MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by giancarlostoro | 2025-10-31 18:02:23+00:00
If you're going to get a MacBook, get the Pro, it has a built-in fan, you don't want the heat just sitting there on the MacBook Air. Same with the Mac mini, get the studio instead, it has a fan, the Mini does not. I don't know about you but I wouldn't want my brand new laptop / desktop to be heating up the entire time I'm coding with 0 cool off. If you go the Mac route, I recommend getting TG Pro, the default fan settings on the Mac are awful they don't kick in soon enough, TG Pro lets you make it a little more "sensitive" to those temperature shifts, its like $20 for TG Pro if I remember correctly, but worth it.

I have a MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro chip, and 24GB of RAM, I believe only 16 of it is usable by the models, so I can run the GPT OSS 20B model (iirc) but the smaller one. It can do a bit, but the context window fills up quickly, so I do find myself switching context windows often enough. I do wonder if a maxed out MacBook Pro would be able to run larger context windows, then I would easily be able to code all day with it offline.

I do think Macs are phenomenal at running local LLMs if you get the right one.
by svat | 2025-10-31 18:02:38+00:00
The article says this was for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition, and it appears that a high-schooler Donald Knuth got to see one such machine in Chicago (possibly on a school trip; he grew up in Milwaukee) long before his first encounter with a computer, as documented in TAOCP vol 4A:

> This setup is based on an exhibit from the early 1950s at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, where the author was first introduced to the magic of switching circuits. The machine in Chicago, designed by researchers at Bell Telephone Laboratories, allowed me to go first; yet I soon discovered there was no way to defeat it. Therefore I decided to move as stupidly as possible, hoping that the designers had not anticipated such bizarre behavior. In fact I allowed the machine to reach a position where it had two winning moves; and it seized both of them! Moving twice is of course a flagrant violation of the rules, so I had won a moral victory even though the machine had announced that I had lost.

Later, a program for playing tic-tac-toe was one of the first programs he wrote, after he entered college and discovered computers. (He also quotes Charles Babbage! https://research.swtch.com/tictactoe)
by mmh0000 | 2025-10-31 18:02:38+00:00
To be fair, for those of us who live in a terminal, the terminal is/was not solved.

Old terminals are slow and have a bunch of weird Unicode issues.

Now, Warp is a terrible product, and I have nothing nice to say about them.

But look at modern terminals like Kitty or Ghostty. There are so many very nice improvements. Like mouse support that works well (as opposed to "kind of works, but who needs a mouse?!, won't fix"), fast keyboard response (you'd think it wouldn't be noticeable, but it's very noticeable), copy-and-paste that makes sense and isn't different from everything else on the system, etc.

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

https://ghostty.org/
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-31 18:02:42+00:00
I think that's almost unfair, to say someone can't feel feelings without being labeled as part of a "mental health crisis". Just because you and I don't understand it doesn't mean it's inherently bad. I mean I think it probably could be bad, but not just because I don't understand how they're feeling those feelings. But I wouldn't label those people "sick", feels borderline disrespectful.
by Marha01 | 2025-10-31 18:02:54+00:00
Your logic might make intuitive sense, but I don't think it is as ironclad as you portray it.

The fact is, there is no law of physics that prevents the existence of a system that can decrease its internal entropy (complexity) on its own, provided you constantly supply it with energy (negative entropy). Evolutionary algorithm (or "life") is an example of such a system. It is conceivable that there is a point when a LLM is smart enough to be useful for improving its own training data, which then can be used to train a slightly smarter version, which can be used to improve the data even more etc... Every time you inference to edit the training data and train, you are supplying a large amount of energy into the system (both inferencing and training consumes a lot of energy). This is where the decrease in entropy (increase in internal model complexity and intelligence) can come from.
by MetaWhirledPeas | 2025-10-31 18:04:02+00:00
It didn't disappear; there's just less of it. Only the stateful things need to remain stateful. Everything else becomes single-use.

