MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cubefox | 2025-10-14 11:51:42+00:00
> Why do we design new programming languages?

The main answer is that we have only a limited ability to modernize existing programming languages. For example, most languages are not null safe, because most languages are old and we can't make them null safe without breaking backward compatibility with most existing code. And we can't break backward compatibility for practical reasons. So Java will never be null safe, PHP will never be strongly or statically typed, etc.

So for fundamental language features, replacing older languages is the only way to achieve progress. Unfortunately that's a very slow process. Python, the currently most popular language, is already over 30 years old.
Show HN: P2P WhatsApp Clone
by Screen8774 | 2025-10-14 11:52:32+00:00
IMPORTANT NOTE - READ FIRST:

This is still a work-in-progress and a close-source project (This is what a honeypot would look like). To view the open source MVP version see [here](https://github.com/positive-intentions/chat). NONE of my projects have been audited or reviewed. I provide them for testing and demo purposes only. NOT to replace your current messaging app (or any other app you use).

BE RESPONSIBLE WHEN USING UNAUDITED SOFTWARE... DO NOT USE FOR SENSITIVE PURPOSES.

---

Now that I've hit you over the head with caution...

Want to send encrypted WebRTC messages and video calls with no downloads, no sign-ups and no tracking?

This prototype uses WebRTC to establish an encrypted browser-to-browser connection. Everything is ephemeral and cleared when you refresh the page - true zerodata privacy!

Check out the pre-release demo.

- Demo: https://p2p.positive-intentions.com/iframe.html?globals=&id=... - Website: https://positive-intentions.com - Mastodon: https://infosec.exchange/@xoron
by otterley | 2025-10-14 11:52:44+00:00
This is probably the stupidest thread I've ever had the displeasure of reading. In the U.S., most homicide perpetrators are white. And it is extremely rare for a Black person to intentionally kill a white person.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
by skydhash | 2025-10-14 11:53:33+00:00
> It's great, some of the time, the great draw of computing was that it would always catch the silly things we do as humans.

People are saying that you should write a thesis-length file of rules, and they’re the same people balking at programming language syntax and formalism. Tools like linters, test runners, compilers are reliable in a sense that you know exactly where the guardrails are and where to focus mentally to solve an issue.
by ricardobeat | 2025-10-14 11:54:30+00:00
If the terms on the product say your access might be revoked because you asked questions about their parent company, that’s illegal and should be contested.

That said, this is entirely different – citizens have the right to know what is happening within all branches of the government, and not only via official press releases. Some level of transparency is a critical requirement for a functioning democracy (I understand the US might be a little past that point).
by pjmlp | 2025-10-14 11:54:48+00:00
Even earlier, I was introduced to the concept of containers in HP-UX Vault back in 1999, before FreeBSD and Solaris got them.

Unfortunely HPe has removed most of HP-UX documentation out of Internet so it is hard to point it out.

However there are still some digital traces,

HP-UX 10.24 release,

> This is a Virtual Vault release of HP-UX, providing enhanced security features. Virtual Vault is a compartmentalised operating system in which each file is assigned a compartment and processes only have access to files in the appropriate compartment and unlike most other UNIX systems the superuser (or root) does not have complete access to the system without following correct procedures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-UX

A forum discussion,

https://community.hpe.com/t5/operating-system-hp-ux/hp-virtu...

Now it would be great to get back those HP-UX Vault PDFs.
by bonsai_spool | 2025-10-14 11:54:59+00:00
> Fun fact: using this ultrasound for prostate cancer treatment reduces the risk of erectile disfunction

I’m not aware of strong evidence in this area (not saying you’re incorrect).

For the liver indications, several elite radiology departments have had very poor outcomes with their patients, despite the strong public data. I would not, with my own prostate, try a new technology until at least a decade out, at least.
by Sammi | 2025-10-14 11:55:10+00:00
I absolute abhor a slippery slope argument that doesn't actually justify why and how this particular slope is slippery. Hand waving that something kinda sorta similar happened before is not good enough.

