MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skydhash | 2025-11-26 12:51:43+00:00
I’m not a native English speaker so I checked on the definition of reliability

the quality of being able to be trusted or believed because of working or behaving well

For a tool, I expect “well” to mean that it does what it’s supposed to do. My linter are reliable when it catches bad patterns I wanted it to catch. My editor is reliable when I can edit code with it and the commands do what they’re supposed to do.

So for generating text, LLMs are very reliable. And they do a decent job at categorizing too. But code is formal language, which means correctness is the end result. A program may be valid and incorrect at the same time.

It’s very easy to write valid code. You only need the grammar of the language. Writing correct code is another matter and the only one that is relevant. No one hire people for knowing a language grammar and verifying syntax. They hire people to produce correct code (and because few businesses actually want to formally verify it, they hire people that can write code with a minimal amount of bugs and able to eliminate those bugs when they surface).
by neomantra | 2025-11-26 12:51:54+00:00
Came here to say the same. It’s the last sentence of their deep post suggests playing in person.

I can’t imagine playing Bughouse online. It is the most fun you’ll have playing chess and it’s all about the interpersonal experiences.

In the simpler times of the mid-90’s, on Autumn Sunday’s my college flatmates and I would drink beer, watch football, and play Bughouse. High fives, smack talking, wild sacrifice tactics… soooo much fun!

I do admire the commenter that took it to hardcore levels too — a different path.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-11-26 12:52:01+00:00
Consider the facts: (1) most open-source maintainers have a real job (2) an unwritten rule of corporate culture is "(appear) nice" (see all of the "corporate speak" memes about how "per my last email" means "fuck off") (3) these developers may eventually need a job at another company (4) their "moron" comment is going to live forever on the internet...
by malfist | 2025-11-26 12:52:42+00:00
I'm not sure you lived the same history I did. Decompiling for intermediate languages has always been a thing. Hell, back in college as an intern I was looking at the assembly of a decompiled C# binary, and back in highschool using intellij's Java decompiler to poke at some game applets to see if there we hacking opportunities. This was back when ruinscape didn't have a paid version
by kamaal | 2025-11-26 12:52:47+00:00
>>Literally the worst job you can find as a programmer today (if you lower you standards and particularly, stay away from cryptocurrency jobs) is 10x better than the non-programmer jobs you can find.

A lot of non-programmer jobs have a kind of union protection, pension plans and other perks even with health care. That makes a crappy salary and work environment bearable.

There was this VP of HR, in a Indian outsourcing firm, and she something to the effect that Software jobs appear like would pay to the moon, have an employee generate tremendous value for the company and general appeal that only smart people work these jobs. None of this happens with the majority of the people. So after 10-15 years you actually kind of begin to see why some one might want to work a manufacturing job.

Life is long, job guarantee, pensions etc matter far more than 'move fast and break thing' glory as you age.
by thunky | 2025-11-26 12:53:06+00:00
> How are you going to be shamed? I thought there's nothing wrong with it?

If you re-read my comments you will understand that I don't believe there's anything wrong with using the word "master" to name a branch. But other people do, which is why there was an uproar and the default name was ultimately changed to "main".

Not sure how you were able to misinterpret this.
by joduplessis | 2025-11-26 12:53:42+00:00
I've started calling it EDD - Executive Driven Development.

Senior stakeholders get into a room, decide they need xyz for the project to really succeed, push this down to managers who in turn try perform miracles with what little development resource they have. Very often they also have an offshore team who is only concerned with prolonging the contract as much as possible, rather than delivering. 2 weeks later senior stakeholders get back into the room...
by the_af | 2025-11-26 12:53:58+00:00
Latin American here: my coworkers used to (note: I'm remote now, that's why the past tense) brush their teeth after lunch, so if they also brushed in the mornings and before going to bed, that'd make it three times.

I didn't though, I'm not taking my brush & toothpaste to a public restroom at the office.
by Tepix | 2025-11-26 12:54:37+00:00
I came here to say this. I find the following to be quite misleading:

Bandwidth Saver respects your privacy and your visitors’ privacy:

Does not track visitors Does not use cookies Does not collect analytics Does not phone home

Because all that tracking and data collection will be done by Cloudflare (a company subject to the CLOUD act) instead.
by nixass | 2025-11-26 12:55:02+00:00
> In the early days of New Orleans, the pieces of the casket were removed and burned, while the remains were pushed to the back of the tomb, falling into an underground chamber called a caveau (This is where the phrase, "I wouldn't touch him with a ten-foot pole comes from... the pole being the device used to push remains to the back of the tomb).

