MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nosianu | 2025-10-14 08:51:31+00:00
> My experience is opposite to yours.

But that is exactly the problem, no?

It is like, when you need some prediction (e.g. about market behavior), knowing that somewhere out there there is a person who will make the perfect one. However, instead of your problem being to make the prediction, now it is how to find and identify that expert. Is that type of problem that you converted yours into any less hard though?

I too had some great minor successes, the current products are definitely a great step forward. However, every time I start anything more complex I never know in advance if I end up with utterly unusable code, even after corrections (with the "AI" always confidently claiming that now it definitely fixed the problem), or something usable.

All those examples such as yours suffer from one big problem: They are selected afterwards.

To be useful, you would have to make predictions in advance and then run the "AI" and have your prediction (about its usefulness) verified.

Selecting positive examples after the work is done is not very helpful. All it does is prove that at least sometimes somebody gets something useful out of using an LLM for a complex problem. Okay? I think most people understand that by now.

PS/Edit: Also, success stories we only hear about but cannot follow and reproduce may have been somewhat useful initially, but by now most people are beyond that, willing to give it a try, and would like to have a link to the working and reproducible example. I understand that work can rarely be shared, but then those examples are not very useful any more at this point. What would add real value for readers of these discussions now is when people who say they were successful posted the full, working, reproducible example.

EDIT 2: Another thing: I see comments from people who say they did tweak CLAUDE.md and got it to work. But the point is predictability and consistency! If you have that one project where you twiddled around with the file and added random sentences that you thought could get the LLM to do what you need, that's not very useful. We already know that trying out many things sometimes yields results. But we need predictability and consistency.

We are used to being able to try stuff, and when we get it working we could almost always confidently say that we found the solution, and share it. But LLMs are not that consistent.
by netdevphoenix | 2025-10-14 08:51:31+00:00
> Why do LLM experiences vary so much among developers?

The question assumes that all developers do the same work. The kind of work done by an embedded dev is very different from the work of a front-end dev which is very different from the kind of work a dev at Jane Street does. And even then, devs work on different types of projects: greenfield, brownfield and legacy. Different kind of setups: monorepo, multiple repos. Language diversity: single language, multiple languages, etc.

Devs are not some kind of monolith army working like robots in a factory.

We need to look at these factors before we even consider any sort of ML.
by ehnto | 2025-10-14 08:52:08+00:00
Well we are all doing different tasks on different codebases too. It's very often not discussed, even though it's an incredibly important detail.

But the other thing is that, your expectations normalise, and you will hit its limits more often if you are relying on it more. You will inevitably be unimpressed by it, the longer you use it.

If I use it here and there, I am usually impressed. If I try to use it for my whole day, I am thoroughly unimpressed by the end, having had to re-do countless things it "should" have been capable of based on my own past experience with it.
by makingstuffs | 2025-10-14 08:52:27+00:00
> and it adds _some_ value by thinking of edge cases I might’ve missed, best practices I’m unaware of, and writing better grammar than I do.

This is my most consistent experience. It is great at catching the little silly things we do as humans. As such I have found them to be most useful as PR reviewers which you take with a pinch of salt
by f_devd | 2025-10-14 08:52:52+00:00
Hey. That's sounds like an awful experience. Btrfs has some rough edges especially since a lot of maintenance tasks are "manual", and you are right to try and address it. And it's annoying that becomes personal for some people with too much time.

For my perspective, my experience with btrfs has been flawless through 11 machines and at least 3 major releases on each without any maintenance but it could just be I'm not hitting the worst case (only use snapshots on 2 machines, raid on 3). And I've only used btrfs since fairly recently (~4 years now). I've had to recover one drive of a friend using the method I outlined before as he filled the entire drive with media. For me the trade-off of a few rough edges but more functionality & flexibility than other filesystems is worth it.