Why and how will keeping some chip manufacturing away from China inevitably lead to Fascism? So much manufacturing has been ceded to to China, that it is at this point reasonable to say the it is time to be careful and stop being naive about China.
by ben_w | 2025-10-14 11:56:13+00:00
> Accurately communicating the sex of the individual reduces the potential for impersonation by probably 50% or more, because people are VERY good at detecting biological sex (regardless of what trans people think of their presentations).

1) If that was true, it still wouldn't be nessesary to record gender as it would cause the presence of disguise to be more obvious.

2) if you want to disguise person A as person B, you pick A that looks like B, it isn't random: Elijah Wood and Daniel Radcliffe famously look alike, neither is going to appear in a biopic of The Rock in the role of Dwayne Johnson.

3) You have no idea how many false negatives or false positives you're making if you don't ask for their background.

Everyone trans person who passes, necessarily doesn't "look trans": Won't say where to avoid outing her, but I suggested a trans woman I knew apply to a team I was in, after she got it the boss (1) took me aside to tell me that she was trans, (2) was shocked when I said I already knew. She had not had surgery by that point, and the company only noticed the transition because she'd also applied to the company before starting the transition.

And conversely some cis people do "look trans", e.g. The French president's wife based on some recent conspiracy theory that makes no sense to me because I can't imagine caring if someone else's spouse has or doesn't have a medical history relating to their genitals.
by ai-christianson | 2025-10-14 11:56:43+00:00
People want predictability from LLMs, but these things are inherently stochastic, not deterministic compilers. What’s working right now isn’t "prompting better," it’s building systems that keep the LLM on track over time: logging, retrying, verifying outputs, giving it context windows that evolve with the repo, etc.

That’s why we’ve been investing so much in multi-agent supervision and reproducibility loops at gobii.ai. You can’t just "trust" the model; you need an environment where it’s continuously evaluated, self-corrects, and coordinates with other agents (and humans) around shared state. Once you do that, it stops feeling like RNG and starts looking like an actual engineering workflow, distributed between humans and LLMs.
by rmoriz | 2025-10-14 11:56:57+00:00
I don't want to be picky, but there is still a lot of value left in "not modern" tasks, like video encoding/transcoding. If somewhere the trickle-down effect is real, then it is computing hardware. Take Hetzner's server auction. If the hardware is physically deployed and running, you just need to find appropriate payloads/customers. https://www.hetzner.com/sb/
by radarsat1 | 2025-10-14 11:57:13+00:00
> scalability needs a whole bunch of complexity

I am not sure this is true. Complexity is a function of architecture. Scalability can be achieved by abstraction, it doesn't necessarily imply highly coupled architecture, in fact scalability benefits from decoupling as much as possible, which effectively reduces complexity.

If you have a simple job to do that fits in an AWS Lambda, why not deploy it that way, scalability is essentially free. But the real advantage is that by writing it as a Lambda you are forced to think of it in stateless terms. On the other hand if suddenly it needs to coordinate with 50 other Lambdas or services, then you have complexity -- usually scalability will suffer in this case, as things become more and more synchronous and interdependent.

> The monolith is composed of separate modules (modules which all run together in the same process).

It's of course great to have a modular architecture, but whether or not they run in the same process should be an implementation detail. Barriers should be explicit. By writing it all depending on local, synchronous, same-process logic, you are likely building in all sorts of implicit barriers that will become hidden dangers when suddenly you do need to scale. And by the way that's one of the reasons we think about scaling in advance, is that when the need comes, it comes quickly.

It's not that you should scale early. But if you're designing a system architecture, I think it's better to think about scaling, not because you need it, but because doing so forces you to modularize, decouple, and make synchronization barriers explicit. If done correctly, this will lead to a better, more robust system even when it's small.

Just like premature optimization -- it's better not to get caught up doing it too early, but you still want to design your system so that you'll be able to do it later when needed, because that time will come, and the opportunity to start over is not going to come as easily as you might imagine.
by AlexWunder | 2025-10-14 11:57:17+00:00
WunderGraph-REMOTE- EMEA-Open Source- Developer Tool- Looking for Staff Typescript/ Staff Full Stack AI Engineers. Comp 90k-130k EUR depending on seniority and location.

