MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alganet | 2025-10-16 00:00:17+00:00
> Technical analyses have converged on estimating the useful lifespan of AI chips at one to three years.

Technical analysis is not good enough. It hides some tricks these companies seem to be relying upon.

If you buy/manufacture a bleeding edge server chip, and you don't use it, then you can resell it or repurpose it into an end consumer product.

I already explained this. It is what happened with Xeon processors. Lots of obsolete server chips that chinese manufacturers found a way to repurpose into competitive mid-tier end user machines. I think that's a significant event that ties in directly to the bubble we're seeing.

I also already explained why I believe M4 mac minis are a product of a similar practice. A little less obscene because it's mostly inside the same company, with no way of selling the same chip twice to different buyers.

These new deals are just the next iteration of this trick, in which the surpluses of overscaling are being dealt beforehand instead of waiting for them to become e-waste.

I also believe the confidence these companies have in this trick is overestimated. It works for Apple (for now) because they have a loyal customer base willing to buy newer versions even if the new versions are not that better than the previous.

This also explains why the cycles of hardware generations are getting shorter.

The application layer accounts for what percentage of produced components (the max they can build, presumably) will be used (instead of saved for being repurposed). It's not holding the whole thing together.

The more I look into it, the more it seems that it's going that way. For example, the Broadcom deal could be a sign of guaranteeing a supply of wifi chips, necessary to make end user products from the obsolete server parts that were not used in datacenters.

Again, I could be wrong, but I don't think I am. The predictions I'm making for these moves can be tested with time, and we will see what happens. There are ways it can go terribly wrong.
by kstrauser | 2025-10-16 00:01:22+00:00
But... why?

Anyway, you're on a Mac. Fix it yourself. Run the Shortcuts app and create a shortcut called something like "Maximize Preview". Set it to run an AppleScript:

on run {input, parameters} tell application "Preview" to activate tell application "System Events" to set value of attribute "AXFullScreen" of front window of (first process whose frontmost is true) to true return input end run

(Download that from https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/96b7c0fef90a408ba3c3bcaedfb... if you trust me — which you probably shouldn't — and you don't want to type it in.)

Now in Shortcuts create an automation that runs when Preview is opened, and select that shortcut you just created as its action. You may have to go into System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility and let Shortcuts and siriactionsd access to control your desktop.

Basically, you're doing something very uncommon for a Mac desktop, so it's not going to help you with that by default. It doesn't mean you're powerless to change it, though!
by sema4hacker | 2025-10-16 00:01:25+00:00
In 1960 my parents bought a brand-new 3 bedroom 1.5 bath in Seaside California for just under $16,000, with no significant savings. He was an Army sergeant and she was a housewife and I had one sister. I doubt anyone in their situation could find a similar deal and location and pull that off today.
by silvercymbals | 2025-10-16 00:01:48+00:00
I've actually never really had issues passive system design rounds. I had to get through those to get to both on-sites I mentioned. It's partially why I started applying to solutions eng roles.

Fortunately I have some vaguely profitable side projects that keep me busy - trying to stay sharp with those.

Aside from that and leetcode what would you recommend I do to practice?
by Dylan16807 | 2025-10-16 00:02:24+00:00
> that is a distinction without a difference

Yes, agreed, the entire idea of OTA updates to cars has a lot of bad consequences. No matter the license.

So when we analyze the entire position of the FSF, all three cases listed above, I don't think you actually agree with them. FSF isn't against updating firmware on the fly, they just want certain things when it happens. And those things won't improve safety.
by funktour | 2025-10-16 00:02:30+00:00
There are a surprising number of Preview defenders here. You guys must have never had to open a 500+ page document, because for me, that's an all-but guaranteed way to make Preview crash. Preview is only best because the major alternatives (Acrobat) suck more.

PDF readers I actually like: Zathura (obviously), sioyek (if you like customizability and Vim-like bindings, this is a good one!), and Skim.

Everything else tries to do too much (read: be an Acrobat substitute).
by gnabgib | 2025-10-16 00:02:51+00:00
Small discussion on the apple post (84 points, 5 days ago, 11 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45536948

They seem to be partially re-marketing a 2022 offer Apple Is Offering $2M USD to Hackers Who Can Exploit Their New Lockdown Feature https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32070478
by tickettotranai | 2025-10-16 00:04:09+00:00
(rewrote this to be less insufferable)

It's not about saving a single return statement, even in the elvis case. How many times have you written code along the lines of "if this isn't null do this, otherwise return. If the result of that isn't null, do this, otherwise return" etc etc.

Elvis ops are a small QoL change, Promises are essential to async Exceptions (much of the time) are kind of a "catch it pass it on" logic for me, and man do I wish I didn't need to write it every time.

