MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by didericis | 2025-10-11 14:56:00+00:00
> When I'm writing the code myself, it's basically a ton of "plumbing" of loops and ifs and keeping track of counters and making sure I'm not making off-by-one errors and not making punctuation mistakes and all the rest. It actually takes quite a lot of brain energy and time to get that all perfect.

All of that "plumbing" affects behavior. My argument is that all of the brain energy used when checking that behavior is necessary in order to check that behavior. Do you have a test for an off by one error? Do you have a test to make sure your counter behaves correctly when there are multiple components on the same page? Do you have a test to make sure errors don't cause the component to crash? Do you have a test to ensure non utf-8 text or binary data in a text input throws a validation error? Etc etc. If you're checking all the details for correct behavior, the effort involved converges to roughly the same thing.

If you're not checking all of that plumbing, you don't know whether or not the behavior is correct. And the level of abstraction used when working with agents and LLMs is not the same as when working with a higher level language, because LLMs make no guarantees about the correspondence between input and output. Compilers and programming languages are meticulously designed to ensure that output is exactly what is specified. There are bugs and edge cases in compilers and quirks based on different hardware, so it's not always 100% perfect, but it's 99.9999% perfect.

When you use an LLM, you have no guarantees about what it's doing, and in a way that's categorically different than not knowing what a compiler does. Very few people know all of the steps that break down `console.log("hello world")` into the electrical signals that get sent to the pixels on a screen on a modern OS using modern hardware given the complexity of the stack, but they do know with as close as is humanly possible to 100% certainty that a correctly configured environment will result in that statement outputting the text "hello world" to a console. They do not need to know the implementation because the contract is deterministic and well defined. Prompts are not deterministic nor well defined, so if you want to verify it's doing what you want it to do, you have to check what it's doing in detail.

Your basic argument here is that you can save a lot of time by trusting the LLM will faithfully wire the code as you want, and that you can write tests to sanity check behavior and verify that. That's a valid argument, if you're ok tolerating a certain level of uncertainty about behavior that you haven't meticulously checked or tested. The more you want to meticulously check behavior, the more effort it takes, and the more it converges to the effort involved in just writing the code normally.
by austin-cheney | 2025-10-11 14:56:18+00:00
We have to deal with this at work. It’s the pain of moving large data across the network via HTTP. You have no idea how large the data is going to be or how long the SQL query will take to execute u til after the HTTP request is issued by which time the request TTL is already defined.

This is a self inflicted pain though. You shouldn’t be using HTTP to move large data. A streaming socket is so much more efficient.
by cs702 | 2025-10-11 14:57:13+00:00
To paraphrase an old saying incorrectly attributed to Everett Dirksen[a]:

$0.77 trillion here, $0.77 trillion there, and pretty soon we'll be talking about real money.

---

[a] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Everett_Dirksen#Misattributed
by hrimfaxi | 2025-10-11 14:57:32+00:00
> Plenty of people here who reacted negatively to OP's suggestion seem to not have had to deal with a loved one who dealt with Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia. It's not hard like taking care of a toddler is hard. It's hard like, "this is not the same person I know for my whole life, they don't recognize me, they say and do mean things to me and their grand-kids and neighbors all the time, and require 24x7 supervision to not hurt themselves or break everything in the room."

This is exactly it. It's like dealing with a curmudgeonly toddler with extreme agency and no self-awareness. The rest of your comment is so spot on or at least matches my experience. I'm sorry you had to go through it but you genuinely seem to have become stronger from it and I'm grateful you could share your experience with us.
by RajT88 | 2025-10-11 14:58:08+00:00
It is - seriously - no wonder they got destroyed. NYC is a symbol, and the towers were a recognizable icon in the skyline.

There's a high number of coincidences about the towers getting destroyed. It's no conspiracy, it's because the towers and NYC meant something in the eyes of the world with regards to the USA.

Just rattling off a few of the wild ones:

The episode of The Lone Gunmen which predicted an attack with a plane on the towers.