TIL
by Sharlin | 2025-11-26 12:55:08+00:00
This touches on the absolutely vital issue of domain knowledge. Everybody understands that you're not supposed to have the same people handle sewer maintenance and preschool teaching because these are two entirely separate skillsets. To an extent you can also treat kindergartens and treatment plants as black boxes that consume money and produce desired services.

For people who don't know much about programs it's sort of natural to assume that software engineering works the same way. Put in money and specs, get back programs. But of course it doesn't work like that, because software dev is not a single skillset. To write useful programs, you have to know how to code and understand the environment in which the program will be used.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-11-26 12:58:43+00:00
This reminds me of the "good developers must be good at thinking at multiple levels of abstraction at the same time" quote. The things you notice about these AI kids is they didn't even do the bare minimum to reason about their PR from multiple angles. __Of course__ someone is going to ask why the copyright is there. Better have a good answer, or - locked, come back when you do. Really that simple.
by Certhas | 2025-11-26 12:59:24+00:00
Do you have any actual evidence that this result can be viewed as an instance of CH?

The networks on the measure theory side and on the algorithmic side are not the same. They are not even the same cardinality. One has uncountably many nodes, the other has countably many nodes.

The correspondence outlined is also extremely subtle. Measurable colorings are related to speed of consensus.

You make it sound like this is a result of the type: "To prove that a coloring exists, I prove that an algorithm that colors the network exists." Which it is not, as far as I understand.

It seems to me you are mischaracterizing CH here as well:

> A proof that your network has some property is an algorithm to construct an instance of appropriate type from your object.

A proof that a certain network has some property is an algorithm that constructs an instance of an appropriate type that expresses this fact from the axioms you're working from.
by adityaathalye | 2025-11-26 13:00:27+00:00
Thanks for the link! I read it earlier today and, wow, she was hard sci-fi, as of the early 1900s. I want to call out two things (water harvesting, energy use), but further details will be spoilers.

I reckon she also presaged some of the demographic / cultural re-workings we are experiencing in the 21st century. Hers was a time of radical social reform and political turmoil in the Indian subcontinent, as well as the world. I suppose many urban intellectuals as well as revolutionaries in the hinterland felt a palpable sense of "hang on, this <insert huge transformation> could actually happen, and we could make it happen".

Fertile ground for all sorts of literary imagination.
by spicyusername | 2025-11-26 13:00:38+00:00
> assign work to an LLM

This is just not happening anywhere around me. I don't know why it keeps getting repeated in every one of these discussions.

Every software engineer I know is using LLM tools, but every team around me is still hiring new developers. Zero firing is happening in any circle near me due to LLMs.

LLMs can not do unsupervised work, period. They do not replace developers. They replace Stack Overflow and Google.
by the_af | 2025-11-26 13:01:15+00:00
Alien and Aliens were masterpieces, but I've been consistently disappointed by everything after.

Let's agree to ignore the awful VS Predator crossovers for a second. I'm not sure they are canon anyway, and they are obviously cash grabs and not made with the same care of even the worst Alien movies.

Alien 3, while it has a cool idea (prison planet), is a mess as a result of executive meddling (the story can be read online). And they killed Hicks and Newt... bastards!

Resurrection was awful and awfully badly acted. I like Jeunet, but this was a hard miss. It has some cool visuals at times, typical of Jeunet, but the movie itself was embarrassing.

Prometheus was atrocious. Badly acted, badly scripted (characters making the dumbest of choices at every turn, professionals who don't know their profession -- xenobiologists who pet alien snakes, geologists who get lots at the first turn -- this has been discussed countless times). And the loss of mystery... nobody needed to know more about the Engineers/Pilot aliens, that's not how good storytelling works. Aided by technology, Scott "pulled a George Lucas" and forgot the cardinal rule of scifi horror/mystery: less is more.

After this, I exercised the good sense of avoiding Covenant (the plot summary seems bad), and Romulus, and now the new TV show.

I think overall the gravest sin is that the Alien universe was meant to be sketched in the broadest strokes, and details and mystery kept, not overexplained.

I wish they had let the first two awesome movies rest in peace.

Extended universes suck.

