directly from the UI, I think this is awesome way to interact with generated code, as you don' really need to understand all details for a vibe coding session.

This is why we've been building CodeBoarding - visualizing your codebase with a diagram so you can quickly understand and navigate the codebase. Now you can just copy a component and paste it as context for your agent so it knows where to work. The analysis agent for the diagram creation is open-source you can find it here: https://github.com/CodeBoarding/CodeBoarding

I would love to hear your opinion on vibe coding for larger projects, how do you navigate the context selection? Further what kind of guardlines are you using, we are thinking of adding guardrail which makes most of the files readonly so your agent (cursor, claude code, etc.) cannot delete/edit them.

Looking forward to chatting with you all, Ivan
by tock | 2025-10-31 16:46:45+00:00
> Why the dig at Americans?

America deserves the dig. Pulling out of the Paris accords. 22% renewable usage compared to the 60% of Germany. And now climate change denial.

> The United States does work with India to develop green energy.

lmao.

> It’s obvious they have voter approval.

I mean they did just vote in the guy who calls climate change a hoax.
by ceejayoz | 2025-10-31 16:47:09+00:00
> Correct.

Then be honest and just say "fuck the poors", not a fake desire for doing it a different way that you hope will go unquestioned.

> I wonder why Switzerland has no issue.

27.6 guns per 100 residents, versus 120 in the US. Firearms registries, acquisition permits, and quite a few controls over ammo acquisition. Plus mandatory universal training via conscription.
by proee | 2025-10-31 16:47:13+00:00
I would love to know if Ives was truly foundation to the iPhone, or if he was more given the overall idea and polished it with the final look/feel (which is also important).

Who was the exact individual that had the vision for glass multi-touch screens and sick gesture like effects (scroll).

Perhaps the team just sat around a table and came up with the vision. Or maybe it was Jobs, but clearly there were some good visionaries in the company.

I think the proof of Ive's excellence will come out of this next OpenAI project. If it's something lame, then I will assume his impact at Apple was overrated. If it's a jaw-dropper, then maybe he really is the cat's meow.
by overvale | 2025-10-31 16:47:15+00:00
> Ultimately, the answer is simple: reinventing AI is essentially reinventing the smartphone.

I don’t think this is true at all. The smartphone is not some kind of endgame device after which there is no future. No more so than the train was the endgame of transportation. Why are we limiting our imagination about the future to only include what is true today?
by pron | 2025-10-31 16:47:29+00:00
It is not "an eternity". A roundtrip of 100-200us - which is closer to the actual GC pause time these days (remember, I said well below 1ms) - is considered quite good and is within the 1ms order of magnitude. Getting a <<1ms pause once every several seconds is not a significant impact to all but a few niche programs, and you may even get better throughput. OS-imposed hiccups (such as page faults or scheduler decisions) are about the same as those caused by today's Java GCs. Programs for which these are "an eternity" don't use regular kernels.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-10-31 16:47:35+00:00
Lenses is mutation by another name. You are basically recreating states on top of an immutable system. Sure, it's all immutable actually but conceptually it doesn't really change anything. That's what makes it hilarious.

In the end, the world is stateful and even the purest abstractions have to hit the road at some point. But the authors of Haskell were fully aware of that. The monadic type system was conceived as a way to easily track side effects after all, not banish them.
by IAmBroom | 2025-10-31 16:47:36+00:00
Spoken like a Linux software developer, I suppose. As a Windows user of generic software (image editing, video players, games, etc.), I want to be able to control such crap. I have a media player that can easily fill a small HD with its mindlessly huge DB, for instance. Rather than manually cleaning periodically, or upgrading my $y$tem, it's easiest to say "Software, store your data here".
by boringg | 2025-10-31 16:47:50+00:00
The original "Tech" boom was an infrastructure boom by the telecoms funded by leveraged debt. It was an overbuild mismatch with the market timing. If you brought forward the timeline to when that infrastructure was used (late 2000s) you probably would never have had the crash.