The Sega Master System game (I forget the name, but I own it) where it depicts a missile hitting the towers on the opening screen. It's pixels with little wings, and super spooky in retrospect.

The Dream Theater live album released on 9/11 which showed the NYC skyline burning.

There's so much stuff, I almost don't blame the conspiracy theorists. But they have the causality backwards. They also really like to ignore the fact that 8 years earlier somebody tried to blow up the towers and killed 6 people...
by bxparks | 2025-10-11 14:58:23+00:00
You are lucky. In 2025 I have to run most of my 20-30 wifi devices on 2.4 GHz because 5 GHz won't penetrate the walls in my house, especially diagonally.

My dev laptop is about 10 m (30 ft) away from the wifi access point, but goes through about 6 walls diagonally, due to some weird layout, and 2.4 GHz is way faster.

The house has some thick walls.

Same with phones. As soon as I'm in a different room, 2.4 GHz is faster. So I just keep things on 2.4.

Yeah, I've been planning to wire the house with Cat-6 into every room and add some access points. It's been on the backlog for 6 years..
by strogonoff | 2025-10-11 14:58:43+00:00
Content delivery costs a lot for streaming services. After content is produced, this is basically the only remaining cost. It’s not surprising that they would go to extreme measures in reducing bitrate.

That’s why, presumably, Netflix came up with the algorithm for removing camera grain and adding synthetically generated noise on the client[0], and why YouTube shorts were recently in the news for using extreme denoising[1]. Noise is random and therefore difficult to compress while preserving its pleasing appearance, so they really like the idea of serving everything denoised as much as possible. (The catch, of course, is that removing noise from live camera footage generally implies compromising the very fine details captured by the camera as a side effect.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44456779

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45022184
by dbZJtFuAXUrVLmY | 2025-10-11 14:58:58+00:00
I don't think the average amount of suffering for people with Alzheimer's and their families is sufficient to warrant euthanasia as a solution. I don't doubt there are some cases where it could be warranted, but I find it very difficult to get behind the idea that consent should pass from the individual. I obviously see that people with Alzheimer's and their families do suffer, the degree to which depends on the availability of proper care. We're essentially debating whether euthanasia is a better option to high quality care, and that's where the life of a person becomes a pretty gross economic equation. High quality care deprives families of assets. That tension between selfish (or so called "practical") interests and prioritising the interests of the dying is non-trivial, particular where the dying can't reasonably consent. The gentleman mentioned in this scenario would have had a more dignified death had he been provided the correct facilities, and probably shouldn't have been left to run riot in the community. It pains me that this is a story about how some guy became an asshole in his final years and not one of how a guy was deprived of a dignified death by the structures of society. I suspect to some degree people see euthanasia as a simple way to offer compassion and dignity in death, but I do think it's highly informed by ableist prejudice. There is a wide spectrum of dignity and life left to live in an end of life pathway and jumping to euthanasia as the solution is a pretty dangerous one in my opinion.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-11 14:59:40+00:00
> I'm not a representative of Rust the language (how could I be), and I reserve the right to call out moral corruption as I see it. I frankly do not need any "well-meaning" advice about how best to advocate for Rust - that's not my job.

Whether you realize it or not, you are an advocate and you are doing a very, very poor job of it.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-10-11 14:59:47+00:00
Not so much the backlash, but what it means for America and the now old world order. Everything he stood for now requires a civil war or worse to sustain it.

Look at it this way, it shouldn't matter that he's black right? But he really needed to be a force of change, not someone who kept the norm and preserved the status quo. He was the highest democrat when they pushed Hillary as the next president and he endorsed her. He didn't jail the bankers, change the democratic party, do something about wage inequality, or about citizens united, reform the intel services after snowden,etc.. the racists can throw a fit all the want, but if he did a good job, it would have only hurt their cause. But his mediocrity and dying on hills like the ACA (because his mother suffered a lot, bad experience with health care,etc..) only made the moderates that voted for him twice retract.

