MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by solatic | 2025-11-15 08:53:22+00:00
I'm personally not convinced OpenTelemetry is the future. I get the desire to not be vendor-locked to a single provider, but Prometheus and Jaeger are very solid, battle-hardened, popular, well-maintained, easily self-hosted open-source projects. For small deployments you do not need to overthink things here - Grafana, Prometheus, Jaeger (with local disk storage), logging depends on how many machines you're talking about and where they're hosted (e.g. GCP Cloud Logging is fine for GCP-hosted projects, the 50 GB free tier is a lot for a small project) but as a default Loki is also just fine and much better than Elastic/OpenSearch.

OpenTelemetry is, last I looked at it, way too immature, unstable, and resource-hungry to be such a foundational part of infrastructure.
by Hustlr786 | 2025-11-15 08:54:19+00:00
Hi HN, I built a tiny MVP to help fintech teams compare infra vendors (KYC/AML, payments, fraud, lending APIs) because the process is slow and opaque.

Would love feedback on:

Is the problem real?

What’s missing for early validation?

Should this be more like G2 or more like Crunchbase?

MVP link: https://hustlr.super.site/

This is super early — very open to criticism.
by yokljo | 2025-11-15 08:54:55+00:00
Nice. I built something basically just like this for work for the same reason last year. It only look a few hours though, cause I just used Acorn [0] to parse my JS, then directly evaluated the AST. It also had an iteration limit and other configurable limits so I can eval stuff in the browser without crashing the tab. I did not use an LLM.

[0]: https://github.com/acornjs/acorn
by tamimio | 2025-11-15 08:55:17+00:00
I, for one, welcome the fact that agile/scrum/daily standup/etc. rituals will be outdated. While they might be somehow useful in some software development projects, in the past 10 years it turned out to be a cult of lunatics who want to apply it to any engineering work, not just software, and think any other approach than that will result in bad outcomes and less productivity. Can't wait for the "open office" BS to die next too, literally a boomer mindset that came from government offices back in the day, and they think it's more productive that way.
by AndrewDavis | 2025-11-15 08:55:38+00:00
You joke. I still use an old winamp 2.81 on my windows machine.

About 15 years ago I came across some plugin dll files that added flac support.

The only issue I ever run into is some non ascii characters in ID3 tags make that file unplayable. But winamp is perfectly capable of editing them.

It's even pretty good in the high dpi monitors because Ctrl-D enables "Double size" mode on the main window and equaliser. And the playlist window has customisable font sizes.
by matrss | 2025-11-15 08:55:49+00:00
> The ideologically forked Forgejo made some license changes and hard fork decisions that increased the maintenance burden even more, resulting in missing upstream features and decreased security. Forgejo is more busy managing ideals, than creating software.

And from other comments:

> When deciding which software fork to pick, it is about the development power.

> In my view they don't have the development to keep up with Gitea.

How do you come to the conclusion that Gitea has more development power? Looking at the Insights / Activities overview of each repository there were slightly more authors with more contributions to Forgejo over the last month. Acknowledging that this fluctuates I'd estimate that both projects are similarly active.

Also, Forgejo is actually dogfooding its development, which is much more reassuring than what Gitea does IMO.
by Chance-Device | 2025-11-15 08:56:59+00:00
This is a weird article. How many times in your career have you been handed a grossly under-specified feature and had to muddle your way through, asking relevant people along the way and still being told at the end that it’s wrong?

This is exactly the same thing but for AIs. The user might think that the AI got it wrong, except the spec was under-specified and it had to make choices to fill in the gaps, just like a human would.

It’s all well and good if you don’t actually know what you want and you’re using the AI to explore possibilities, but if you already have a firm idea of what you want, just tell it in detail.

Maybe the article is actually about bad specs? It does seem to venture into that territory, but that isn’t the main thrust.