This boom is a data center boom with AI being the software layer/driver. This one potentially has a lot longer to run even though everyone is freaking out now. If you believe the AI is rebuilding compute then this changes our compute paradigm in the future. As well as long as we don't get an over leveraged build out without revenue coming in the door. I think we are seeing a lot of revenue come in for certain applications.

The companies that are all smoke and mirrors built on chatGPT with little defensibility are probably the same as the ones you are referring to in the current era. Or the AI tooling companies.

To be clear circular deal flow is not a good look.

I can see the both sides of bull and bear at this moment.
by 12_throw_away | 2025-10-31 16:48:39+00:00
This is a very good analogy, sheet music with all the Italian replaced by English would be very funny. "Loud!" "Very loud!" "Super-duper quiet!" "This is the end of the song!" "play this part reallll smooootthh" etc.

(Actually I believe the late P.D.Q. Bach [1] did this a lot, and it was in fact quite funny)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._D._Q._Bach
by squidproquo | 2025-10-31 16:49:01+00:00
The non-determinism is part of the allure of these systems -- they operate like slot machines in a casino. The dopamine hit of getting an output that appears intelligent and the variable rewards keeps us coming back. We down-weight and ignore the bad outputs. I'm not saying these systems aren't useful to a degree, but one should understand the statistical implications on how we are collectively perceiving their usefulness.
Futurelock: A subtle risk in async Rust
by bcantrill | 2025-10-31 16:49:26+00:00
This RFD describes our distillation of a really gnarly issue that we hit in the Oxide control plane.[0] Not unlike our discovery of the async cancellation issue[1][2][3], this is larger than the issue itself -- and worse, the program that hits futurelock is correct from the programmer's point of view. Fortunately, the surface area here is smaller than that of async cancellation and the conditions required to hit it can be relatively easily mitigated. Still, this is a pretty deep issue -- and something that took some very seasoned Rust hands quite a while to find.

[0] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/omicron/issues/9259

[1] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/397

[2] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/400

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrv5Cy1R7r4
by gethly | 2025-10-31 16:50:10+00:00
That's why I mentioned the analog model because with digital, you have a quartz oscillator where you measure 1 or 0 at each frame of the cycle. So the information travels in queues, step by step, one bit at a time. But with analog, everything is essentially "online" at the same time, all the time. There is no "off" state. Yes, there are still differences in levels of conductivity(which is essentially information), which is how we measure binary values in the strict window imposed by the oscillator, but analog essentially allows you to experience the whole system in an instant. I think that is where consciousness comes from. Binary system is incapable of manifesting itself because not only it lives only in those tiny windows of time dictated by the oscillator, but only one bit exists at a time. Analog, comparatively, is unimaginably more advanced system. Now if we can figure out how to turn our binary technology into analog, we could definitely move on to an unfathomably advanced level of technology. Whether we could create sAI with to or not is something we cannot answer at this stage of our technological development but it would certainly be closer to what we have today.
by softfalcon | 2025-10-31 16:51:19+00:00
For anyone who wants to see some real workstations that do this, you may want to check out Alex Ziskind's channel on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@AZisk

At this point, pretty much all he does is review workstations for running LLM's and other machine-learning adjacent tasks.

I'm not his target demographic, but because I'm a dev, his videos are constantly recommended to me on YouTube. He's a good presenter and his advice makes a lot of sense.
by snvzz | 2025-10-31 16:51:38+00:00
>while RISC-V has its own peculiar ideas on the result of an integer division by zero.

Yeah, it does. Its architects knew that it is cheaper to, when necessary, check and branch if the divisor is zero than it is to deal with exceptions.

