MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by herf | 2025-10-05 17:07:42+00:00
Vertically integrated apps are much cheaper to run - Instagram stores only a small fraction of your photos and makes a lot of money from them. It is somewhat harder to explain why we pay for things like iCloud, which mostly has no web API, only APIs for Apple devices. (Plenty of value there because it keeps you from having to buy a bigger iPhone.) But there are lots of these "almost general purpose" solutions, paying to upload files and store them, but where you cannot use them as you like.

Why not dozens of apps running over the "web filesystem" like happens on the desktop? Two reasons: 1. Amazon pricing for transit/bandwidth is way higher than storage, and so it makes accessing your own data quite expensive if it is not in the same datacenter. 2. And there is a huge security and usability gap between "pick one photo" vs "give me [scoped] access to your Dropbox" Often the general-purpose mode does not work that well, is quite slow, or just costs a lot in bandwidth, a thing nobody wants to pay extra for when they're already paying for storage.
by TinkersW | 2025-10-05 17:08:13+00:00
8 bit is not absent in x86 SIMD, it is a slightly less covered than 32 & 16 bit, but you can fully implement all the common 8 bit ops and most are 1 instruction(with AVX2). There are even various horizontal ops on 8 bit values(avg, dot etc).

Also AVX512 is way more common than SVE2, all Zen4 & Zen5 support it.
by f1shy | 2025-10-05 17:08:15+00:00
IF LLM do translate so good English somehow directly in “code”, then there are much more job in the line that just coders, and many tools that could be rendered obsolete. Indeed fact the whole chain, from customer to, well, back to customer, could be replaced. Requirements elicitation, writing requirements, making a design, architecture, even tests (shloud we need them?)

As far as I know and my experience confirms (maybe biased?) the whole chain of SW engineering is there precisely because English is not always optimal.

Indeed fact fact in a project I directed, the whole requirement management was basically a loop

Repeat{talk to customer; write formal language; simulate; validate}until no change;

It was called “runnable specification” not my idea. It worked absolutely incredibly good.
by martin-t | 2025-10-05 17:08:48+00:00
Do they say it in public or private?

Because yesterday I learned that 30% of Americans think political violence may be necessary to fix the country[0], which was gathered from anonymous polls I presume, yet I see almost none of it online and certainly not in mainstream media.

And the censorship is certainly not helping.

My friend got multiple warnings and temporary bans on reddit for suggesting that:

- The only hope for democracy in Russia is a violent revolution. From what got banned and what didn't, we gather it's OK to talk about revolution, less OK about violent revolution and not allowed to talk about killing people. Well, how does reddit think revolutions work? People have to get killed or have a very high chance of being killed to give up power "voluntarily".

- That their dictator should be sentenced to death by the ICC and executed. She managed to appeal this one because she phrased it as a court ordered killing ("execution") with the caveat that the court would legalize anyone killing him (since the ICC cannot reach him to arrest him but somebody close to him might be able to do it and could use protection is he managed to escape).

So pro-tip to avoid _some_ censorship: frame it as a change of law or a legal process.

[0]: https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2025/10/02/day-1717...
by Defletter | 2025-10-05 17:09:42+00:00
While I'm unsure about the efficacy of LLMs, I do yearn for language tooling that lets you 'Bring Your Own Syntax'. I'm someone who prefers TypeScript, Java, and Zig's syntax and genuinely, genuinely struggles with Go, Crystal, Kotlin's syntax. Whoever came up with := versus = needs to stub their toe at least once a day for the rest of time. But if I could write code for Go using a different syntax, I'd write way more Go code. I feel like that's what petlangs like Borgo (https://github.com/borgo-lang/borgo) and AGL (https://github.com/alaingilbert/agl) are doing: making Go less goey.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-05 17:10:35+00:00
I'm basically right here, but I don't want to be debugging anything at all. Some things can't be expressed properly in every language. I think a bunch of languages (sadly the ones that LLMs are best at right now) just need to be abandoned completely. Every best practice that we had to pick up in order to parallelize things after Moore ended has to be universal and embedded into the language, and everything else has to be binned. Especially seeing as those practices made everything more modular and maintainable, and we were able to slip into microservices and serverless fairly effortlessly (and skulk back the same way.)