You see how loud trump is and how just goes around bulldozing things? Obama was hired to do that job in '08. trump is doing it for fascist and racist ends, but the people wanted to hire a bulldozer. Now, if you ask me, this is all largely the fault of an ungrateful American public that don't get just how good even the lowliest homeless guy has it in America and how easy it is to lose all that we have. There is this infuriating foolishness that's endemic in America where there is a disdain for institutions, politicians, etc... and both liberals and conservatives have this disease. That's why everyone wants a bulldozer, and guess what, America is getting bulldozed right now.

Oh, and Biden was many times worse because he saw how bad it was under Trump and he doubled down on mediocrity and "return to normal" , he wanted to improve the economy and living conditions of Americans, leave a nice legacy or whatever. If only he was the president decades ago. he couldn't even fire his own attorney general for not convicting trump and locking him up. He knew a traitor to the country and an even worse person is about to run for president and he just sat back and stuck to ideals and optimistic hopes and wishes.

Obama's failure is that he didn't do the job he was hired to do and didn't adapt to the changing tides of politics well enough.
by jonhohle | 2025-10-11 15:00:01+00:00
The alternative being when someone becomes inconvenient to others we should encourage their death? What good is compassion or empathy when the lesser in society could just go off and die, right? Why stop at incurable diseases? Political opponents, coworkers, nasty service workers, double parkers, lawyers, and many other groups cause a lot of anguish and suffering.
by mojuba | 2025-10-11 15:01:15+00:00
The early internet was like some settlers' shacks, built uncontrollably and unsystematically whereas the modern web is all skyscrapers, residential and business. Uniform apartments, uniform offices all looking very similar differeing in only subtle interior design details here and there.

Should we go back to the shack era? Of course not. But maybe we should start a new era of land exploration and start over. It shouldn't necessarily be Internet 3.0, might be something else completely. AR/VR? Possibly although that has already failed once.
by xeonmc | 2025-10-11 15:01:36+00:00
First Question: is it possible to change your handle or delete your account on the tngl.sh PDS instance?

Second Question: how much resource does creating and hosting a new AppView entail? For example let's say I make an appview that's essentially the PDS-hosted equivalent of Cloudflare Pages, where a user upload a folder of a static website and the appview just forwards it verbatim at a hypothetical https://atprotocities.org/@cool.guy/... , would you need to bear the brunt of the traffic cost as an AppView host?
by toofy | 2025-10-11 15:01:58+00:00
> Someone needs to tell filmmakers. They shoot dark scenes because they can…

i disagree completely. i watch a movie for the filmmakers story, i don’t watch movies to marvel at compression algorithms.

it would be ridiculous to watch movies shot with only bright scenes because streaming service accountants won’t stop abusing compression to save some pennies.

> …ends up looking like shit after compression that assumes normal lighting levels.

it’s entirely normal to have dark scenes in movies. streaming services are failing if they’re using compression algorithms untuned to do dark scenes when soooo many movies and series are absolutely full of night shots.
by spprashant | 2025-10-11 15:02:02+00:00
I am not ashamed to admit this whole agentic coding movement has moved beyond me.

Not only do I have know everything about the code, data and domain, but now I need to understand this whole AI system which is a meta skill of its own.

I fear I may never be able catch up till someone comes along and simplifies it for pleb consumption.
by ReptileMan | 2025-10-11 15:02:37+00:00
A beautiful woman dies twice as the old saying goes.