Declaring something as a constant gives you license to only need to understand it once. You don't have to trace through the rest of the code finding out new ways it was reassigned. This frees up your mind to move on to the next thing.
by mschwaig | 2025-10-31 18:04:59+00:00
I mentioned another alternative to adding flake-specific metadata to data structures that are transferred over the network, as part of the signed traces or otherwise, in a comment on that PR Eelco linked.

It's keeping flake-specific data locally, to guarantee that it matches how the user ended up with the data, not how the builder produced it. I think otherwise from the user POV such data could again look misleading.
by Amadiro | 2025-10-31 18:05:00+00:00
It's also because around 20 years ago there was a "reset" when we switched from x86 to x86_64. When AMD introduced x86_64, it made a bunch of the previously optional extension (SSE up to a certain version etc) a mandatory part of x86_64. Gentoo systems could already be optimized before on x86 using those instructions, but now (2004ish) every system using x86_64 was automatically always taking full advantage of all of these instructions*.

Since then we've slowly started accumulating optional extensions again; newer SSE versions, AVX, encryption and virtualization extensions, probably some more newfangled AI stuff I'm not on top of. So very slowly it might have started again to make sense for an approach like Gentoo to exist**.

* usual caveats apply; if the compiler can figure out that using the instruction is useful etc.

** but the same caveats as back then apply. A lot of software can't really take advantage of these new instructions, because newer instructions have been getting increasingly more use-case-specific; and applications that can greatly benefit from them will already have alternative code-pathes to take advantage of them anyway. Also a lot of the stuff happening in hardware acceleration has moved to GPUs, which have a feature discovery process independent of CPU instruction set anyway.
by Joker_vD | 2025-10-31 18:05:21+00:00
Well, have you been on, I don't know, TV Tropes? They have those long lists, that are separated into "folders" on a single page. You can click on those "folders" to expand/collapse them, and it's implemented as a <div> with "onclick" property and <ul> inside it (well, used to IIRC; nowadays this <ul> is a child of a sibling <div>).
by darksaints | 2025-10-31 18:05:40+00:00
I absolutely love minizinc and constraint programming in general, but I have to say that the whole concept of a specialized language for constraint programming really breaks down once you get past the toy problem stage. For example, there isn't really IO...the closest you can get is a specialized file format to input data into your model, and printing output to stderr. If you want specialized constraints, you're gonna need to implement them yourself at the language level. There aren't really libraries. It's really fun to play with, but not for serious problems that would underpin a production system.

Although it sometimes feels like it was created by an unholy union of mathematicians and 1990's C++ dweebs that never learned a new thing since Y2K, I'd really recommend Google's or-tools for something similar that requires a better solver and a language with actual capabilities outside of solving toy problems.

And although it's not a traditional constraint solver, I would also recommend Timefold. It's incredibly good for the types of problems that have elements of linear programming, quadratic programming, constraint programming, but also with odd domains that are hard to express as models using typical constraint programming idioms. I actually have had a bunch of incredibly valuable wins with this (and its predecessor Optiplanner)...for example, I've used it to optimize operations planning with $10+B budgets that could save 10+% over previous methodologies. And I've used it to dynamically reoptimized auction bidding strategies for FCC spectrum auctions, which saved us from overbidding on hot bid licenses by adjusting our bidding targets for subsequent rounds to capture better value for our auction money compared to what we could get in the secondary market.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-31 18:06:19+00:00
> I do think Macs are phenomenal at running local LLMs if you get the right one.

How does the prompt processing speed look like today? I think it was either M3 or M4 together with 128GB, trying to run even slightly longer prompts took forever for the initial prompt processing so whatever speed gain you get at inference, basically didn't matter. Maybe it works better today?
by port11 | 2025-10-31 18:06:20+00:00
This is disingenuous as a counter-argument because it's never been possible at this scale — perhaps excepting the Stasi. The sentiment has arisen because:

1) yes, people are more likely to fight it.

2) it's being done at an unprecedented and very intrusive scale.

Wiretapping required more labor on all fronts. Mail snooping the same.