Overall I think this is just a part of the cottage industry that’s sprung up around agile, and an argument for that industry to stay relevant in the age of AI coding, without being well supported by anything.
by mid-kid | 2025-11-15 08:57:36+00:00
Firefox remains very conservative on enabling modern features on X11. Some distributions force them on, but otherwise it's up to the user to figure out how to do that.

It's likely that some hwaccel flag in about:config wasn't turned on by default. Similarly, if you want smooth touchpad scrolling, you need to set MOZ_USE_XINPUT2
by nettalk83 | 2025-11-15 08:57:54+00:00
The core argument is simple: AI forces philosophy to leave the “island” of traditional methods and re-enter the open ocean. Analytic philosophy, with its precision and formal clarity, is increasingly complemented—and sometimes challenged—by AI systems capable of pattern recognition and reasoning assistance. Continental philosophy, which explores meaning, narrative, and the human condition, becomes even more relevant in a world where technology destabilizes identity and value. Yet neither tradition is sufficient alone. The future of philosophy will require hybrid navigation: conceptual rigor, interpretive depth, and systems thinking merged into a new methodological map.

To express this shift, the project uses the mythic structure of Moana as an allegory. The island represents stable philosophical paradigms; the ocean, uncertainty and exploration; the wound of Te Fiti, the erosion of human meaning under technological acceleration. The goal is not to celebrate or condemn AI, but to examine how humans can reconstruct orientation and purpose in its presence.

This project spans 80 parts, but the introductory essay is available here: https://dotnetxpert.com/philosophers_ai_intro.html

I’m sharing it to invite discussion on a central question: If AI can process, simulate, and generate knowledge, what remains uniquely human in philosophical inquiry? And perhaps more importantly: What should philosophy become next?
by gf000 | 2025-11-15 08:58:56+00:00
> Java and C#, for being enterprisey

I believe there are far more interesting stuff to learn about these languages, like the whole category of runtimes could have been mentioned, which can directly affect the language design itself (e.g. having GC vs some language feature for managing memory, open vs closed world model, having an async feature in the language or let the runtime handle it, etc)
by adangert | 2025-11-15 08:59:22+00:00
Deshitification is directly related to profit motives, VC dollars, and providing a service or good that overwhelmingly exceeds any hope of making substantial ROI in the future. None was shown in any of the above promotional materials, your company and product is tarnishing and devaluing the term, congrats on the achievement. We'll continue to look for another word that has not been captured.
by yason | 2025-11-15 09:00:42+00:00
On the other hand, how the heck are they claiming to own any of that if they can't even produce the paperwork. A big enough developer would be able to remaster the game just enough to provoke a lawsuit from the "rights holders" and that would be the place to cross-check whether there's any meat in the deal. If they can't prove they actually own the rights, they can't sue. If they can, then they can sell/license it to the developer. Obviously this won't work for a small, independent actor because it's all going drown in the noise of legal billing.

I've always maintained that if we must have copyright then it should be something like a trademark where you have to actively defend it to keep it valid. If you have the "rights" to a piece of music, movie or game then, to validate the copyright's original purpose, you will have to actively exercise those rights to make gains from the "intellectual property". Copyright does not promote innovation if you're not required to gain from your creation: if you're just keeping your work in a drawer there's no point in granting you a temporary monopoly over the right to copy the work.
by hnlmorg | 2025-11-15 09:02:45+00:00
It’s basically called “reinforced learning” and it’s a common technique for machine learning.

You provide a goal as a big reward (eg test passing), and smaller rewards for any particular behaviours you want to encourage, and then leave the machine to figure out the best way to achieve those rewards through trial and error.

After a few million attempts, you generally either have a decent result, or more data around additional weights you need to apply before reiterating on the training.
by sholain | 2025-11-15 09:02:49+00:00
You started by saying 'There's no way to judge!' - but then bring out 'Benchmarks!' ... and hypocritically infer that I have 'dual standards'?

The snark and ad hominem really undermine your case.

I won't descend to the level of calling other people names, or their arguments 'A Joke', or use 'It's Common Sense!' as a rhetorical device ...