For your update issue, I think you're mostly correct; the package manager likely assumes the filesystem is not snapshotted (i.e. it will reclaim disk space), while btrfs with snapshots/CoW will use the entire size of written files unless it's in the same snapshot.
by Topfi | 2025-10-14 08:54:06+00:00
As a European, I of course received slightly delayed access to Googles new AI mode, so just now tried it for the first time.

Normally not one to judge a model by the first prompt, but I felt the need to share my first experience due to how poorly it went and as something of a counter to past reporting by others [0].

Asking for offers concerning the "Google AI Ultra" [1] plan, I received a hodgepodge of incorrect information [2], including the claim that such a plan did not exist for Austrians (despite linking to just the Google One page where it is advertised) and claims around a "Google AI Premium" offering that, as far as I can tell, has been renamed to "Google AI Pro" months ago.

I tried other models, of course, which did handle the task as expected [3].

Genuinely, I cannot for the life of me understand how this happens, especially since the model did find and link to the correct information, especially considering Geminis upcoming models seem very promising in my A/B limited testing. A cautious reminder though that even when it comes to information by the company making that model, using LLMs for (re)search requires users to actually step through the linked sources.

It also reinforces a notion I have had for a while, but never benchmarked due to lack of interest, that despite having the search advantage, Googles models somehow purely subjectively have been the least reliable in using online sources unless directly linked. Bard, Gemini, Attention is all you need, etc. have been a tale of missed opportunities, I feel this has been talked about to no end, but that they still struggle with search after years [4], when the frontier models they release have gotten competitive in most other fields is hard to understand.

[0] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/7/ai-mode/

[1] https://one.google.com/intl/de_at/about/google-ai-plans/

[2] https://share.google/aimode/Pey5o1s8OsrKsxN7J

[3] https://chatgpt.com/share/68ee0ec3-a188-8009-a5fc-aa103754c1... and https://claude.ai/share/0cfd06e9-b67b-442b-87dd-a6843f5b84a1

[4] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
by mschuster91 | 2025-10-14 08:54:29+00:00
> offshored manufacturing pollution

One might be tempted to say that offshoring the manufacturing pollution was the point - the Silicon Valley is the US' top Superfund site for a reason [1]. Now it's not Western countries that get to deal with the legacy of a few decades of exploitative capitalism, it's China, Taiwan and India which are out of sight, out of mind to us.

> Personally, I'd rather pay extra for high quality goods made ethically than some planned obsolescence or plastic garbage.

Indeed but that's a niche market which means R&D costs alone make products so much more expensive that it's basically impossible to compete... and for the stuff that is made domestically, manufacturers love to go for "planned obsolescence" and other strategies to turn consumer spending into recurring revenue - always remember BMW and subscription seat heaters.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/09/silic...
by matttbe | 2025-10-14 08:54:57+00:00
There are different ways to force an app to use MPTCP, where the most convenient method is 'mptcpize run <cmd>', see: https://www.mptcp.dev/setup.html#force-applications-to-use-m...

But the best is to let the app (and their users) controlling that, with a nice option. With Chrome/Firefox/..., we could enable MPTCP per domain for example.
by mrsssnake | 2025-10-14 08:55:22+00:00
> in the name of preserving the rights and capabilities of the tiny base of power users

These are the rights of all the users. Take that perspective.

Remotely pushing a code to billions of devices to lock their baisc function (running code user loads) unless the device owner pay and provide sensitive info is a full-scale global malware attack by itself.
by rcxdude | 2025-10-14 08:56:03+00:00
It is brittle, or at least it's got a limited life. When you don't have these things, you lose the knowledge that set up the system in the first place, and you can be SOL when something breaks. I'm not saying just change things willy-nilly, but if you don't have an active process of understanding and interacting with the way that your factory is set up, you're going out of business, you just don't know when.
by intended | 2025-10-14 08:56:21+00:00
I am going to try and make it a habit to post this request on all LLM Coding questions -

Can we please make it a point to share the following information when we talk about experiences with code bots?