If the "East" isn't fighting this, it might simply be because they see no recourse with their less democratic institutions. (I'm borrowing from you for this last point, I'd never presume the West to be as democratic as we'd like to believe.)
by saltcured | 2025-10-31 18:06:23+00:00
As an older person, I have to say that it feels palpably different to me.

Old time buses with people reading felt a little more like some 80s buses full of people with Walkman headphones. The material was a bit of a performance of "I'm minding my own business".

A modern environment with people grafted to their phone apps feels more than that. It sometimes feels more like the movie cliche of an opium den.

Here, people aren't just signalling the idea that they are minding their own business. They really are lost in their own world of addiction. A circus clown could ride down the aisle juggling flaming bowling pins and these phone users would not even know.
by MantasPetraitis | 2025-10-31 18:06:46+00:00
The way they're framing this… it's unsettling. It's not about simply removing information, it’s about redefining it. Like a slow erosion.

There's a deliberate layering, a building of assumptions. It's… efficient, in a way that feels profoundly wrong.

I'm not saying everyone is acting maliciously, but the process itself... it's designed to limit perspective. To narrow the field.

I just... I need to be careful about how I interpret things. About the sources I trust.

It's a subtle game, and I don’t think I fully understand the rules yet.
by max51 | 2025-10-31 18:06:59+00:00
>Overall, the development world does not intuitively understand the difficulty of creating good interfaces

I think it's because they are not using the product they are designing. A lot of problems you typically see in modern UIs would have been fixed before release if the people writing it were forced to use it daily for their job.

For example, dropdown menus with 95 elements and no search/filter function that are too small and only allow you to see 3 lines at a time.
by zoeysmithe | 2025-10-31 18:07:07+00:00
The war on terror has killed millions of civilians, mostly women and children. Brown University lists excess deaths from the WoT at 4 or 5m. The USA has destabilized many countries and performed coups. It invades and goes to war for its own geopolitical gains and regularly lies why. What you're praising is a horror.

Being defenseless hoping an angry 800lbs gorilla will be kind to you must be the worst system imaginable. A balance of power both economic and arms is going to be the best way forward because now that gorilla knows it can't just do what it wants anymore.
by angiolillo | 2025-10-31 18:07:41+00:00
> any good resources for developing good UX for necessarily complex use cases?

For teasing apart complex workflows I'd suggest Holtzblatt and Beyer's Contextual Design book, I taught a user-centered research and design class many years ago and used that as our textbook, hopefully it still holds up.

For organizing complex applications I like to start with affinity diagrams, card sorts, and collaborative whiteboard sessions. And of course once you have a working prototype, spend as much time as possible quietly watching people interact with your software.
by jhallenworld | 2025-10-31 18:08:02+00:00
I thing I learned only recently is that the write protect switch on the SD card is not an electrical switch connected to anything in the SD card itself: it just hits a lever in the SD socket that opens a contact closure and it's up to the system (hardware and software both) to bother to look at it. So on many systems the write protect switch doesn't even work.
by MetaWhirledPeas | 2025-10-31 18:08:40+00:00
> it'd require too much discipline to do such a thing in Python

Is Python that different from JavaScript? Because it's easy in JavaScript. Just stop typing var and let, and start typing const. When that causes a problem, figure out how to deal with it. If all else fails: "Dear AI, how can I do this thing while continuing to use const? I can't figure it out."
Show HN: Sebastian.run – Build mobile apps from prompts using AI
by HansP958 | 2025-10-31 18:09:08+00:00
Hi HN!

I’ve been working on Sebastian.run — an AI tool that lets you build mobile apps by simply describing them in natural language.

Think of it as “vibe coding” — you type:

“Build me a recipe app with favorites, search, and pastel colors.”

...and in seconds, it generates the full app (frontend + backend + logic).

My goal is to make mobile app creation as intuitive as talking to a designer — no code, no templates, just clear intent.

Why I built it: I got tired of the friction in no-code tools. They made building faster, but not simpler. So I built an AI-native alternative.

How it works:

You type a prompt describing your idea

The AI generates the full structure and UI

You preview instantly in your browser

It’s still in early beta, and I’d love your feedback — especially from developers, designers, and founders who’ve tried no-code tools before.