I think we need languages optimized for isolation, without global anything and uncompilable without safety; and for readability. We need LLM oriented languages, meant to be read and not written. Like the author I think they'll look a lot more like Rust than anything else.

We should be programming them in structured natural language that expresses architecture, rather than details. Instead of application code, we also should be generating absurdly detailed and comprehensible test suites with that language, and ignoring the final implementation completely. The detailed architecture document, consisting of heavy commentary generated by the user (but organized and edited for consistency by the LLM in dialog with the user), and the test suite, should be the final product. Dropping it into any LLM should generate an almost identical implementation. That way, the language(s) can develop freely, and in a way oriented towards model usage, rather than having to follow humans who have to be retrained and reoriented after every change.

So maybe LLM-agnostic programming is what I'm asking for? I want LLM interactions to focus on making my intentions obvious, and clarifying things to whatever degree is necessary so it never has to really think about anything when generating the final product. I want the LLMs to use me as a context-builder. They can do the programming. Incidentally, this will obviously still take programmers because we know what is possible and what is not; like a driver feels their car as an extension of their body, although they're communicating with it through a wheel, three pedals, and a stick.*

Right now, LLMs are asking me what I want them to do too much. I want to tell them what I want them to do, and to have them probe the details of that until there's no place for them to make a mistake. A "programmer" will be the one who sets the program.

[*] Imagine the alternative (it's easy) of a autonomous car that says "Do you want to go to the grocery store? Or maybe visit your mother?" Stay out of my business, car. I have an organizer for that. I'll tell you where I want to go.
by magicalhippo | 2025-10-05 17:11:00+00:00
I've been using ZFS for quite a while, and I had a realization some time ago that for a lot of data, I could tolerate a few hours worth of loss.

So instead of a mirror, I've set up two separate one-disk pools, with automatic snapshots of the primary pool every few hours, which are then zfs send/recv to the other pool.

This gives me a lot more flexibility in terms of the disks involved, one could be SSD other spinning rust for example, at the cost of some read speed and potential uptime.

Depending on your needs, you could even have the other disk external, and only connect it every few days.

I also have another mirrored RAID pool for more precious data. However almost all articles on ZFS focus on the RAID aspect, while few talk about the less hardware demanding setup described above.
by arikrak | 2025-10-05 17:11:05+00:00
I recently wrote a short post on something similar: while AI is able to solve increasingly longer tasks, people's attention spans are getting shorter. https://www.zappable.com/p/ai-vs-human-attention-spans

Hopefully people can learn to use AI to help them, while still thinking on their own. It's not like that many of the assignments in school were that useful anyways...
by scoofy | 2025-10-05 17:11:18+00:00
For me it was when prime raised it's price to $125, they stopped giving me any credit when my prime deliveries were late (they were more often than they weren't), and so I decided to walk over to Target in my neighborhood and see if it was more expensive -- Target was cheaper.

At that point I decided the experience of going for a walk when I need something in a pinch was nicer than ordering online, and if I need something obscure, I'll pay for shipping once or twice a year.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-10-05 17:11:25+00:00
If you’re in high school/college (hell your 20’s) and can game 10+ hours a week it was an unbelievable deal. Even $30 isn’t that crazy if you’re really using it. But a lot of people can’t get that kind of value out of it and it doesn’t help that Microsoft keeps cancelling every interesting game and/or lets their best studios languish.
by davydm | 2025-10-05 17:12:13+00:00
yes - stop chasing the "productivity"

producing more code is not the same as being more productive

producing more working features that your users actually want and squashing bugs so that they have confidence in the product is productivity

good senior engineers should appreciate that an entry/junior (or even mid) dev may not "produce" as much - and should be helping you to upskill

producing large amounts of trash code that someone has to review and ultimately fix is not productivity - many "ai-first" companies are starting to learn that

so I'd suggest: focus on your craft, on the basic principles, but also the niches and the interesting bits. Find a part of it that you enjoy, that you're good at - preferably even outstandingly good at - and keep going.
by erichocean | 2025-10-05 17:12:34+00:00
> Firstly, we’re making new technologies and APIs that LLMs really struggle

LLMs absolutely excel at this task.