P.S. same applies to Blade Runner. Then again, I didn't even like the sequel, so I'm sure I'll dislike the upcoming show :(
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-11-26 13:01:16+00:00
GNU Taler already exists and was built by actual experts.

https://www.taler.net/en/

Copy pasting the front page:

> We provide a payment system that makes privacy-friendly online transactions fast and

> Payments without registration

> Data protection by default

> Fraud eliminated by design

> Not a new currency!

> Empowers communities to run their own payment infrastructure

> Free Software
by theoldgreybeard | 2025-11-26 13:01:30+00:00
This is awesome software. Set it up as my home’s main file sharing server the last time it was posted here and it’s been great!

Moved all my family’s photos and videos out of the various clouds and now use this and it’s been great. Even my non tech savvy wife has gotten used to how it works and it works good for her. No complaints after the initial learning curve.

It’s not pretty but it does what it is supposed to do and it’s extremely easy to setup and configure.
by snickerbockers | 2025-11-26 13:02:09+00:00
That's an argument against ranking students in a way which can potentially determine their entire lives, not an argument against standardized testing. The alternative to standardized testing is GPA which is an extremely subjective metric masquerading as some objective datapoint. Kids from different schools don't even have the same curricula let alone the same grading standards.

Also the teachers have a vested interest in giving the highest grades they can to as many students as they can without making it obvious that they aren't actually grading them fairly. i don't mean this as an accusation against anybody or some sort of insult against teachers as a whole, I merely mean to point out that this is what they are incentized to do by virtue of the fact that they are indirectly grading themselves by grading their students.
by rcxdude | 2025-11-26 13:02:20+00:00
They are async across operations that do 'yield', i.e. when the function eventually runs an i/o operation or sleep or similar. Those are the points where the functions can be interleaved. Simply awaiting another function is _not_ one of those points: await here only means the called function might yield to the scheduler at some point in its execution (it doesn't have to!), not that the calling function will yield immediately.
by furyofantares | 2025-11-26 13:02:53+00:00
Yep, it's another slop. We are getting these about daily now where there's lots of comments on articles that'd are clearly slop.

Half the article is paragraph headings, the other half is bullet points or numbered lists, if there was anything interesting in the prompt it'd been erased by an LLM which has turned it into an infodump with no perspective, nothing to convey, and I have no ability to tell what if anything might have been important to the author (besides blog clicks and maybe the title).

I really wish we could start recognizing these sooner, I think too many people skim and then go to the comments section but I don't think we really want HN to be a place filled with low value articles just because they're good jumping off points for comments.

I've been flagging them here and then heading over to kagi and marking as slop there. Makes me wish we had something similar here rather than just "flag".

And I know we aren't supposed to comment when we flag, but this feels different to me, like we've got to collectively learn to notice this better or we need better tools.
by thyristan | 2025-11-26 13:03:30+00:00
Steam and hot water pipes are extremely expensive to install, far worse than electricity, fibre, water or sewage.

You need to be more leak-proof than cold water pipes, because loss of pressure with steam and hot water is much more of a problem than with cold water and cannot easily be solved by just adding more cheap water. Pipe materials have to be more resistant to corrosion because higher temperatures and pressures make them corrode so much faster than with cold water. Closed hot water/steam circuits also mean that there won't be a protective limescale coating on the inside. You need insulation that you can bury and which will last for at least 40 years, which is even more expensive than the pipes. And the insulation will double the pipe diameter. And the insulated pipes have a larger keepout area that needs to be kept free of rocks, other pipes and mechanical strain because the insulation is soft and sensitive to those things. Since usually the pipes aren't operated in summer, and since generally thermal variance is far higher than with cold water, thermal expansion needs to be taken into account, so you need expansion corners, sliding sections, different valve constructions that are tight in all temperatures, etc.

And even with perfect insulation, you will loose approximately 30 to 40% of heat in your piping. So all of this is only viable if you don't care about the cost of the heat, your consumers can (be forced to or persuaded to) accept at least 30% higher prices per kWh compared to their local boiler, not to mention the capital cost.

There are only some areas in Europe even, where those kinds of installations take place: Densely packed inner cities with largely rented-out flats in appartment buildings. There, the landlords/owners avoid the cost and risk of a local boiler and don't care about the running cost of heat, because they don't pay for it. In smaller towns, like in the example, mostly public buildings like schools use those kinds of district heating systems, because the municipality doesn't care as much about cost of the heat, and more about cost of maintenance of a hundred local boilers vs. one centralized system. And in the end, it's taxpayers' money, so they don't actually care that much, headlines and opening ceremonies are more important than that.