Try it here: https://sebastian.run

Also wrote a short piece about the concept of “vibe coding” here: https://medium.com/@tonprofil/why-i-stopped-coding-and-start...

Would love to hear your thoughts — what feels promising, what feels missing? Thanks!
by pessimizer | 2025-10-31 18:09:38+00:00
Do they even really have a choice about this? When all your platforms are locked down and proprietary you can't allow piracy apps. I never understood why people buy products like this, but I don't have to understand - some people just don't mind if Amazon or Google own their televisions, or even every sound made in their homes.

And they allowed piracy apps until now, so I was overestimating how fast the frog was boiling anyway. Must have been a good deal while it lasted.

Weird how people are acting like this is a collapse: everything was always locked down until FOSS alternatives came to free you. Megacorps invited you back by letting you pirate a bit, for a while, and now that the alternatives have been adequately starved it's time to get in line again.

Why in the hell would Amazon let you pirate the things it sells (rents?), forever? I think a lot of people got caught up in a free promotion handing out samples of a zero-marginal cost product. It didn't cost them anything to pretend like you were going to have any real control over their completely controlled device.
by cb321 | 2025-10-31 18:09:52+00:00
While it's ecosystem probably does not even match Julia's let alone Python's or the C/FORTRAN-verses, since Nim has been around for almost 20 years and publicly since 2008, there are still a lot of accumulated packages. Some are listed at: https://github.com/ringabout/awesome-nim for really a large (and even so still incomplete!) list of things you might be interested in. Hard to say how well maintained they are. That said, you do probably have to be prepared to do a lot of work yourself and work around compiler limitiations/bugs. Also, binding to C libs is very straightforward with a near trivial FFI.

I suppose it very much depends on the programmer & setting, but like 3 times I've looked for Rust projects similar to Nim ones and found the performance of the Rust quite lacking. Of course, any language that allows you access to assembly makes things ultimately "only" a matter of programmer effort, but the effort to get performance out of Nim seems very competitive in my experience. I've seen at least one ancient 1990s C project be more flexible and much faster in Nim at like 6% the LOC (https://github.com/c-blake/procs for the curious).
by MattyRad | 2025-10-31 18:09:57+00:00
Seems like a catch-22. For codebases that I'm highly familiar with and regularly perform code review in, I'd say "thanks LLM, but I don't trust you, I'm more familiar with this codebase than you, and I don't need your help." For codebases that I'm not familiar with, I'm not really performing code review (at least not approving MR/PRs or doing the merging).

But still, this is very creative and a nice application of LLMs that isn't strictly barf.
by Farbklex | 2025-10-31 18:10:13+00:00
The blacklist is easy to circumvent by offering apps with randomly generated package IDs and probably also with randomly generated signing keys per user.

This is of course more effort than just building and signing the app once, but doable.

Of course you can't have any api keys or functionality in the app, that is bound to a specific app id or signing key.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-10-31 18:10:18+00:00
> Oh, the FIRE community.

I think you may be confused, I'm not part of the FIRE community. I'm only taking the statement that "doing meaningful things is not financially sensible" to its logical conclusion, not endorsing any position.

> If you trained yourself to live looking at the money you need to save to retire, your brain will most likely be wired to that behavior, and breaking free from that will be utterly difficult. On top of that, people with the FIRE mindset have probably by default already a strong (innate? taught?) bias towards enjoying optimizing their life and making it the end goal.

So many assumptions and claims without any supporting evidence:

- "FIRE people" train themselves to live looking at money only.

- This wires their brain to that behaviour (left unclear what this actually means in terms of concrete behaviour).

- Breaking free from this behaviour is difficult.

- People with this mindset have a bias towards enjoying optimizing their life, to the point this is their end goal.

- (Implied) This makes their life some combination of sad/bad/meaningless.