Thus that hardware budget can instead be used for making the chip faster and more power efficient.
by juki | 2025-10-31 16:52:24+00:00
There are shorter options in Nim too, depending on your stylistic preferences

let sorted = entries.sorted(proc (a, b: Entry): int = cmp(a.timestamp, b.timestamp)) let sorted = entries.sorted((a, b) => cmp(a.timestamp, b.timestamp)) let sorted = entries.sortedByIt(it.timestamp)

I suppose you could change the whole proc to something like

proc groupIntoThreads(entries: seq[Entry], threshold: int): seq[seq[Entry]] = let sorted = entries.sortedByIt(it.timestamp) for i, entry in sorted: if i == 0 or entry.timestamp - sorted[i - 1].timestamp > threshold: result.add(@[sorted[i]]) else: result[^1].add(sorted[i])
by weregiraffe | 2025-10-31 16:52:43+00:00
Self-improving LLM is as probable as a perpetual motion machine.

Practically, LLMs train on data. Any output of an LLM is a derivative of the training data and can't teach it anything new.

Conceptually, if a stupid AI can build a smart AI, it would mean that the stupid AI is actually smart, otherwise it wouldn't have been able too.
by ColeShepherd | 2025-10-31 16:53:08+00:00
Some potential alternatives to consider:

1.

classList = ['highlighted', 'primary'] .concatif(discount, 'on-sale') .join(' ')

2.

classList = ' '.join(['highlighted', 'primary'] + (['on-sale'] if discount else []))

3.

mut classList = ['highlighted', 'primary'] if discount: classList.append('on-sale') classList = ' '.join(classList) freeze classList

4.

def get_class_list(discount): mut classList = ['highlighted', 'primary'] if discount: classList.append('on-sale') classList = ' '.join(classList) return classList classList = get_class_list(discount)
by hollerith | 2025-10-31 16:53:21+00:00
No, it is several things.

One is that I cannot select part of the text, then copy and paste it into the "reference material" I keep in plain-text files on my local computer.

Another is that there is no convenient way to search, i.e., Ctrl+F does not work.

Another is that making the text larger[1] is less convenient: in general I need to right click > "Open image in new tab", then do the zooming rather than just do the zooming, and then the zooming is jumpier somehow (which I can handle, but it slows me down) and text never reflows. Sometimes after I zoom the image to make the text large enough for me to read easily, a column of text has become too wide for my screen so that I need to scroll back and forth horizontally for every line of text. That was not a problem with this specific image file, but IIRC I gave up right before I noticed that that would not be a problem.

Finally, even when the text I want to read is actual text (not an image) sometimes I have to resort to Ctrl+A (select all) then copy and paste the text into a text editor (because every web site is a snowflake, and some of the snowflakes are gnarly); knowing that this last resort is not available with an image file makes me less likely to try to read the image file.

The reasons I give above add up to a situation in which it is slower and more annoying to read from an image file than to read ordinary HTML text or plain text.

Also, I was already annoyed by archive.org even before I figured out that the thing I might want to read is an image file: the way my browser is configured (OS zoom set to 200%, then Chrome's zoom set to 80%, so the effective zoom of the viewport is 160%, but the browser chrome occupies twice as much vertical real estate as it would if OS zoom were 100%) when I land on the web page, more than half of the viewport is occupied by a plea for money at the top plus the two menu bars in the site header. (And the text in the plea for money is larger and sharper than the text of the content.)

[1] My eyesight is substandard.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-31 16:53:40+00:00
No, this is poison. They constantly change things, and Free Software would be racing to clone them, continually leaving familiarity behind in order to be a wonky version of the real thing. That battle is lost when it starts. Firefox was a great version of Firefox, everybody loved it (except when it locked up the entire system), nobody thought it was a knock-off of IE. Firefox then became a shit version of Chrome (I assume on Google's orders), and eventually developed into a good enough version of Chrome, shedding all of its users along the way. The Linux desktop is doing better than Firefox now.