But I will say that it's unreasonable to imply that Kimi, Qwen etc are 'Frontier Models'.

They are pretty good, and narrowly achieve some good scores on some benchmarks - but they're not broadly consistent at that Tier 1 quality.

They don't have the extended fine tuning which makes them better for many applications, especially coding, nor do they have the extended, non-LLM architecture components that further elevate their usefulness.

Nobody would choose Qwen for coding if they could have Sonnet at the same price and terms.

We use Qwen sometimes because it's 'cheap and good' not because it's 'great'.

The 'true coding benchmark' is that developers would chose Sonnet over Qwen, 99 out of 100 times, which is the difference between 'Tier 1' and 'Not Really Tier 1.

Finally, I run benchmarks with my team and I see in a pretty granular way what's going on.

What I've said above lines up with reality of our benchmarks.

We're looking at deploying with GLM/Z.ai - but not because it's the best model.

Google, OAI and Anthropic score consistently better - the issue is 'cost' and the fact that we can overcome the limitations of GLM. So 'it's good enough'.

That 'real world business case' best characterizes the overall situation.
by nkmnz | 2025-11-15 09:03:03+00:00
There’s nothing keeping you from scoping the spec to an agile package of work. To the contrary: even if you start with a full spec for a multi-day-AI-coding-session, you are free to instruct it to follow agile principles. Just ask it to add checkpoints at which you want to be able to let users test a prototype, or where you want to revisit and discuss the plan.
by 9rx | 2025-11-15 09:03:04+00:00
> proper enums

It has proper enums. Granted, it lacks an enum keyword, which seems to trip up many.

Perhaps what you are actually looking for is sum types? Given that you mentioned Rust, which weirdly[1] uses the enum keyword for sum types, this seems likely. Go does indeed lack that. Sum types are not enums, though.

> sensible arrays & slices, without any magic and awkward syntax

Its arrays and slices are exactly the same as how you would find it in C. So it is true that confuses many coming from languages that wrap them in incredible amounts of magic, but the issue you point to here is actually a lack of magic. Any improvements to help those who are accustomed to magic would require adding magic, not taking it away.

> iterators

Is there something about them that you find lacking? They don't seem really any different than iterators in other languages that I can see, although I'll grant you that the anonymous function pattern is a bit unconventional. It is fine, though.

> result unwrapping shorthands

Go wants to add this, and has been trying to for years, but nobody has explained how to do it sensibly. There are all kinds of surface solutions that get 50% of the way there, but nobody wants to tackle the other 50%. You can't force someone to roll up their sleeves, I guess.

[1] Rust uses enums to generate the sum type tag as an implementation detail, so its not quite as weird as it originally seems, but still rather strange that it would name it based on an effectively hidden implementation detail instead of naming it by what the user is actually trying to accomplish. Most likely it started with proper enums and then realized that sum types would be better instead and never thought to change the keyword to go along with that change.

But then again Swift did the same thing, so who knows? To be fair, its "enums" can degrade to proper enums in order to be compatible with Objective-C, so while not a very good reason, at least you can maybe find some kind of understanding in their thinking in that case. Rust, though...
by bobmcnamara | 2025-11-15 09:04:28+00:00
> If you start with the problem of how to create a reliable stream of data on top of an unreliable datagram layer, then the solution that comes out will look virtually identical to TCP.

I'll add that at the time of TCP's writing, the telephone people far outnumbered everyone else in the packet switching vs circuit switching debate. TCP gives you a virtual circuit over a packet switched network as a pair of reliable-enough independent byte streams over IP. This idea, that the endpoints could implement reliability through retransmission came from an earlier French network, Cylades, and ends up being a core principle of IP networks.
by Arch-TK | 2025-11-15 09:05:05+00:00
We could just stop calling it an engineering discipline. You've laid out plenty of reasons why it is nothing like an engineering discipline in most contexts where people write software.

Real software engineering does exist. It does so precisely in places where you can't risk trying it and seeing it fail, like control systems for things which could kill someone if they failed.