While what you say is extreme there is a point in the decline past which there is no point of living. If you have something worth living for - cling to life and to 107 if you like. But if the only thing that waits you is to slowly decay and fade and lose yourself - what is the point?
by hatradiowigwam | 2025-10-11 15:02:57+00:00
This is large but not a black swan by any means. If you trade NQ for several years or more these movements should not be surprising. Even at after the drop, it is (in my opinion) absurdly overvalued, and has been for 5+years. That said… the advice about the market remaining irrational longer than you can remain solvent applies.
by rishabh16 | 2025-10-11 15:03:29+00:00
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by csar | 2025-10-11 15:03:57+00:00
I’m curious how you think this compares to the Research -> Plan -> Implement method and prompts from the “Advanced Context Engineering from Agents” video when it comes to actual coding performance on large codebases. I think picking up skills is useful for broadening agents abilities, but I’m not sure I’d that’s the right thing for actual development.

The packaged collection is very cool and so is the idea of automatically adding new abilities, but I’m not fully convinced that this concept of skills is that much better than having custom commands+sub-agents. I’ll have to play around with it these next few days and compare.
by fsloth | 2025-10-11 15:04:19+00:00
I agree alzheimers turns everything to shit in every meaning of the word.

I disagree it’s up to you to conclude it would have been better if he had been killed 3 years earlier (which you imply).

In general you don’t have the right to such a statement.

Now, if you were discussing _your own_ condition this would be a totally valid consideration IMHO. But you (almost) _never_ have the right to conclude from someone elses part when it’s their time to go.

Assisted suicide is a humane option but ”I hope he had died with some dignity years ago instead of pissing everyone off” tarnishes the entire concept and is exactly the type of argument which stops assisted suecide becoming a more widely accepted option.
by pflenker | 2025-10-11 15:05:08+00:00
The same argument would apply to any other kind of will or testament. You need to update it frequently. It’s not uncommon for people to change their mind quite late, and (at least in Germany) that’s perfectly possible even until late. If people dispute this later change of mind a judge needs to get involved, and being married to one I can tell you that they treat each case differently and with the appropriate care.

Arguably the best qualified person to decide what to do with Future You is Present You.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-11 15:05:15+00:00
C has one massive advantage over many other languages: it is just a slight level above assembler and it is just about as minimal as a language can be. It doesn't force you into an eco-system, plays nice with lots of other tools and languages and gets out of the way. 'modern' languages, such as Java, Rust, Python, Javascript (Node) and so on all require you to buy in to the whole menu, they're not 'just a language' (even if some of them started out like that).
by lelanthran | 2025-10-11 15:05:24+00:00
> Why does "unidiomatic" have to imply "buggy" code?

Because when you stray from idioms you're going off down unfamiliar paths. All languages have better support for specific idioms. Trying to pound a square peg into a round hole can work, but is unlikely to work well.

> You're basically saying an unidiomatic approach is doomed to introduce bugs and will never reduce them.

Well, yes. Who's going to reduce them? Where are you planning to find people who are used to code written in an unusual manner?

By definition alone, code is written for humans to read. If you're writing it in a way that's difficult for humans to read, then of course the bug level can only go up and not down.

> It sounds weird. If I write Python code with minimal side effects like in Haskell, wouldn't it at least reduce the possibility of side-effect bugs even though it wasn't "Pythonic"?

"Pythonic" does not mean the same thing as "Idiomatic code in Python".
by its-summertime | 2025-10-11 15:06:22+00:00
I'd prefer:

<output for=input> <!-- bring your own time-locale component --> <time is=time-locale datetime=2001-02-03>2001-02-03</time> </output>

With the component replacing the value dependent on locale. I don't think having HTML/CSS fiddling around with making fake content is a great idea, it already causes issues with trying to copy things injected by CSS's :before/:after psudoelements, let alone having a difference between the DOM's .innerText and, well, the inner text.

Not saying decisions can't be made about these things, just that, making those decisions will pretty much make a dedicated DSL out of a single element (dependent on input, desired kind of output (absolute or relative), other data sent along side (type of currency, does it need to be a "real" currency? Since instead of just calling something in mutable/overridable JS, its now part of the HTML processing, something that can't directly be touched)
by hmottestad | 2025-10-11 15:06:36+00:00
Phishing. Super easy now to send a fake email with a great offer, and have your name and loyalty programme number right there in the email. Much easier to trick someone when your email contains a bunch of personal info that you wouldn’t assume others to have.