The advantage to Free Software is that you don't have to change everything with Windows, Apple, Adobe, or Google demand you do (unless they grab control of a FOSS project, like in Firefox's case.) There are a number of writers who recommend Linux and Free software only for that reason - that once you get a workflow going, you don't want to change it according to corporate whims.

> practically never requires its user to fire up a terminal window

This can be a problem. But it will be less of a problem with LLMs. We need to encourage amateur (and proficient) Linux adopters and users to lean on AI to deal with anything giving them problems. I had an LLM walk me through updating a .deb package in MATE to match HEAD upstream, and to do it in a way that would be replaced when Debian updated the package itself. This is something I've been carefully avoiding learning for a decade, and if I had taken the effort to try to learn, it would be weeks of research and I'd have messed up the system multiple times along the way. Instead, after a few false starts, I did it and gained the knowledge to do it again.
by tialaramex | 2025-10-31 16:54:08+00:00
I don't think so? I've been clear that there are three distinct kinds of thing here - constants, immutable variables, and mutable variables.

In C the first needs us to step outside the language to the macro pre-processor, the second needs the keyword "const" and the third is the default

In Rust the first is a const, the second we can make with let and the third we need let mut, as Carmack says immutable should be the default.
by Podrod | 2025-10-31 16:54:20+00:00
Only some items were stolen or damaged, not everything.

During the security turmoil following the 25 January Revolution, the museum was broken into on 28 January 2011, by unidentified individuals, and 54 artifacts were stolen. Zahi Hawass, the then director of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, stated "My heart is broken and my blood is boiling".[30] Hawass later told The New York Times that thieves looking for gold broke 70 objects, including two sculptures of the pharaoh Tutankhamun and took two skulls from a research lab, before being stopped as they left the museum.[31] In response, the military cordoned off the museum to secure it against looting and theft.[32]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Museum

And a page about the foreign exhibitions and tours

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhibitions_of_artifacts_from_...
by joshstrange | 2025-10-31 16:54:23+00:00
Case in point, Safari. I used Blackberry before the iPhone as well as multiple other "mobile browsers" on PocketPC, Palm, and even WAP browsers on flip phones (maybe also Opera Mini? My memory is fuzzy on when that came out).

Nothing, and I mean nothing, compared to Safari on the iPhone. It was in a league of its own. It was dog-slow over Edge but it was a _real_ browser instead of what had come before.
by overvale | 2025-10-31 16:55:12+00:00
I think you could make identical arguments about any new technology. Amazingly expensive computers were once not very practical, it’s easy to point at any massive world changing tech and call it unethical, you can find these arguments about oil, railroads, 24 hour news, etc. and the same is true for economic incentives. Rubber barons and railroad tycoons were not well intentioned from this point of view. I don’t think there’s anything about AI that is inherently different from previous tech.

And isn’t that the entire point of the quote?

I’m not trying to be dismissive of your point, just to pose a counterpoint.
by keyringlight | 2025-10-31 16:55:51+00:00
It had internet, back then one of the big bits of news tangential to the iphone releasing was how Jobs decided on no Flash player on their mobile devices, which was the mortal wound to official support of that format. More generally though, I think the iphone (or smartphones in general) work as a good example of bundling capabilities and doing it well. Phones before then could do many of the things smartphones could, some could play games, could play music, some had cameras, and there were separate devices that specialized in those and did them better, but smartphones collected them all up and started an arms race in doing them great.
by AaronAPU | 2025-10-31 16:56:04+00:00
I spent a decade or so working on video codecs with an international team, and there was sort of an unwritten rule that code shouldn’t have comments and variable names shouldn’t be descriptive (english language couldn’t be assumed).

Which sounds really awful, but after a while it forces you to parse the logic itself instead of being guided by possibly-out-of-date comments and variable names.

I now prefer less verbosity so that probably explains why I’m a little out of distribution on this topic.

If you looked at any of my code prior to that job, it was the polar opposite with very “pretty” code and lengthy comments everywhere.
by manoDev | 2025-10-31 16:56:13+00:00
That's not mutation though.

