MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by keeda | 2025-10-28 06:50:28+00:00
This article is right, but I think it may underplay the changes that could be coming soon. For instance, as the top comment here about TDD points out, the actual code does not matter anymore. This is an astounding claim! And it has naturally received a lot of objections in the replies.

But I think the objections can mostly be overcome with a minor adjustment: You only need to couple TDD with a functional programming style. Functional programming lets you tightly control the context of each coding task, which makes AI models ridiculously good at generating the right code.

Given that, if most of your code is tightly-scoped, well-tested components implementing orthogonal functionality, the actual code within those components will not matter. Only glue code becomes important and that too could become much more amenable to extensive integration testing.

At that point, even the test code may not matter much, just the test-cases. So as a developer you would only really need to review and tweak the test cases. I call this "Test-Case-Only Development" (TCOD?)

The actual code can be completely abstracted away, and your main task becomes design and architecture.

It's not obvious this could work, largely because it violates every professional instinct we have. But apparently somebody has even already tried it with some success: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7196786...

All the downsides that have been mentioned will be true, but also may not matter anymore. E.g. in a large team and large codebase, this will lead to a lot of duplicate code with low cohesion. However, if that code does what it is supposed to and is well-tested, does the duplication matter? DRY was an important principle when the cost of code was high, and so you wanted to have as much leverage as possible via reuse. You also wanted to minimize code because it is a liability (bugs, tech debt, etc.) and testing, which required even more code that still didn't guarantee lack of bugs, was also very expensive.

But now that the cost of code is plummeting, that calculus is shifting too. You can churn out code and tests (including even performance tests, which are always an afterthought, if thought of at all) at unimaginable rates.

And all this while reducing the dependencies of developers on libraries and frameworks and each other. Fewer dependencies means higher velocity. The overall code "goodput" will likely vastly outweight inefficiences like duplication.

Unfortunately, as TFA indicates, there is a huge impedance mismatch with this and the architectures (e.g. most code is OO, not functional), frameworks, and processes we have today. Companies will have to make tough decisions about where they are and where they want to get.

I suspect AI-assisted coding taken to its logical conclusion is going to look very different from what we're used to.
by js8 | 2025-10-28 06:51:01+00:00
I don't think your opinion about LLMs inner workings changes anything in what I said. Extremely open-minded people also don't care about facts in the sense they just accept whatever their perception of reality is, with no prejudice (in particular, for consistency of some form). How the reality is actually perceived, or whether it corresponds to human reality, is immaterial to my argument.
by BrenBarn | 2025-10-28 06:51:19+00:00
Yes, it's crazy. I think a lot of people see it as a question of "how can we give the PSF (or orgs like it) more money" but I see it a bit differently. Basically if something like Python can arise and become so effective and useful in so many ways with so little funding (and even less in earlier stages), it suggests that money isn't really the bottleneck here. What we need are people doing good work with good motives and not chasing dollars.

That in turn suggests that a lot of money currently being spent is wasted, or worse, used for ill. We would be better served by taking all the assets of the Fortune 500 and distributing them widely to tons of little groups. Some of those groups may turn out to be the next Python, and for the ones that don't, well, we didn't waste much money on them. Right now what we get instead is hundreds of billions of dollars going to advertising algorithms.

The reason it's crazy that the PSF survives on $5 million isn't that $5 million is crazy little, it's that too many other entities are crazy big.
by leptons | 2025-10-28 06:52:49+00:00
That's great for rote work, simple CRUD, and other things where you already know how the code should work so you can write a test first. Not all programming works well that way. I often have a goal I want to achieve, but no clue exactly how to get there at first. It takes quite a lot of experimentation, iteration and refinement before I have anything worth testing - and I've been programming 40+ years, so it's not because I don't know what I'm doing.
by true_religion | 2025-10-28 06:53:24+00:00
HIPAA only applies to covered healthcare entitites. If you walk into a McDonalds' and talk about your suicidal ideation with the cashier, that's not HIPAA covered.