People get offended when you claim most software engineering isn't engineering. I am pretty certain I would quickly get bored if I was actually an engineer. Most real world non-software engineers don't even really get to build anything, they're just there to check designs/implementations for potential future problems.

Maybe there are also people in the software world who _do_ want to do real engineering and they are offended because of that. Who knows.
by shroobani | 2025-11-15 09:06:24+00:00
If you don't have a vehicle you can't do anything, if this person was anywhere other than a large east coast city losing your vehicle is death. Have you ever tried to go somewhere in the south without a car? Pick two points even a couple miles away from each other around Kansas City, Kansas and genuinely think about how you would physically do it. You can't go anywhere so you can't work so you can't pay rent, you can't do anything. What is even the point of not going to prison except the fact you would have to stay in jail for a few months and you might be literally devoured by bedbugs?
by constantcrying | 2025-11-15 09:07:18+00:00
Much of the hype around SDD is really about developers never having experienced a real waterfall project.

Of course SDD/Waterfall helps the LLM/Outsourced labor to implement software in a predictable way. Waterfall was always a method to please Managers and in the case of SDD the manager is the user promoting the coding agent.

The problem with SDD/Waterfall is not the first part of the project. The problems come when you are deep into the project, your spec is a total mess and the tiniest feature you want to add requires extremely complex manipulation of the spec.

The success people are experiencing is the success managers have experienced at the beginning of their software projects. SDD will fail for the same reason Waterfall has failed. The constant increasing of complexity in the project, required to keep code and spec consistent can not be managed by LLM or human.
by khannn | 2025-11-15 09:07:28+00:00
It takes something like a week to acclimate to lower salt intake. Not hard at all, it's like coming down on caffeine or weed. Salt is very important in pasta to keep the shape of the noodle. Whole wheat pasta alone is a giant step up in health outcomes, especially considering school kid's famous preference for McD's, which has a ton of sodium. I also want to link the John Stewart rant about Olive Garden not salting the pasta, but can't find it.

Ever wondered why hospital food tastes bad? It's cooked en masse without salt so that people with a sodium restriction (heart healthy) can eat the same meat as everyone else. The sodium denaturizes the meat and affects flavor greatly.
by deng | 2025-11-15 09:07:34+00:00
As someone old enough to remember OSS, the amount of stockholm syndrome going on here is impressive. The fun times fiddling with 'vmix' to get different applications to play sounds at the same time, yeah, that was awesome. MIDI? USB Audio? Resampling? Jack? There's also this wireless thing, what's it called, redlip or something, but who cares about this modern stuff, I still got my C64 here, it's awesome, everything just works and it boots in a second.
by logicchains | 2025-11-15 09:08:34+00:00
> Now they have a lot of money so not having money to pay for developers is not an excuse.

NVidia is the exception to the rule when it comes to hardware companies paying competitive salaries for software engineers. I imagine AMD is still permeated by the attitude that software "isn't real work" and doesn't deserve more compensation, and that kind of inertia is very hard to overcome.
by surfingdino | 2025-11-15 09:08:56+00:00
What a wonderfully visual example of the crap LLMs turn everything into. I am eagerly awaiting the collapse of the LLM bubble. JetBrains added this crap to their otherwise fine series of IDEs and now I have to keep removing randomly inserted import statements and keep fixing hallucinated names of functions suggested instead of the names of functions that I have already defined in the same file. Lack of determinism where we expect it (most of the things we do, tbh) is creating more problems than it is solving.
by FiloSottile | 2025-11-15 09:09:40+00:00
128 bits of symmetric keys are enough for post-quantum security. See https://words.filippo.io/post-quantum-age/.