«Happy birthday! As a loyal Quantas customer, we would like to offer you a sneak peek of our upcoming Black Friday deals. Consider it a little birthday present from us.»
by robocat | 2025-10-11 15:06:51+00:00
There's no need to be rude.

cycomanic knows stuff but their answer was basically contradicting chrneu, which nobody likes. It is counterintuitive to me (and I'm guessing cycomanic too) that the different bands should interact so much.

The AI answers passed my shit-detector... And I think it is the same as trying to be helpful but providing a search link in the past. Other HN users can make their own decision about reading the prompt or reply (although using links does make me wonder about cross account tracking and doxing myself).
by CooCooCaCha | 2025-10-11 15:06:57+00:00
Entertainment is becoming increasingly customizable and personalized. It’ll get to the point, like you said, that we’re not watching the same movie, playing the same game, etc.

It feels like we’re losing something, a shared experience, in favor of an increasingly narcissistic attitude that everything needs to shapeable to individual preferences instead of accepting things as they are.
by drob518 | 2025-10-11 15:07:12+00:00
While there may be no technical reasons why these functions need to be bundled together in a forge, there may still be economic reasons (can’t support development as a standalone function) and usability reasons (people want it to arrive “batteries included”). The counter might be “open source proves this can work because people ignore the economics there, too,” but remember that most open source projects die with a single maintainer and the most successful ones have some sort of corporate patrons contributing sponsorship money, engineers, etc.
by MichaelRo | 2025-10-11 15:07:47+00:00
Yeah, I think it was but I was just starting in programming and GOSUB didn't made much sense to me as it's not a proper structured programming procedure with input and output params but more like a hack with data passed through global variables. And by the time I learned structured programming I already moved to Pascal (HiSoft Pascal : https://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Hisoft_Pascal ) and there was no turning back to BASIC.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-10-11 15:08:37+00:00
I can't imagine why this wouldn't be parody but Dumb Starbucks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumb_Starbucks) was fine, and I can't help but imagine that the number of attorneys MTV/Viacom can put to the field has a lot to do with why it went that way. Doing a lot of imagining lately.
by grishka | 2025-10-11 15:09:07+00:00
I'm not an American, I've only ever been to NYC once in 2014, and I was only 8 when 9/11 happened, but somehow, seeing that skyline with those two towers still in it, evokes the feeling of simpler, friendlier times. Even though in the 90s, my own country was going through the troubles of recovering from 70 years of socialism — it was anything but simpler friendlier times.
by liendolucas | 2025-10-11 15:09:14+00:00
Uff, they are really really pushing for people to keep using Windows, huh? Some time ago it was Windows Subsystem for Linux. Now this.

I already said the same in that HN thread and will repeat it here:

Let's do it the other way round: run Windows in FreeBSD with bhyve and voila. But even better, just switch to FreeBSD. It's an amazing and rock solid OS.

Microsoft loves open source so much that they are putting efforts into... making you keep using their lousy closed source OS infested with telemetry and dark patterns. No thanks.
by MountDoom | 2025-10-11 15:09:30+00:00
Sort of. There are many confounding factors here. For one, they're harder to find because the number of personal websites doesn't scale as quickly as commercial content and SEO spam. It's also a bit of a vicious cycle, because if your website is less likely to be read by anyone, why bother writing it in the first place?

But for the most part, the very people bemoaning the current state of affairs then go back to scrolling through TikTok / Instagram / Facebook / Reddit.
by shinycode | 2025-10-11 15:09:56+00:00
I completely agree with you. And sometimes depending on the content it’s unreadable that’s for sure. But they must have an endgame. Maybe they get us used to the UI, users will complain and in 6 months will get used to it and in a year it’s forgotten & updated. Because if they have a new paradigm then it’s easier for them if people are already used to the UX I guess ?