To become a covered entity, the business has either work with a healhcare provider, health data trasmiter, or do business as one.

Notably, even in the above case, HIPAA only applies to the healthcare part of the entity. So if McDonald's collocated pharmacies in their restaurants, HIPAA would only apply to the pharmacists, not the cashiers.

That's why you'll see in connivence stores with pharmacies, the registers are separated so healthcare data doesn't go to someone who isn't covered by HIPAA.

**

As for how ChatGPT gets these stats... when you talk about a sensitive or banned topic like suicide, their backend logs it.

Originally, they used that to cut off your access so you wouldn't find a way to cause a PR failure.
by neilv | 2025-10-28 06:55:05+00:00
If you instead put parentheses around the lexical sequences, then you wouldn't need syntax like `[3]` to denote length.

You also wouldn't need indentation levels to be syntactically meaningful.

You could also get rid of LLM tokens like square brackets, curly braces, colons, and commas.

And you could have objects nested to arbitrary depth.

In near the same character count as TOON (sometimes more, sometimes less).

(I was telling someone over the weekend that there are only a few small wins for Lisps in most AI work right now. I hadn't considered that the printed syntax itself might have a use with these LLM huge black boxes.)
Show HN: AmbrosAI – An AI longevity companion for nutrition, sleep, and stress
by nbochenko | 2025-10-28 06:55:08+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Nicolas, a technical founder (17+ years in engineering, ex–VP of Engineering at two regional unicorns). I’ve been working on AmbrosAI, a mobile-first AI longevity companion that helps people eat better, sleep deeper, and stress less, through personalized daily insights powered by AI.

The app connects nutrition, sleep, and stress in one adaptive system. It uses AI to analyze meals, learn from behavior, and guide users toward healthier, longer living, without making health feel like work.

I’m preparing to launch the beta soon, and I’d love to get early feedback from the HN community, especially on: - The product concept and positioning - How to frame the value of “longevity” simply for mainstream users - Advice on finding a business/growth cofounder

My goal is to make longevity accessible, practical, and data-driven, not another calorie tracker, but a true AI health companion that adapts to you.

Learn more or join the waitlist: ambrosai.life

Would love your thoughts, what resonates, what doesn’t, and what you’d expect from something like this.

Thanks, Nicolas
by eimrine | 2025-10-28 06:55:09+00:00
I am really laughing you are so naїve.

In 2025 bots (we used to call them spiders) from LLM companies are not just visiting your web-site, they are reading absolutely everything, they are exploiting every possible field with every possible argument, constantly. Their IP-adresses use more traffic than all human visitors if not to ban them. They are totally ignoring robots.txt and mimicring under human activity.

Go and take some legal action against them. Go and damage their reputation. Of course you are able to do these measures.
by jkingsman | 2025-10-28 06:56:01+00:00
Privacy is vital, but this isn't covered under HIPAA. As they are not a covered entity nor handling medical records, they're beholden to the same privacy laws as any other company.

HIPAA's scope is actually basically nonexistent once you get away from healthcare providers, insurance companies, and the people that handle their data/they do business with. Talking with someone (even a company) about health conditions, mental health, etc. does not make them a medical provider.
by avidiax | 2025-10-28 06:56:23+00:00
It should be simple enough to use the odometer. If the vehicle drives significantly outside the country or on private roads, then a GPS-based odometer seems simple enough. I'm sure a 1GB SD-card can geofence the public road network of most countries so that the taxed odometer rolls only when on taxed roads.

Doesn't seem like a privacy nightmare, and this kind of system is more practical than an online server-based one, given that mobile signals are especially uncommon when off-roading or roaming internationally.
by johngossman | 2025-10-28 06:57:28+00:00
Having grown up in the 60s and 70s, I'd say people took nuclear war seriously. People had different opinions on how likely it was and whether it was an extinction event, but there was near unanimity that it was "a really bad idea." The obvious difference was that was impossible to doubt it was man-made and it wasn't something that slowly built up over decades--there was no way to say it was "normal"
by reeredfdfdf | 2025-10-28 06:59:09+00:00
Real life hobbies, voluntary work, religious organizations if you're into that stuff. Any of these could work, as long as you find some genuine interest in it, and there are enough people that meet your dating profile around.