The public key algorithm has been frustratingly blocked on the IETF and CFRG, which are taking more than 15 months since FIPS 203 to stabilize a simple hash-based hybrid combiner.
by rda2 | 2025-11-15 09:10:38+00:00
It’s different if you have influence over the network, like a government might. I spend a lot of time in China, and they’ve done a good job of blocking VPNs in recent years, including my personal WireGuard connection to my home network. Not that any technical solution is impossible to bypass, but a motivated state government could make VPN use difficult if it wasn’t for the whole Constitution thing.
by ahartmetz | 2025-11-15 09:11:18+00:00
Not all of the criticism in the UHH is valid IMO. About the part that is... Some of the trouble with Unix is that it doesn't follow its own principles enough. The fix for that is Plan9. Some of the trouble is "worse is better" (too simple), the fixes for that are things like nushell and capability based security systems and microkernel based, uh, kernels and other systems that demonstrate how things could be better. These don't need to stray too far from the core ideas and principles - Plan9 contains some nice demonstrations for doing more with less while being much more Unix than Unix.
by makeitdouble | 2025-11-15 09:11:52+00:00
> Giving enough info about the project (including user stories, tech design requirements, filesystem structure and meaning, core interfaces/models, functions, etc)

What's not waterfall about this is lost on me.

Sounds to me like you're arguing waterfall is fine if each full run is fast/cheap enough, which could happen with LLMs and simple enough projects. [0]

Agile was offering incremental spec production , which had the tremendous advantage of accumulating knowledge incrementally as well. It might not be a good fit for LLMs, but revising the definition to make it fit doesn't help IMHO.

[0] Reminds me that reducing the project scopes to smaller runs was also a well established way to make waterfall bearable.
by itopaloglu83 | 2025-11-15 09:12:07+00:00
A common problem I found myself in is that I have to develop the query in one file and frequently run it to verify the data accuracy. I define the variables at top reminding me types and limitations etc. int vs varchar(10) vs varchar(50)

So I made a very simple module that takes those sql files and turns them into SQLAlchemy text objects with variables in them.

Would it be possible to add something like this to the project or does it require many sql parsing libraries etc. to ensure sql validity to find variables in the sql file?
by phil21 | 2025-11-15 09:12:08+00:00
Totally different from my lived experience.

Friends who grew up in middle class to upper middle class suburbs and parenting all took on college debt to varying degrees and varying outcomes 20 years later.

Friends who grew up with me in the inner city around poverty and who grew up poor or worse didn’t even consider college as an option due to the costs.

Almost no one growing up in actual poverty is going to be considering taking on six figures of college debt. The concept itself is utterly foreign and absurd. You simply already know at a young age it’s out of reach short of a full ride (sports or academic) scholarship. Even if you wanted to, your family doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for you to graduate college before you contribute to helping care for parents or younger siblings. This fact is socially reinforced by both family and your peers.

The folks I know who ended up with massive life-ending crippling student debt all grew up insanely privileged compared to the average around me. They all pretended to grow up “lower middle class” but they are outright lying to themselves (and others) about it.

It’s been interesting watching the student debt forgiveness debate under this lense. I don’t think a certain class of people understands just how tone deaf they are on the subject.

Sure there are outliers, but I’m talking about generalizations here.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-11-15 09:12:09+00:00
The detailed design spec is an issue hence Agile's "working code over comprehensive documentation". Your two points are consequences of this.

"Heavy documentation before coding" (article) is essentially a bad practice that Agile identified and proposed a remedy to.

Now the article is really about AI-driven development im which the AI agent is a "code monkey" that must be told precisely what to do. I think the interesting thing here will be do find the right balance... IMHO this works best when using LLMs only for small bits at a time instead of trying to specify the whole feature or product.
by rdtsc | 2025-11-15 09:12:56+00:00
There every complex enough distributed system will eventually implement Erlang but in an ad-hoc and not very good way. Quite a lot of systems ended up with actors. TigerBeetle in Zig, FoundationDB in C++. But they miss critical aspect of it and that’s isolated memory between processors. And they don’t know how to yield unless they do it on IO or do cooperative yielding. The global shared heap is really the dangerous part though. Rust could avoid the danger by asserting some guarantees at compile time.