Source: Me, been doing it since early July with Gemini Pro 2.5 and Claude Opus.

So good, in fact, that I have no plans to hire software engineers in the future. (I have hired many over my 25 years developing software.)
by LTL_FTC | 2025-10-05 17:12:40+00:00
I have also been considering this for some time. Been comparing MinIO, Garage, and Ceph. MinIO may not be wise given their recent moves, as another commenter noted. Garage seems ok but their git doesn’t show much activity these days so I wonder if it too will be abandoned. Which leaves us with Ceph. May have a higher learning curve but also offers the most flexibility as one can do object as well as block and file. Gonna set up a single node with 9 OSD’s soon and give it a go but always looking for input if anyone would like to provide some.
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-05 17:12:44+00:00
>Why are people betting on small modular reactors?

Because it's a bet on bad government(s) continuing to be bad.

There is immense value to utilities in being able to just park SMRs on top of semi trailers beside all the infrastructure they already own and "get ahead" of onerous governments who would be all over something like a solar farm say nothing of a real large scale power generation station looking to extract their pounds of flesh.

Being able to just "inject" base load power near where you need it on the grid saves nearly infinite money in otherwise necessary upgrades in transmission between the source and users of the power.
by furst-blumier | 2025-10-05 17:12:45+00:00
I get most of your points but from experience it just doesn't work out very well. For example I get a different /64 (or was it /60?) prefix every day from my ISP. I complained about it and the reply was that they don't offer a stable prefix for non-business customer. Your point with email is something I didn't experience. I could never get email on ipv6 only to work because the mailservers I wanted to send mail to were ipv4 only...
by amatecha | 2025-10-05 17:12:54+00:00
Yeah, Valve understood MS' position/power a long time ago and worked to mitigate that risk. I remember them shopping around nearly 15 years ago to find a partner to help them work on Linux and improve Steam's abilities there, which resulted in SteamOS[0]. Indeed the plan worked, and now you can even buy a dedicated gaming console[1] that runs ~all the Windows games but completely without reliance on MS.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SteamOS

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Deck
by starburst | 2025-10-05 17:12:54+00:00
Well Hetzner's "VPS" [1] is more like the "Cloud" [2] from OVH rather than OVH's VPS [3]

(no /hours pricing, cannot instantly deploy, etc.)

Not that their pricing isn't really really good, but it depends on your use-case. DO / Linode / Upcloud / EC2 / etc. do have an insane pricing in comparison, yes.

[1] https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/

[2] https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-ca/public-cloud/prices/

[3] https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-ca/vps/
Show HN: I built a free IPA discovery site to help you find IPAs to sideload
by ziadhussein | 2025-10-05 17:13:50+00:00
Hello HN, I built a free IPA discovery site to help you find IPAs to sideload.

100% free and no signups needed. Currently it is only scraping 1000 repos from Github that have .ipa files in the release files. I will add more repos in the next few hours

I will probably add a way to suggest must-haves at some point today.

Check it out here and let me know what you think
by hnlmorg | 2025-10-05 17:13:53+00:00
Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any decent alternative.

SMB is a nightmare to set up if your host isn’t running Windows.

sshfs is actually pretty good but it’s not exactly ubiquitous. Plus it has its own quirks and performs slower. So it really doesn’t feel like an upgrade.

Everything else I know of is either proprietary, or hard to set up. Or both.