Of course there's also the possibility of meeting people in online communities centered around some shared interest. IMO that's also probably more effective than dating apps, especially if it leads to meeting in real life later on.
by asabla | 2025-10-28 06:59:14+00:00
> The last thing I'll mention is that Claude Code (Sonnet 4.5) is still very token-happy, in that it eagerly goes above and beyond when not always necessary. Codex (gpt-5-codex) on the other hand, does exactly what you ask, almost to a fault.

I very much share your experience. As for the time being I like the experience with codex over claude, just because I find my self in a position where I know much sooner when to step in and just doing it manually.

With claude I find my self in a typing exercise much more often, I could probably get better of knowing when to stop ofc.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-10-28 06:59:24+00:00
>"When they go to sleep at night, they have to choose between all of the information ever published in the history of the world, or the back of their eyelids."

But when they power the device on, instead of reading all the information ever published in the history of the world, they watch vacuous tiktok videos where losers talk in the most annoying voices possible TAP LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE.

This should be obvious, I suppose. Gluttons aren't eating pounds of filet mignon and bags of truffles, they're chowing down on pseudo-manufactured crunchythings that are only distantly related to food.
by lukan | 2025-10-28 06:59:43+00:00
"Misinformation about the supposed dangers of nuclear power, as arthurcolle is spreading "

I maybe did not read all of it, but which missinformation is he spreading exactly?

(Follow up, why are you in a position to judge that? )

As for missinformation in general, I happened to be born after chernobyl. Where the authorities in eastern germany said, all is fine. But since the people got western television, where they said no, not fine, children may not go outside while the radioactive raincloud is still there, my immediate experience is rather people downplaying the dangers.
by ahtihn | 2025-10-28 07:00:03+00:00
> Some estimates for 2025: around 20-30% of all ad clicks were bots. Around $200B in ad spend annually lost to click fraud.

I think this is the wrong way to look at it.

Bots lower the cost per click so they should have net zero impact on overall ad spend.

Imagine if the same number of humans were clicking on ads but the numbers of bots increased tenfold. Would total ad spend increase accordingly? No, it would remain the same because budgets don't magically increase. The average value of a click would just go down.
by theturtlemoves | 2025-10-28 07:00:19+00:00
I agree with you in the sense that I find it helpful for personal topics. I found it very helpful to figure out how to deal with some difficult personal situation I was in. The thing actually helped me reassess the situation when I asked it to provide alternative viewpoints.

You can't just blindly type in your problem though, you still have to do the actual thinking yourself. Good prompting skills is the ability to steer with your mind. It's no different from using Google, where some people never figured out that you're actually typing in the solution you expect to find rather than the question you have. It's the same with these tools it seems
by Galanwe | 2025-10-28 07:00:31+00:00
What is most scary to me, is that these grants are not opportunistic (money is raised when needed), they are on an enveloppe basis (the amount to be distributed is fixed).

Essentially that means for every dollar not spent on, say, the PSF; then an other organization willing to denounce DEI is going to get these $1.5M.

I fear less for the opportunity loss to _proper_ organizations, and worry that activist anti-DEI/partisan organizations are artificially going to get a massive funding increase.

In that setup, it may be the lesser of two evils for the PSF to accept that grant, if only to deny a more partisan organization to get this funding.
by Xylakant | 2025-10-28 07:00:48+00:00
The experience was okay, I would take it again. We went all the way from the start in Milano to Messina. The train left Milano on time and pretty much remained on time except for a minor delay in Rome (15 minutes).

We had a 3 person sleeper cabin for ourselves. They do serve a little breakfast - espresso, shrink-wrapped croissants, some biscuits with Marmelade and some salty crackers. Not a great meal, but good enough. If you’re going beyond Messina to Syracuse or Palermo, you should bring food along - or pick something up on the ferry.