1) Language - gives us an idea if the language has a large corpus of examples or not

2) Project - what were you using it for?

3) Level of experience - neophyte coder? Dunning Krueger uncertainty? Experience in managing other coders? Understand project implementation best practices ?

From what I can tell/suspect, these 3 features are the likely sources of variation in outcomes.

I suspect level of experience is doing significant heavy lifting, because more experienced devs approach projects in a manner that avoids pitfalls from the get go.
by ggsp | 2025-10-14 08:57:14+00:00
Hey, thank you for making this—I really enjoyed playing it and it feels like it fits the mental-reward-between-work-tasks need. It did spin up my M1's fans after a few minutes which is a rather rare occurrence, but I'm guessing that's par for the course when you're working with a bunch of video on canvas. Either way, hope I remember it the next time I'm looking for a puzzle to solve while I take a break :)
Show HN: Runnable Flowcharts for the Web
by sake92 | 2025-10-14 08:57:26+00:00
Title says it all, you can make a flowchart and run it in your browser. I hated it in school when we were just drawing these on a piece of paper.. Only later when we started with Pascal it kinda clicked to me.

It is mostly intended for teaching basics of programming. Used in lots of schools all around the world. Gets around 500 daily users.

There is a series of interactive tutorials: https://flowrun.io/tutorials

Also a free ebook: https://leanpub.com/learnprogrammingwithflowrun

Editor is open source: https://github.com/sacode387/FlowRun

Supports debugging, custom functions and recursion even.

This is an alternative to Flowgorithm, which only works on Windows.
Show HN: Daily NBA and Pokémon bingo – 4×4, no login, speed-run trivia
by teotran | 2025-10-14 08:57:47+00:00
I built a super fast, no-login daily bingo-style quiz:

• Basketball Bingo – match players to intersecting hints (team combos, awards, stat feats) while a 40-player queue ticks down. • Pokémon Bingo – similar idea with abilities/types/stats.

It loads instantly, one new board per day. Feedback on difficulty, mobile feel, and edge-case correctness would help a ton.

Hub: https://www.bballbingo.com/?utm_source=hn&utm_medium=post&ut... Direct: NBA /pokemon links in comments.
Show HN: Query 50M statistics in plain English
by SamTinnerholm | 2025-10-14 08:58:50+00:00
Hey HN,

We built qoery because we were tired of downloading CSVs from the World Bank, Eurostat, OECD, and a dozen other portals every time we needed a simple statistic.

Now you can just ask "What's France's GDP growth rate?" and get structured data back instantly. We've indexed 50M observations from ~10K sources into a single queryable interface.

The technical challenge was less about NLP and more about normalizing incredibly messy data. Every source has different formats, naming conventions, and methodologies. Figuring out which "GDP" you actually mean when there are 47 different series is harder than it sounds.

We're currently focused on economic and demographic data. Free tier is 250 queries/month if you want to try it out.

Curious what statistics you find yourself constantly needing but having to hunt down manually. That's what we're prioritizing next.

Code HN50 for 50% off for three months.
by rep_lodsb | 2025-10-14 08:59:43+00:00
Confusingly written article, to the point of being unreadable unless you already know exactly how graphics drivers in Windows work.

"WDDM is a major overhaul that shifts responsibility of managing the GPU away from Win32k and gives better control over the GPU to the driver vendor. Dxgkrnl.sys, the DirectX graphics driver, talks to a miniport driver to provide varying levels of WDDM interfaces."

"Officially starting with Windows 8, every GPU driver for the system had to be a WDDM driver. But all that was really dropped was the miniport driver."

"For WDDM, the communication back to the miniport driver is more direct."

So does the miniport driver exist in modern Windows at all (and is an essential part of how WDDM works), or was it dropped?
by zzbn00 | 2025-10-14 08:59:51+00:00
Many comments here focusing on secrets and problems. But here is another way to look at this:

Environment variables are the "indefinite scope and dynamic extent" variable bindings to make structured programs out of Unix processes. To compare them to a text file is like writing that a program needs no variables because it can read all the values it needs from an input data file when it needs them.