I don't really want to even argue against this because the burden of proof for providing any supporting evidence is yours, not mine. I'm not particularly interested in constructing some overarching psychoanalytic theories for a large category of people who I've never even interacted with, but you do you.
by runevault | 2025-10-31 18:10:26+00:00
Personally I'd tweak your last sentence to "return statements in the middle of a function."

Early returns at the very top for things like None if you pass in an Option type don't increase the risk of bugs, but if you have a return nested somewhere in the middle it makes it easier to either write bugs up front or especially have bugs created during a refactor. I certainly have had cases where returns in the middle of a beefy function caused me headaches when trying to add functionality.
by redhale | 2025-10-31 18:11:05+00:00
You are conflating two different things.

There are "vibe coding" tools like Lovable that let you build a prototype-level app with no coding experience. They're easy and fun, but I probably wouldn't want a novice (or anyone, really) using them within an enterprise codebase.

Then there are tools like Claude Code which, when used by a skilled practitioner, can be used to accelerate real SWE work in enterprise production codebases.

You are of course free to bury your head in the sand and ignore both categories of tools under the same "overhyped fantasy" umbrella, but I think you're doing so at your own professional peril. Just my opinion though.
by valcron1000 | 2025-10-31 18:11:14+00:00
> I mean, Haskell has like what, 2, 3, 4? Major build systems and package repositories? It's a quagmire.

Don't know when was the last time you've used Haskell, but the ecosystem is mainly focused on Cabal as the build tool and Hackage as the official package repository. If you've used Rust:

- rustup -> ghcup - cargo -> cabal - crates.io -> hackage - rustc -> ghc
by contrahax | 2025-10-31 18:11:43+00:00
This ultimately needs to get addressed at the OS level. Why is a random JS file on disk allowed to read my browser cookies without my awareness? Why is a native extension downloaded from S3? This goes across all package managers (npm, pypi, cargo).

I think security controls on macOS have been trending in the right direction to tackle these types of things comprehensively with secure domains, sandboxing, etc. but there is always a war of how much friction is too much when it comes to security.

We saw the same thing with 2SV where people were vehemently against it, and now many are clamoring that it should be the only way to be able to do things like publish packages (I agree! I have no issue jumping through some extra hoops when I publish something a million people will install).

This might be a hot take but I think a lot of loud mouths with their personal preferences have been holding security in this space back for a while, and recently people seem to be getting tired of it and pushing through. The engineering leadership that won't just make these types of high impact security decisions because it might irritate a handful of highly opinionated workflows is unfortunate!
by kevin_thibedeau | 2025-10-31 18:11:49+00:00
Allen Baum has some inside baseball on this:

When the Microelectronics Group was transferred to Intel, that included the StrongARM Group. A month later, everybody in the StrongARM Group had pretty much quit.

https://youtu.be/wN02z1KbFmY?si=Gnt4DHalyKLevV2p

From 2:03:30 he points out that the only purpose of the DEC lawsuit was to facilitate the sale to Compaq without the microelectronics group.
by vindarel | 2025-10-31 18:12:20+00:00
> with the syntax of Python

this library should allow that: https://github.com/hraban/metabang-bind (never tried)

with some limitations: https://github.com/nimpylib/nimpylib/tree/master/doc/mustRew... no "end" argument in print, no triple quote and newline, no "a not in b" (write not (a in b)), no variable named _ (underscore), or double underscore, no slice as foo[:b] where the left part of the slice is not specified, rewrite foo[0:b], etc.
by taf2 | 2025-10-31 18:12:38+00:00
At least with clang it's a warning:

f.c:4:8: warning: initializing 'int *' with an expression of type 'const int *' discards qualifiers [-Wincompatible-pointer-types-discards-qualifiers] 4 | int* p = &x; | ^ ~~ 1 warning generated.
by mentalgear | 2025-10-31 18:12:55+00:00
While there are fascist leaders in those countries (especially Trump modelled is remodelling of the country after Orban's autocratic and corrupt Hungary), those are just 2 of 27 - so far far from the majority.

And many decisions in the EU do not allow for their veto votes anyhow - Orban's Hungary has been withhold now for years Billions of EU investments because of how the countries institutions were hollowed out by him.