The rolling stock is old - as in the toilets are still the kind where you can see the tracks, not a closed system. So they close the toilets a while before you get on the ferry.

Still, the ride was comfortable enough to actually sleep, even though the top bunk is a bit short for people of my size (1,85) - but neither wife nor kid could be convinced to climb up there.

Going to bed in Milano and waking up with a view of the coast was amazing. The beds fold up and you have a proper 3 seat cabin for the rest of the ride.

The ride was amazingly cheap - we paid 160 EUR for two adults and one 8year old, one way, so 330 in total.
by Ekaros | 2025-10-28 07:00:50+00:00
I am not really sure if TDD often is compatible with modern agile development. It lends well to more waterfall style. Or clearly defined systems.

If you can design fully what your system does before starting it is more reasonable. And often that means going down to level of are inputs and states. Think more of something like control systems for say mobile networks or planes or factory control. You could design whole operation and all states that should happen or could happen before single line of code.
by bilegeek | 2025-10-28 07:01:12+00:00
>> If you are a farmer who has the choice of planting more productive plants or not, if you do not, you will be at a disadvantage and eventually will be outcompeted in the market if you don't "defect".

More productive crops = more competitive = higher chance of market survival.

It's not about the crops per se. It's about surviving in a market that is ruthlessly cruel to anybody who doesn't subscribe to "line go up" dogma, and who isn't cutthroat in every advantage they can eke out or margin they can widen.
by inhumantsar | 2025-10-28 07:01:29+00:00
I was curious about this too so I dug into it a bit. it seems that the point placement has to be optimized to ensure they have roughly even spacing while still being randomly placed.

the naive algorithm is O(n^2) where n is the number of pixels in an image. tiling and sampling pregenerated noise is O(n), so that's what most people use. the noise can be generated on the fly using a FFT-based algorithm, though it still needs to be applied iteratively so you'd typically end up with O(k n log n) s.t. 10 <= k <= 100.

this has been neat stuff to read up on. my favorite nugget of learning: blue noise is white noise that's fine through a high pass filter a few times. the result of a high pass filter is the same as subtracting the result of a low pass filter from the original signal. blurring is a low pass filter for images. since blue noise is high frequency information, blurring a noised up image effectively removes the blue noise. so the result looks like a blurred version of the original even though it contains a fraction of the original's information.
by xmprt | 2025-10-28 07:02:17+00:00
> having developed with it for a decade now

I think this is the reason why React feels normal to you. But as someone coming into it fresh, React felt like there were always 4 different ways to do the same thing and 3 of them are wrong because they built a new API/there are more idiomatic ways to accomplish the same thing now. If you have a decade of experience, then you probably do most things the right/obvious way so don't even notice all the incorrect ways/footguns that React gives you.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-10-28 07:02:38+00:00
Seems strangely out of touch as well.

First of all, 20 years ago porn proliferation was also rampant, and the stuff online was, I'd argue, considerably "worse" that the Onlyfans flavor content that dominates now.

The descriptions of "Goonworld" had me laughing out loud. Reminded me of this skit: https://youtu.be/7-KpbD_RnPs?t=110

Also there are so many broad brushes in generalizations in this! I've been friends with a sex worker who didn't hate her regulars, and there is a huge movement in the male oriented online space that firmly stands against "gooning" and what they label as degeneracy. That would have incredibly lame in the not so recent past but it's a fairly mainstream perspective now, and of course all of that is left out entirely.

Then there are a lot of casual statements thrown out that is very easy to disagree with. Ex: it just brushes over the fact that modern online dating as an unattractive person is complete ass, and yes, attractive people do have it easier in many areas of life, especially dating (both men and women, no need to split every other line into boys VS girls).

Hold on, I think I need to "jack in" to "Goonworld".
by 334f905d22bc19 | 2025-10-28 07:03:03+00:00
There will also be the visionfive 2 lite in (hopefully) a moment for more risc-v capabilities. I am excited about it. Haven't looked too much into it, but what I've heard is that the visionfive 2 is not too bad. Lacks a few drivers or performance in them. Will see. I am also curious how easy it can be used for some OS dev.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starfive/visionfive-2-l...