Environment variables are precisely to be used in situation where sub-processes need to be passed information in a way that is not necessarily affecting subsequent calls to that subprocess from another section of a program. Sometime the subprocesses are sequences of nested shells, and sometimes other more complex programs, but the same idea applies.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-10-14 08:59:55+00:00
>The US is far more welcoming to immigrants than any of those places.

So the country that brought you "No dogs, no blacks, no Irish" and has the strictest work visa process in the world, then kicks you out the moment you loose your job or ICE needs to fulfill their quota, calls itself "far more welcoming to immigrants"?

But yes, I agree to the spirit of your comment that foreigners have an easier time integrating into the US, which happens because unlike European or Asian countries, the US is run less like a homogenous nation of people sharing the same ethnicity, religion, culture and values, and more like an economic zone where everyone, barring the indigenous Indian tribes, is a foreigner and has no obligations of conforming to any social norms or values and is free to pursue individualism and making money, which has the upshot of making the US incredibly wealthy, but also the downside of being more socially divided and unsafe.
by littlestymaar | 2025-10-14 09:00:32+00:00
> Covid was a black swan event

I beg to differ. Epidemiologists and public health planners always knew such a pandemic would happen eventually. In fact, it wasn't even surprising that it came from a coronavirus as this virus group was the most likely contender with the influenza family.

The only open question was when. We dodged the bullet several times over the past two decades with SRAS, H5N1, MERS and H1N1 (notice, two influenza and two coronaviruses), but one virus slipping through was definitely the most likely outcome.

And I can confidently tell you: it will happen again.
by watwut | 2025-10-14 09:00:56+00:00
Maybe they should not vote for guy who did exactly this already once and said repeatedly that he will do this.

Frankly, they voted for Trump, because they thought only liberals, trans and other people they hate will be harmed. It is really not the case that they would be victims on an unexpected event. They wanted this to happen, just kind of to everyone else.
by mtrovo | 2025-10-14 09:02:40+00:00
You're talking about it as if it was a bug, it was not. I'm pretty sure a generation of MBAs got raised and retired really rich shifting manufacturing jobs to China. The narrative about them not being open is just a way to cope with their rise now and get rid of any blame.

> We gave China everything - we allowed their people to study at our universities, we allowed their tourists, we gave them virtually full access to our economic market, we gave them access to the Internet, we gave them seriously discounted shipping rates and customs exemptions.

Lol, when you have to convince people that working in services instead of manufacturing is the future, that's what you get. Mindset is also a big issue, I know enough people who played the Erasmus game and graduated in double the normal time just by coasting that I think it's just normal at this point. And the problem with this spiral is that it just compounds, Europe is shifting to a continent of pensionists, highly educated people that live with their parents til their 40s and nepobabies playing airbnb landlords.
by cwillu | 2025-10-14 09:03:17+00:00
“Drone” covers many orders of magnitude in capability, but a CIWS can handle functionally unlimited numbers of the low-end, and the high-end don't clearly win the cost-per-kill war.

Drones are game changing on land because they allow smart munitions to be usefully spread across an entire country, far outpacing a defender's ability to deploy air defenses. But a carrier battle group doesn't have this problem: the defenses are necessarily already positioned on and around the thing being defended.

Where the cost balance starts becoming relevant is when destroyers are trying to defend other vessels: something that could be easily shot down by a CIWS at the target might require an SM-1 if the Standard is coming from 100km away from the target vessel.
by jkrejcha | 2025-10-14 09:03:40+00:00
Part of the problem with namespaces in general comes from setuid/setgid binaries. Now, nosuid helps, but the argument goes (and this is why dropping privileges on Linux sometimes requires root) that blocking setuid can actually increase attack surface (because many programs, as part of their initialization routines setuid to a specific service user). Blocking setuid blocks this which can lead to a program unintentionally running, paradoxically, with too many privileges (or the incorrect set of ones).