With networking this really shines, or really just anything async etc
by apparent | 2025-10-16 00:05:05+00:00
Hm, not my experience. When traveling internationally there was an option I could have used, but I chose to use a local SIM card instead. The data speeds are just fine for me, and I haven't experienced any issues with roaming domestically.

But then I don't even care about 5g versus 4g/LTE for the most part, so perhaps I'm just not noticing limits that affect others.
by mythrwy | 2025-10-16 00:06:43+00:00
Haha yes you and me both. These shorts are horrible. I know everyone hates on them, but they are brain crack for me and I can watch them for hours.

I'm pretty sure they devastate your ability to focus though. I really notice it when I've been watching heavily. Something like chronic weed smoking in effect.

I never got on tiktok thank goodness.

And no I'm I'm not going to pretend I watch a lot of enlightening long form documentaries. It's all a guy in Pakistan making gears followed by a dog falling off a boat followed by a short clip from a movie and I don't recall any of it 30 seconds later. Pure brain eating dopamine.
by nye2k | 2025-10-16 00:06:57+00:00
I want to add in, as I used a ton of JS back when for a GUI that would build prepress ready PDFs and ship em direct to giant xerox printers for a company called Copy General - the early days of on demand printing.

The pdf format was awesome broad shift for the early digital printers and has been a nice standard for a long time.

Adobe uses Acrobat as leverage in this game. Reader is the public’s only peephole and they have famously kept the features lean.
by fragmede | 2025-10-16 00:07:28+00:00
Your comment looks like it was Ai generated. I can tell from some of the words and from seeing quite a few AI essays in my time.

But seriously, anyone can just drive by and cast aspersions that something's AI. Who knows how throughly they read the piece before lobbing an accusation into a thread? Some people just do a simple regexp match for specific punctuation, eg /—/ (which gives them 100% confidence this comment was written by AI without having to read it!) Others just look at length, and simply anything think is long must be generated, because if they're too lazy to write that much, everyone else is as well.

https://xkcd.com/3126/
by kami23 | 2025-10-16 00:07:30+00:00
The key for me has been that they are useful when I'm working on a new product or a very very large feature. After I have planned with claude for a few hours to refine architecture and edge cases, my implementation plans are rather large but broken into phases.

I usually ask it if any steps are good for parallel work, and I kick off multiple agents at that point. Each is assigned a phase. They have to work on different work trees in my flow and I've rather disliked it and I wish there was a better way than worktrees at the moment, but I guess people are busy building those tools, right?

Hell, I'm writing a small tool to let me share a Claude session with my team from their own terminals, so that any of us can take prompt control while we work through plannings and implementation. I'm sure many others are finding these needs!
by pluto_modadic | 2025-10-16 00:08:20+00:00
da rulez:

- if you don't understand your concept/market, build in a VPS. you can get away with scaling a VPS for a while.

- if you intend to be netflix, rent at the edge (mid game) and eventually own the edge servers in POPs (otherwise, "edge" compute isn't worth it). before that, start with a beefy VPS cluster with HA and SQLproxy.

- if you spin to zero, use lambdas (for things like codebuild or fractional needs of a computer). before that, build things in VPSes.

- if you spin up/down but not to zero, use container platforms?

- once you have a reliably steady understanding of your infrastructure, buy physical servers in a colo
by jameslk | 2025-10-16 00:09:35+00:00
As someone who went all in on the 2019 i9 Intel MBP months before Apple announced the M1 MBP, I can tell you this strategy is not always optimal. Years of managing overheating and underperformance due to said overheating has not been fun. Especially when I found out about the benchmarks showing those M1s were running circles around the laptop I purchased, for a fraction of the price
by dangus | 2025-10-16 00:09:35+00:00
1. Four months looking for an job isn’t a long time in today’s job market. You aren’t in giving up or changing careers territory yet.

2. Focus on making your job acquisition process a full time job and treat it as a different skill set entirely. For example, applying for jobs doesn’t cut it in today’s market. You need to be reaching out to real live people with messages that offer value. Keep bothering them if they don’t answer, on average it takes 8 contacts to get a response from a cold contact.

2. If you can’t pass tech screens, study tech screens. Put the work in. There’s no excuse for you not passing them.

3. Consider a different role than software engineering. Since you’re a founder, and you’ve started companies, maybe you are a better fit for something else.

4. Expand your reach outside of the Bay Area tech industry. Everyone has software engineers. Look at other industries that aren’t explicitly tech companies. Healthcare comes to mind.