These days everything has gone more cloud-oriented. Eg Dropbox et al. And I don’t want to sync with a cloud server just to sync between two local machines.
by GeekyBear | 2025-10-05 17:13:58+00:00
> Avondale Man Sues After Google Data Leads to Wrongful Arrest for Murder

Police had arrested the wrong man based on location data obtained from Google and the fact that a white Honda was spotted at the crime scene. The case against Molina quickly fell apart, and he was released from jail six days later. Prosecutors never pursued charges against Molina, yet the highly publicized arrest cost him his job, his car, and his reputation.

https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/google-geofence-locatio...

Google spying on people as much as possible and storing everything they glean on their servers (where they have no choice but to hand it over to any government agency with a warrant) is dangerous.
by phatskat | 2025-10-05 17:14:02+00:00
I helped port a Vue 2 project to Vue 3, and then I worked on a Vue 3 project we’ve slowly been rewriting in a greenfield Nuxt 3 project. Vue 2 and the options API were just difficult in all senses - even Vue3 with Options feels bad. I really enjoy 3 with the composition API, and I have always had a difficult time reasoning about React personally.

While I will continue to probably promote Vue where it makes sense, I’m honestly more inclined towards learning Svelte, HTMX, and other less arduous frameworks.
by dagmx | 2025-10-05 17:14:08+00:00
It’s not just the language but the domain within the language.

I see both the latest Claude and GPT models fall over on a lot of C++, Swift/ObjC and more complex Python code. They do better in codebases where there is maximal context with type hints in the local function. Rust does well, and it’s easier to know when it’s messed up since it won’t compile.

They also tend to clog up code bases with a cacophony of different coding paradigms.

A good developer would be able to see these right away, but someone who doesn’t understand the basics at the least will happily plug along not realizing the wake they’ve left.
by johnmaguire | 2025-10-05 17:14:47+00:00
I'm not implicitly asserting that: the actual data I provided was about homicides exclusively. Please click the link to see for yourself.

Meanwhile, you have not cited your 20% statistic.

> And even so, this is still newsworthy for the reasons I mentioned.

I'm not sure why you ignored my other counters on why those reasons don't make it newsworthy.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-10-05 17:14:48+00:00
<< instead of waiting for large, ad filled, for profit networks to act on it.

I think I agree. I know I started re-evaluating my internet presence as a whole. I accept that a lot can't or won't do much, but the same was true, when firefox was new and no one wanted to jump ship, but the people, who liked privacy focus and extensions. Those that can, will move. The herd will follow if they see it can work.
by BenoitEssiambre | 2025-10-05 17:15:49+00:00
Yeah, the example with the eggs isn't great because an LLM would indeed get the correct interpretation but the thing is, this is based on LLMs having been trained on the context. When and LLM has the context, it is usually able to correctly fill the gaps of vague English specifications. But if you are operating at the bleeding edge of innovation or in depths of industry expertise that LLMs didn't train on, it won't be in a position to fill those blanks correctly.

And domains with less training data openly available are areas where innovation and differentiation and business moats live.

Oftentimes, only programming languages are precise enough to specify this type of knowledge.

English is often hopelessly vague. See how many definitions the word break has: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/break

And Solomonoff/Kolmogorov theories of knowledge say that programming languages are the ultimate way to specify knowledge.
by casenmgreen | 2025-10-05 17:15:54+00:00
I may be wrong, but I think this was Google banning far-right wing accounts posting lies?

And now - by Trump / the far-right - Google has been coerced into reinstating those accounts, and Biden admin is being blamed for the bans on the basis of banning free speech.

The problem here is that free speech must be truthful, not intended to deceive and/or mislead.
by martin-t | 2025-10-05 17:15:54+00:00
From what I've seen, all that has happened is that aggressors ("bullies") are better at hiding it.

When it was OK to beat somebody up (for pleasure or social status), they did that. Now, violence is being painted as the greatest evil. So instead they get pleasure and gain social status by less visible kinds of aggression, such as verbal, social and online abuse.

And, worse, the victims have a harder time fighting back because

- Fewer people notice the abuse - fighting is visible but veiled insinuations or in-jokes at the victim's expense are hard to notice and understand by onlookers.