The `assoc` on the second binding is returning a new object; you're just shadowing the previous binding name.

This is different than mutation, because if you were to introduce an intermediate binding here, or break this into two `let`s, you could be holding references to both objects {:a 1} and {:a 1 :b 2} at any time in a consistent way - including in a future/promise dereferenced later.
by jihadjihad | 2025-10-31 16:56:14+00:00
> Jassy explained that as Amazon added headcount, locations and lines of business in recent years, “you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers … sometimes without realizing it, you can weaken the ownership of the people that you have who are doing the actual work.”

"And here's something else, Bob. I have eight different bosses right now." "I beg your pardon?" "Eight bosses." "Eight?" "Eight, Bob."
by Agingcoder | 2025-10-31 16:56:25+00:00
I see your point but … trees and blobs are an implementation detail that I shouldn’t need to know. This is different from files and directories ( at least directories ) in your example. What I want to know is that I have a graph and am moving references around - I don’t need to know how it’s stored.

The git mental model is more complex than cvs, but strangely enough the docs almost invariably refer to the internal implementation details which shouldn’t be needed to work with it.

I remember when git appeared - the internet was full of guides called ‘git finally explained ‘ , and they all started by explaining the plumbing and the implementation. I think this has stuck, and does not make things easy to understand.

Please note I say all this having been using git for close to 20 years, being familiar with the git codebase, and understanding it very well.

I just think the documentation and ui work very hard towards making it difficult to understand .
by naasking | 2025-10-31 16:57:16+00:00
> How likely are we to NOT see the AI data center apocalypse through better algorithms?

Near certain IMO. Algorithmic improvements have outpaced hardware improvements for decades. We're already seeing the rise of small models and how simple tweaks can make small models very capable problem solvers, better even than state of the art large models. Data center scaling is nearing its peak IMO as we're hitting data limits which cap model size anyway.
by joshstrange | 2025-10-31 16:57:40+00:00
> I don't recall if the iPhone actually even had internet and maps at launch

It did. Jobs famously said on stage [0] "An iPod, a Phone, and an Internet Communicator. An iPod, a Phone... are you getting it? These are not 3 seperate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone" at the launch. It also did come with maps that used Google Maps.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK55ElsVzxM
by BizarroLand | 2025-10-31 16:57:48+00:00
The fact is you are wrong. You had a childhood as did every other adult. It was no more real or better than modern childhoods.

It was just different, and maybe one of the last periods of non-digital childhoods in mainstream human history, yes, but using that to just take a big fat emotional glory dump on every person born after you is pathetic.
by luciferin | 2025-10-31 16:58:05+00:00
I suppose it's possible, but it seems less likely to me because ADHD is a life long neurodevelopmental disorder that shows [visible physical changes in the brain on scans](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7879851/). That said, there are statistically more people with narcolepsy who have ADHD, and the same goes for sleep apnea. There's a number of hypotheses I've read as to why, to name a couple: related epigenetic causes, or [possible misdiagnosis](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7336577/) (narcolepsy is much harder to diagnose than ADHD if you don't have textbook symptoms). So there is definitely something there.
by niwtsol | 2025-10-31 16:58:08+00:00
Kind of related, but there is a concept of polyphasic sleep - where you sleep for small increments throughout the day (like 30 minutes every 3 hours). I did it for a bit at a startup thinking we were "hacking sleep" and "getting more productive hours out of every day!" - It takes awhile to transition to it, but once there, your scheduled "sleeps" are insane, 15 minutes, feel like straight to REM. The main problem was if you missed on schedule sleep you were a zombie.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-31 16:58:40+00:00
> things smartphones could, some could play games, could play music, some had cameras, and there were separate devices that specialized in those and did them better

But even Sony Ericsson phones way before the iPhone could all do those things in one phone too, some of them really good for their time. Yet they never kind of changed the technology scene as much as the iPhone.