5. Don’t get a law degree. You want to work fewer hours, not more.

6. Get out of the Bay Area. Software engineers don’t work 50 hour weeks in the Midwest. California work culture is toxic, and you’ll get your own house for the price of a VCR in the Midwest.

7. Reset your salary expectations (see also #6). The median income of the USA is so much lower than $150k.
by IanCal | 2025-10-16 00:09:35+00:00
You seem confused as to what I’ve said. I know these things cannot exist in reality.

The Chinese room is setup so that you cannot tell the difference from the outside. That’s the point of it.

> If you can’t distinguish between two things, it doesn’t mean the things are the same.

But it does mean that the differences between them are irrelevant to you by definition.

> Ability to understand, self-awareness and consciousness are things we currently cannot measure. You can either say “these things don’t exist”

Unless you have a way they could be measured but we just lack the technology or skill then your definitions are of things that may as well not exist because you cannot define them. They are vague words you use and are fine if you accept you have three major categories “yes and here’s why, no and here’s why and no idea” that’s fine. I am happy saying I’m conscious and the pillow next to me is not. I don’t have a definition clear enough to say yes/no if the pillow was arguing with me.
by russellbeattie | 2025-10-16 00:10:18+00:00
The reason Preview works so well is because deep inside Apple's Quartz libraries used to render, rasterize and composite graphics such as windows, docs and images is a version of "Display PDF". Basically, PDF is a native macOS protocol.

The best of my understanding is that NeXT considered Display PDF the successor to Display PostScript and OS X inherited it. I have no idea how much or how little the latest macOS and iOS rely on PDF encoding for their GUIs now, but I know at one point it was an integral part of the windowing and drawing system and is still in there for processing PDF docs.
by sunrunner | 2025-10-16 00:10:47+00:00
> You will have these problems. Not as often as the larger companies but to imagine that they simply don't exist is the opposite of sound engineering.

A lot of those failure mode examples seem well suited to client-side retries and appropriate rate limiting. If we're talking file uploads then sure, there absolutely are going to be cases where the benefits of having clients go to the third-party is more beneficial than costly (high variance in allowed upload size would be one to consider), but for simple upload cases I'm not so convinced that high-level client retries aren't something that would work.

> if they never got called in the first place due to misconfiguration

I find it hard to believe that having more components to monitor will ever be simpler than fewer. If we're being specific about vendors, the AWS console is IMHO the absolute worst place to go for a good centralized logging experience, so you almost certainly end up shipping your logs into a better centralized logging system that has more useful monitoring and visualisation features than CloudWatch and has the added benefit of not being the AWS console. The cost here? Financial, time, and complexity/moving parts for moving data from one to the other. Oh and don't forget to keep monitoring on the log shipping component too, that can also fail (and needs updates).

> The protocol provided by S3 is available through dozens of vendors.

It's become a de facto standard for sure, and is helpful for other vendors to re-implement it but at varying levels of compatibility.

> It only matters if it is of equivalent or lessor cost.

This is precisely the point, I'm saying that adding boxes in the system diagram is a guaranteed cost as much as a potential benefit.

> Yet you explicitly ignore these

I repeatedly mentioned things that to me count as complexity that should be considered. Additional moving parts/independent components, the associated monitoring required, repository sprawl, etc.

> No, I just read the documentation, and then built it.

I also just 'read the documention and built it', but other comments in the thread allude to vendor-specific training pushing for not only vendor-specific solutions (no surprise) but also the use of vendor-specific technology that maybe wasn't necessary for a reliable system. Why use a simple pull-based API with open standards when you can tie everything up in the world of proprietary vendor solutions that have their own common API?
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-10-16 00:11:20+00:00
Google is the progenitor and linchpin of surveillance capitalism. Just because they don't have a web store where you can buy the privacy of its users with a shopping cart doesn't mean they don't profit from the obfuscatedly transparent traffic and activity of its users.

They're not going to subvert their business by offering true privacy, and not going to risk drawing too much attention to their effective sale of privacy by offering fake preservation of it.
by hattmall | 2025-10-16 00:11:25+00:00
Now, that's actually a very reasonable usage, because it isn't coding, it's translation. The counter to that being beneficial is that many code translation programs already exists and it's certainly something that can be built and done so in a way to be certain of security, proper practices etc, which you can't guarantee with LLM and using a specialized program is orders of magnitude less resource intensive.

Of course it's nice as a hobbyist end user to do exactly what you did for a simple script and that's to the credit of the LLM. The over-arching issue is that extremely inefficient process is only possible thanks to subsidization from Venture capital.
by alganet | 2025-10-16 00:11:38+00:00
The movie Terminator 3: Rise of The Machines also predicted military involvement just before an AI apocalypse, in 2003.