WE are looking for our new colleagues at WunderGraph. We are a developer's tool, open source company, remote, global, series A start up, backed by Ebay to continue innovation in the API Management Space.

Currently 35 people, we are working on fresh new projects, we have open roles across:

SENIOR WEB/UX Design Engineer- https://wundergraph.com/jobs/2b5e8d34-d64d-487a-9bd0-ed3f3d5...

Staff Full Stack AI Engineer - https://wundergraph.com/jobs/fadbaed1-cca0-4e17-8126-b7ab3c0...

Staff Typescript ( Library & Algorithm)- https://wundergraph.com/jobs/97443b40-84cd-4d9e-8598-0d5d19c...

+Senior Front End Eng.

We have roles open in US as well such as a Developer Relations Engineer and Media Producer.

Culturally, these opportunities would fit someone that prefers to work in a no BS culture, highly collaborative, with big scope for impact, and supportive leadership.

Please apply if you believe we can grow together.
by etothet | 2025-10-14 11:57:25+00:00
I recommend you check out Andrej Karpathy’s 2 YouTube videos on how LLMs work (they are easy to find, but be forewarned they are long!). Once one digs in deeper it becomes clear why a model today might fail at the task you described.

Generally speaking, one of the behaviors I see in my day to day work leading engineers is that they often attempt to apply agentic coding tools to problema that don’t really benefit from them.
Show HN: Plotnine Cheatsheet [pdf]
by jeroenjanssens | 2025-10-14 11:57:33+00:00
I wanted to share with you a cheatsheet I made for Plotnine, a data visualization package for Python.

I've probably never spent so much time on just two pages, even with the ggplot2 cheatsheet as a starting point. Hope you find it useful.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-14 11:57:51+00:00
I've seen startups killed because of one or two "influential" programmers deciding they need to start architecturing the project for 1000TPS and 10K daily users, as "that's the proper way to build scalable software", while the project itself hasn't even found product-market fit yet and barely has users. Inevitably, the project needs to make a drastic change which now is so painful to do because it no longer fits the perfect vision the lead(s) had.

Cue programmers blaming the product team for "always changing their mind" as they discover what users actually need, and the product team blaming developers for being hesitant to do changes, and when programmers agree, it takes a long time to undo the perfect architecture they've spent weeks fine-tuning against some imaginary future user-base.
by kshacker | 2025-10-14 11:58:04+00:00
Not trying to excuse google but wonder why that happens. I have had my own issues with ChatGPT memory but that's more like it forgets the context and spits out something gibberish at a later invocation counter to what it said earlier in the thread. But that's because it is buggy.

Rewriting history requires computes which is more malicious. Why would someone burn compute to rewrite your stuff given that rewrites are not free? Once again not defending google trying to think through what's going on.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-14 11:58:08+00:00
Linux is already being replaced by type 1 hypervisors on cloud server workloads.

Anyone doing deployments in managed languages, regardless of AOT compiled, or using a JIT, the underlying operating system is mostly irrelevant, with exception of some corner cases regarding performance tweeks and such.

Even if those type 1 hypervisors happen to depend on Linux kernel for their implementation, it is pretty much transparent when using something like Vercel, or Lambda.
by GuB-42 | 2025-10-14 11:58:12+00:00
I have a more cynical view of the reason.

It is to protect commercial interests, I don't think that Google cares about the NSA looking at your personal data.

Google cares a lot about protecting the personal data they get from you, so that they and no one else can get it, at least not for free.

Because let's get real, 99% of the time, why do you need encryption? The reason is commercial activity. It is really important to protect your credit card number, otherwise no one would trust e-commerce. For paid service to work, you need to authenticate, and it means encryption, no paywall means no authentication and much less need for encryption. And even with "free" services, you need encryption to protect the account that shouldn't even be required in the first place. As for general communication, my guess is that hackers and governments alike are more interested in financial data than in casual conversation.