And in the case of allowing setuid and filesystem views, the issue here becomes that an unprivileged user could create a view of the filesystem that has an /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow file that the attacker knows in their home directory. Run some setuid program (like su or sudo) with this view and we've successfully became root, breaking out of the sandbox.

And you can't whitelist /etc/passwd or whatever either. This is why allowing anyone to play with mount points is fraught with danger.

Now is suid/sgid a fundamental part of a Unix-like system? No, but setuid was created in the world that was and even though these are arguably bugs, releasing a Linux kernel that creates a bunch of security holes in userspace is a very very bad breakage of userspace.

---

No New Privileges does make this a bit better (as you can never gain more privileges than you already have, and this is a one-way door) and the kernel docs even say that eventually unshare or chroot may be allowed when operating under no new privileges

But this is currently why you can't chroot as an unprivileged user as you can trivially blow through the security domain on most Linux distributions
by aredox | 2025-10-14 09:04:12+00:00
>Assuming the voting and election situation doesn't change, they won't be in office forever, possibly even the next term.

Trump pardoned all of the Jan 6th putchists.

Trump ordered full military honor for Ashley Babbitt.

Trump put openly said after meeting Putin that more than ever, he believes the 2020 elections were rigged.

Trump appointed an election denier as the secretary for "Election Integrity".

Trump appointed pure servile hacks as heads of FBI, CIA and Justice (I mean, Kash write a book with Trump as a king).

Trump ordered 800 military brass to come to Quantico to be lectured about the "Enemy from within", turn American cities into military training grounds and that anyone that disappoints him will lose everything.

I mean, how many more clues do you need, to admit the next election will be cancelled as soon as they lose? He literally said what he was going to do. And there has been no pushback, neither from the military nor parliamentarians.
by thuridas | 2025-10-14 09:04:20+00:00
Without post WW2 taxes.

Part of the problem is that a lot of the extra wealth ends invested in the house market. This increases the cost of terrains for both old and new homes. It is also not very productive just to buy one thing to extract rents from it. ( There is value in handling the rent, building or reforming and old house).

The urban land is limited and requires government infrastructure to connect it.

Another big cost is the university.
by delusional | 2025-10-14 09:04:52+00:00
> Yes it advanced extremely quickly, but that is not a confirmation of anything. It could just be the technology quickly meeting us at either our limit of compute, or it's limit of capability.

To comment om this, because its the most common counter argument. Most technology has worked in steps. We take a step forward, then iterate on essentially the same thing. It's very rare we see order of magnitude improvement on the same fundamental "step".

Cars were quite a step forward from donkeys, but modern cars are not that far off from the first ones. Planes were an amazing invention, but the next model of plane is basically the same thing as the first one.
by holowoodman | 2025-10-14 09:05:24+00:00
> 1000 pages of environmental impact assessment takes time. But it doesn't take years.

Oh, but it does. For example, if there is a suspected hamster population, you need at least one year of data gathering to assess local population state. And then you need a resettlement plan for the hamsters. This alone takes at least a year because of the data gathering, and of course you need an expensive and busy hamster expert to do the gathering and writing.

German only, but I guess a translation tool can get across the most absurd points ;) https://artenschutz.naturschutzinformationen.nrw.de/artensch...

Oh, and btw, that's just for permitting. After you get your permit, you have to have those hamsters professionally resettled, observed and documented.

You are right that it is theoretically still possible to get stuff done. Prime example is Elon Musks Gigafactory in Brandenburg, where there was enough political and economic pressure to get it done. But that is a rare thing to happen, and lots of those steps you have to do are out of your control and up to some bureaucrat who is of course "very busy" and "cannot at this time give an estimate as to when the permit might be completed". It is just hard to convey how bad it really is...