And if someone wants to get fancy and do some HW-SW-Codesign with risc-v and FPGAs, then there is the PolarFireSoC. A lot cheaper than AMD/Xilinx products and okay-ish to use. Their dev enviroment feels kinda outdated, but at least it's snappy. Also the documentation feels kinda sparse, but most stuff is documented __somewhere__ - you just gotta find it.

https://www.microchip.com/en-us/development-tool/MPFS-DISCO-...

Fun fact: The dev board costs less than the chip itself. (Apparently that's often the case, but I just noticed that the first time)
by jamilton | 2025-10-28 07:03:19+00:00
The article links to the case of Adam Raine, a depressed teenager who confided in ChatGPT for months and committed suicide. The parents blame ChatGPT. Some of the quotes definitely sound like encouraging suicide to me. It’s tough to evaluate the counterfactual though. Article with more detail: https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/09/19/nx...
by LeonB | 2025-10-28 07:03:26+00:00
In Superman III, the eponymous man straightens the leaning tower of Pisa, and in Superman II he spins the earth backwards to reverse time.

A better idea would be to un-tilt the earth’s axis, thus getting rid of variable day lengths, annual seasons, the need for DST etc, just one enjoyable spring day, every where, all year round.
by bfg_9k | 2025-10-28 07:03:43+00:00
An interesting article that confirms something I've often been annoyed about - in Australia most of the top universities don't use GPAs but WAMs (weighted average marks).

In a GPA system whether you get 100 or 85, you get an A which results in a 4.0 GPA. In Australia, it's simply a weighted average number (so there is a big difference to employers when reading a resume that has an 85 WAM or a 95 WAM). I guess the flip side 'benefit' is that there's a marginal difference between 84.5 and 85, whereas that's 1 whole GPA point in the US.

To add on to that, from what I've heard, broadly speaking in the US getting an A is the result of turning up to class and doing the homework. Here, you've got to really go above and beyond what they teach you to get anything close to 85. The somewhat aggravating part of that is given how large the foreign student market is here (it's our 3rd biggest export industry), it results in grade inflation at the low end. Teachers/ lecturers will find all sorts of ways to get students an easy 40-60% worth of marks and then absolutely crush students in the final.

In other words, it's very very easy to pass classes, but exceedingly hard to do very well. If I had to approximate, the mean mark in most university classes would be around 60-65 with the standard deviation being something like 8 marks (meaning the top 2.5% of students get above 80ish). Compared to the 60% of students getting A at Harvard.
by brainwad | 2025-10-28 07:04:21+00:00
They can't go twice as far if the ride is up a defined climb. One you do the distance, that's it, you reached the pass, you can now only coast back down to the base.

In my experience, those on e-bikes are older and less fit in general, so it's not a matter of them making up for the work in volume; it's more that they couldn't do the climb at all without the assistance.

Also, your assumption about them providing half the work is surely wrong. Even basic ebikes provide 250W; some models provide double or triple that still. The rider provides probably 125W at most, so a third or less of the total power.
by bayareapsycho | 2025-10-28 07:04:47+00:00
> Seeing it as a book about psychology that revolves around theological themes, when it is a book about theology that revolves around psychological themes.

I don't think Dostoevsky's Christianity is genuine. It feels about as genuine as Hegel's Christianity. To both of them it's just a convenient prop where their actual ideas take center stage

Every nihilist main character that he writes follows this pattern where they do something really bad, then destroy themselves as some kind of act of penance. This is the only way that conversion happens in his books. But in this case, it's obviously just a way of processing guilt (and reenacting the author's trauma from near execution most likely)

Maybe I'm psychologizing religion too much, but I don't think religious belief is genuine if it's rooted in some kind of (obvious) psychological trauma

The one thing that stands out in Dostoevsky is the psychological depth of the characters, especially in Demons