So by pushing TLS everywhere, Google is actually pushing for a more commercial, less open web. That it helps with general privacy (except against Google itself) is just a happy accident.
by acron0 | 2025-10-14 11:58:29+00:00
Ugh, there is just something so satisfying about developer cynicism. It gives me that warm, fuzzy feeling.

I basically agree with most of what the author is saying here, and I think that my feeling is that most developers are at least aware that they should resist technical self-pleasure in pursuit of making sure the business/product they're attached to is actually performing. Are there really people out there who still reach for Meta-scale by default? Who start with microservices?
by Hendrikto | 2025-10-14 11:58:41+00:00
Web standards are in the same boat as C++. They can never really deprecate anything, but they want shiny new things, so they just add and add on top of the pile.

Every feature sounds great in isolation, but in aggregate they become a moloch.

Then people say “modern CSS is great, you just have to pick the ‘good subset’.”, but then nobody can agree what that subset should be, and everybody else uses a different subset.

LLMs also contribute to this, as 90% of what’s available on the web is considered outdated now, but that is the majority of training data.
by jwr | 2025-10-14 11:59:03+00:00
I don't get this scalability craze either. Computers are stupid fast these days and unless you are doing something silly, it's difficult to run into CPU speed limitations.

I've been running a SaaS for 10 years now. Initially on a single server, after a couple of years moved to a distributed database (RethinkDB) and a 3-server setup, not for "scalability" but to get redundancy and prevent data loss. Haven't felt a need for more servers yet. No microservices, no Kubernetes, no AWS, just plain bare-metal servers managed through ansible.

I guess things look different if you're using somebody else's money.
by _ZeD_ | 2025-10-14 11:59:28+00:00
Honestly, in my experience, the only good reason to have microservices in a "software solution" is to be able to match 1 service -> 1 mantainer/team and have a big (read "nested", with multiple level of middle-managers) group of teams, each that may have different goals. In this way it's very easy to "map" a manager/team to a "place" in the solution map, with very explicit and documented interactions between them
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-14 11:59:43+00:00
> It's of course great to have a modular architecture, but whether or not they run in the same process should be an implementation detail

It should be, but I think "microservices" somehow screwed up that. Many developers think "modular architecture == separate services communicating via HTTP/network that can be swapped", failing to realize you can do exactly what you're talking about. It doesn't really matter what the barrier is, as long as it's clear, and more often than not, network seems to be the default barrier when it doesn't have to be.
by smokel | 2025-10-14 11:59:49+00:00
ThoughtWorks gathers this phenomenon under the term "envy": Web Scale envy [1] or Big Data envy [2] are two relevant blips on their technology radar. It is typically better to keep things simple.

[1] https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques/high-performan...

[2] https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques/big-data-envy
by rjmunro | 2025-10-14 12:00:19+00:00
The whole point of owning shares is to share in a company’s profits. In simple terms, you make money through dividends or buybacks. Without that, there’s really no reason to own the stock. Sure, prices go up and down, and you can try to profit from that, but if a company never plans to return money to shareholders, there’s nothing real behind the price. Eventually you’d just be holding on until the company fades away or goes bankrupt.

Buybacks are just another way of giving profits back to shareholders—an alternative to dividends with different tax implications. Their purpose isn't to "allow companies to reward executives directly", they are just an alternative way for shareholders to share in the profits.

A company could tie executives compensation to the amount of dividend if it wanted. That might be a good idea.
by Rochus | 2025-10-14 12:00:48+00:00
Perl presents a fascinating counterexample: Larry Wall, trained as a linguist, explicitly cared about human factors, but his linguistic philosophy produced a language that empirical tests show performs poorly on readability and learnability measures (see e.g. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2534973 or https://doi.org/10.1145/2089155.2089159).
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-10-14 12:01:15+00:00
> I mean, compare Google with Facebook. Surely we can agree Google is the better behaved of those two.