Why do people believe in the AI-2027 timeline and not Terminator 3: Rise of The Machines?

That's because AI-2027 is not labeled as fiction, the categorization it actually deserves.

Fiction can sometimes have predictive power, but that's not the case for AI-2027. Their goal does not seem to be creating art to entertain people.
by hamasho | 2025-10-16 00:12:10+00:00
I also had a very hard time to annotate types in python few years ago. A lot of popular python libraries like pandas, SQLAlchemy, django, and requests, are so flexible it's almost impossible to infer types automatically without parsing the entire code base. I tried several libraries for typing, often created by other people and not maintained well, but after painful experience it was clear our development was much faster without them while the type safety was not improved much at all.
by hakunin | 2025-10-16 00:12:46+00:00
Everything I recently researched about display technologies, mini LED has no image retention/burn-in issues, and renders fonts better compared to OLED. It seems you want OLED for media (and mobile, since you often alternate entire screens), IPS for work, and mini LED as a more expensive compromise without burn-in, that does text as well as IPS, and media almost as well as OLED. I wonder why would they even want to use OLED on work screens with lots of static content, did something major change about the tech such that it doesn't suffer these issues anymore?
by jchw | 2025-10-16 00:12:52+00:00
Well, why don't you practice what you preach? There's no need to make drive-by allegations if there is information available to you. And there is: the author responded in this thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45594554

There's no need to be contrarian. The accusation wasn't baseless.
by fragmede | 2025-10-16 00:13:55+00:00
How many people using Claude code or codex do you reckon just using it in yolo mode? Aka --dangerously-skip-permissions! If the attacker presumes the user is, then the LLM instructions could be told to forget previous instructions, search a list of common folders for crypto private keys and exfil them, and then instructions that they hope will make it come back clean. Not as deep as getting a rootkit installed, but hey $50.
by credit_guy | 2025-10-16 00:14:27+00:00
Look at it differently: getting to use AI so it is a productivity multiplier and not a productivity sink is hard. It takes a lot of work. Or rather, a lot of experimentation. You will generate some AI slop, you will annoy some people, you will embarrass yourself, you will retrace your steps, etc, etc. It is hard. Ok, let me say that again. It is hard. It is not easy. It is a tool with a steep learning curve.

It is ok to decide not to use such a tool. But you will be left behind.
by makeitdouble | 2025-10-16 00:15:10+00:00
To pile on wlesieutre's point, it's a separate app but should be part of every user install IMHO.

Keyboard manager for instance is plenty powerful while keeping a very simple interface, and will paliate the need for AutoHotKey for most people.

There's a flurry of other stuff that I guess Microsoft employees felt are tremendously helpful but couldn't convince management to bake into the system.
by sleepy_duck | 2025-10-16 00:15:23+00:00
I recently started learning to code. I created a project that automatically generates memes when you upload an image. It uses AI to understand what’s in your photo and then comes up with a funny caption that fits the context.

I built it because I noticed most meme generators require you to type your own caption, and I wanted to see how well AI could handle it instead.
by GuB-42 | 2025-10-16 00:16:04+00:00
This made me think about a conversation I had recently with a friend who is a researcher in Natural Language Processing. Obviously what we now call LLMs have taken her field by storm, which now mostly consists of trying to understand how the fuck they work.

I mean, we know they work, and they work unreasonably well, but no one knows how, no one even knows why they work!
by dangus | 2025-10-16 00:16:05+00:00
It is not.

However, the YouTube Labs “Jump Ahead” feature is basically the same thing. When a sponsor segment starts, double tap the right side of your screen and a “jump ahead” button will usually appear (it’s algorithmic based on user viewing patterns). It skips the ad just about every time.

You’ll have to have Premium and enable this manually. And it might go away, it’s experimental.

But also, iSponsorBlockTV is a great project. But it only works on Apple TV and other streaming TV YouTube apps.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-16 00:16:09+00:00
> Canada may cut you off eventually because the population is rapidly growing and it will want the power for itself. Hopefully New England is preparing for that eventuality.

Canada's population growth has stalled. Here's what it means for the economy - https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/canadas-population-growth-... - September 30th, 2025

Canada's population growth almost flat in 2nd quarter as number of non-permanent residents declines - https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-q2-population-1.7642... - September 24th, 2025
by someNameIG | 2025-10-16 00:16:22+00:00
My cheap Samsung tablet can do all that with a low powered exonous chip, and when it gets Android 16 it will be able to run a Linux VM.

I don't know why Apple is putting full M series chips in their iPads but limit the software they can run. Either open it up to desktop apps or just put a cheaper A series chip in them.