- Responding to verbal abuse with physical retaliation would be seen as an escalation.
by drob518 | 2025-10-05 17:16:20+00:00
Yes, that’s why I said almost free. But that said, as I understand it, the x86 decoders aren’t that much of the die area of a modern design. Most of it is L1 cache, GPUs, neural engines, etc., which makes simple die area comparisons of modern processors a bit useless for this particular question. You’re really comparing all that other stuff. To be clear, I’m squarely on the RISC side of any “debate,” but it was interesting to watch how the CISC designs evolved in the early 2000s to maintain their relevance.
by IAmGraydon | 2025-10-05 17:16:35+00:00
I'm not sure why we're talking about sports betting as if the "sports" part is relevant. The gambling industry in general is the business of selling hope to hopeless people. All of it is bad, and as long as we have the states themselves selling hundreds of millions of dollars of lottery tickets primarily to those living in poverty, this is never going to go away. It should not be legal to make money off of other people's suffering, which is exactly what this is.
by Spivak | 2025-10-05 17:16:45+00:00
I feel like the fundamental disconnect between the goals of private enterprise and government in these matters is a never ending source of frustration. I don't know what that solution is but it feels like we have to do something to reward companies for doing "what we want" which is providing stable gainful employment for as many Americans as possible and providing goods to consumers at the lowest price possible. These have to be balanced but the point is that generating profit for shareholders isn't the north star for a successful company at the expense of everyone else.

What is good for the FTC is typically opposed to what is good for profits and we get standoffs like this.
by AlexandrB | 2025-10-05 17:17:29+00:00
> Consolidation around Unity and Unreal has probably been good for everyone, yeah.

I don't know about that. Unreal 5 games seem to have some real issues with clarity, ghosting, and dithering. There's plenty of analysis on the subject[1], and I'm not sure whether it's Unreal 5 or DLSS/TAA more to blame but I'm already longing for the days of more engine variety.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJu_DgCHfx4
by wkat4242 | 2025-10-05 17:17:33+00:00
Then you have Copilot Chat, that's the free version. It indeed can't interact with company data unless you manually upload it.

If you have a tab selector "Work / Web" at the top, you do have the paid version. Select Work to make it able to find stuff in sharepoint, look at your calendar and emails etc.

If you don't have this selector you only have the free version.

> If the normal search system has access to the data why doesn’t copilot? Surely it would be trivial for Microsoft to run copilot in a way that keeps company data private so that they could actually turn it on and make it useful by default.

Upselling of course. Finding stuff in the gigantic trash heap that is Sharepoint is its main added value for me.

Also, RAG will cost a lot more compute.
by jakebasile | 2025-10-05 17:17:41+00:00
> Consolidation around Unity and Unreal has probably been good for everyone,

Strongly disagree here. It worked out well for the businesses that can standardize on these engines and not spend resources making custom bespoke engines for sure, but as a gamer I remember the days when each game or company had their own engine which brought their own feel to the game. They could specialize it for exactly the type of game they were making.

In addition, Unreal Engine 5 in particular runs like absolute trash on many PCs (including my very high end machines). Its reliance on frame generation (fake frames) and super resolution (fake pixels) has predictably led to developers ignoring optimization even further - "just turn on DLSS 4x Frame Gen and DLSS Ultra Performance!" - see Randy Pitchford's recent rants on Twitter.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-10-05 17:17:43+00:00
I genuinely disagree. At this point, the only real way to make sure something like this stays worthwhile is when it is not 'super easy and convenient'. In other words, it has to take effort ( and obviously right now it does take effort and that effort ranks close to 'impossible' --- that should be pared down a bit ).
by f1shy | 2025-10-05 17:17:44+00:00
I haven’t had luck with visual programming. I miss the easy to refactor things, copy/paste/move… in big projects for me at least tends to get messy. Anybody who has used labview for some years will probably agree.

I have dreamed about a programming language which would be basically text, but the editor would present it as a kind of flow chart. Maybe can be done with any existing programming language? But I found some troubles with language extensions… maybe someday someone much smarter than me can implement that in a meaningful way.