I'm not sure I agree, particularly with respect to their core businesses. Like Google basically own all parts of the ad stack and use that dominance to compete unfairly against basically everyone else, causing them to appear to be a better service. There was even an anti-trust case about it (up for sentencing at the moment, here's hoping for a breakup).

Facebook have certainly done a bunch of nefarious stuff, but Google is just a more useful product to the people who come here (and I agree with this), so they get more of a pass.
by therealpygon | 2025-10-14 12:02:14+00:00
IMO, it’s just a small scale example of “training to the tests” because “count the ‘r’s in strawberry” became such a popular test that would make the news when a powerful model couldn’t answer such a simple question correctly while being advertised as the smartest model ever.

Assigning this as an indicator for improvement of intelligence seems like a mistake (or wishful).
by rsynnott | 2025-10-14 12:02:25+00:00
> Even if all this new AI would completely vanish overnight, I'm pretty sure most of the world wouldn't care one bit.

If the economic chaos in the US was sufficiently large (I still think this is _kinda_ unlikely, because exposure is pretty concentrated, but with the massive debt raises it's maybe less contcentrated than it used to be), there would likely be contagion.

> If it bankrupts Microsoft, that would have a tremendous impact on many companies using Microsoft products of course

It won't; in terms of publicly traded companies, it's probably mostly Oracle and Nvidia in the firing line. MS has plenty of money.
by Zababa | 2025-10-14 12:02:34+00:00
I've known lots of people that don't know how to properly use Google, and Google has been around for decades. "You're using it wrong" is partially true, I'd say more something like "it is a new tool that changes very quickly, you have to invest a lot of time to learn how to properly use it, most people using it well have been using it a lot over the last two years, you won't catch up in an afternoon. Even after all that time, it may not be the best tool for every job" (proof on the last point being Karpathy saying he wrote nanochat mostly by hand).

It is getting easier and easier to get good results out of them, partially by the models themselves improving, partially by the scaffolding.

> non-developer public is mostly convinced that AI is actually artificial intelligence, rather than a very sophisticated next-word predictor

This is a false dichotomy that assumes we know way more about intelligence than we actually do, and also assumes than what you need to ship lots of high quality software is "intelligence".

>While claiming that an LLM cannot follow a simple instruction sounds, at best, very unlikely, it remains true that these models cannot reliably deliver complex work.

"reliably" is doing a lot of work here. If it means "without human guidance" it is true (for now), if it means "without scaffolding" it is true (also for now), if it means "at all" it is not true, if it means it can't increase dev productivity so that they ship more at the same level of quality, assuming a learning period, it is not true.

I think those conversations would benefit a lot from being more precise and more focused, but I also realize that it's hard to do so because people have vastly different needs, levels of experience, expectations ; there are lots of tools, some similar, some completely different, etc.

To answer your question directly, ie “Why do LLM experiences vary so much among developers?”: because "developer" is a very very very wide category already (MISRA C on a car, web frontend, infra automation, medical software, industry automation are all "developers"), with lots of different domains (both "business domains" as in finance, marketing, education and technical domains like networking, web, mobile, databases, etc), filled with people with very different life paths, very different ways of working, very different knowledge of AIs, very different requirements (some employers forbid everything except a few tools), very different tools that have to be used differently.
by isthatafact | 2025-10-14 12:02:40+00:00
> "What about non-vehicle traffic, like bikes and pedestrians?"

It seems like the world is missing an obvious application for "AI". Every traffic light should notice a walker or biker, and signal them through their intersection without any manual steps. It would require that cars have lower priority than people, but this is already the case in many places, even if not implemented in a practical way.
by yobbo | 2025-10-14 12:02:41+00:00
Many startup business models have no chance of becoming profitable unless they reach a certain scale, but they might have less than 1% probability of reaching that scale. Making it scalable is easy work since it is deterministic, but growing customers is not.

Another perspective is that the defacto purpose of startups (and projects at random companies) may actually be work experience and rehearsal for the day the founders and friends get to interview at an actual FAANG.

I think the author's “dress for the job you want, not the job you have” nails it.