Individual home owners usually do have their local systems, which can be run cheaper than what district heating will charge you. And since city density is lower and home ownership is more widespread in the US, district heating is even less competitive there.
by skydhash | 2025-11-26 13:04:27+00:00
> Imagine refusing to drive a car in the 60s because they haven't reach 1kbhp yet. Ahaha.

That’s very much a false analogy. In the 60s, cars were very reliable (not as much as today’s cars) but it was already an established transportation vehicle. 60s cars are much closer to todays cars than 2000s computers are to current ones.
by xtiansimon | 2025-11-26 13:05:25+00:00
> “…exploiting our employer's lack of information…”

I agree in the sense that those of us who work in for-profit businesses have benefited from employer’s willingness to spend on dev budgets (salaries included)—without having to spend their own _time_ becoming increasingly involved in the work. As “AI” develops it will blur the boundaries of roles and reshape how capital can be invested to deliver results and have impact. And if the power dynamics shift (ie. out of the class of educated programmers to, I dunno, philosophy majors) then you’re in trouble.
Show HN: Turn Your NAS into an AI Subtitle Machine (Open Source, Local)
by mrqjr | 2025-11-26 13:05:56+00:00
I built an open-source tool that turns any NAS into a fully automated subtitle-generation pipeline — running completely locally, no cloud services, no data leaving your network.

If you keep movies/TV shows on a Synology/QNAP/TrueNAS box, this project makes the NAS generate subtitles automatically using on-device models.

Highlights Local speech-to-text with Whisper-compatible engines No external API calls — privacy by design Simple plug-and-play: drop media in a folder → subtitles appear Multi-thread + GPU acceleration support Auto-language detection, timestamp correction, subtitle formatting Web UI for queue monitoring & batch processing Works on Synology, QNAP, Unraid, TrueNAS, Docker everywhere

Why I built this

Existing subtitle tools either rely on cloud APIs (privacy concern), require manual processing, or don’t integrate well with NAS workflows. So this project aims to provide:

A fully autonomous subtitle engine for home servers.

Repo + Docs: https://subtitlesdog.com/en/nas-subtitler

https://github.com/subtitlesdog/nas-subtitler

Happy to hear feedback from HN folks — feature suggestions, performance improvements, or architecture critiques are more than welcome.
by paulgrammer | 2025-11-26 13:06:23+00:00
CSI driver Rclone lets you mount any rclone-supported cloud storage (S3, GCS, Azure, Dropbox, SFTP, 50+ providers) directly into pods. It uses rclone as a Go library (no external binary), supports dynamic provisioning, VFS caching, and config via Secrets + StorageClass.
by spicyusername | 2025-11-26 13:06:53+00:00
100% my experience as well.

Negativity spreads so much more quickly than positivity online, and I feel as though too many people live in self reinforcing negative comment sections and blog posts than in the real world, which gives them a distorted view.

My opinion is that LLMs are doing nothing but accelerating what's possible with the craft, not eliminating it. If anything, this makes a single developer MORE valuable, because they can now do more with less.
by analog31 | 2025-11-26 13:07:05+00:00
>>> Without fail, from the students that use Python, the response is: “This will take me a bit. Let me sit down at my desk and figure it out and then I’ll be back.”

This is completely aside, but I wouldn't hold this against the students or Python. The students may be following an age-old rule of office politics: "Never troubleshoot in front of an audience." And why this is more prevalent among the students who use Python, well... sample size of 30.
by menaerus | 2025-11-26 13:07:23+00:00
I see. Let's take another example here, I hope I understood you - imagine you have an AI model which is connected to all of your company's in-house data generation sources such as wiki, chat, jira, emails, merge requests, excel sheets, etc. Basically everything that can be deemed useful to query or to create business inteligence on top of. These data sources are continously generating more and more data every day, and given their nature they are more or less unstructured.

Yet, we have such systems in place where we don't have to retrain the model with ever-growing data. This is one example I could think of but it kinda suggests that models, at least for some purposes, don't have to be retrained continuously to keep them running well.

I also use a technique of explaining something to the AI model he has not seen before (according to the wrong answer I got from it previously), and it manages to evolve the steps, whatever they are, so that it gives me the correct answer in the end. This also suggests that capacity of the models is larger than what they have been trained on.
by IgorPartola | 2025-11-26 13:07:25+00:00
The example with parent() awaiting a child() is showing.. nothing? Maybe I am missing some subtlety but here is a JS example that is equivalent:

async function sleep(t) { return new Promise((resolve) => { setTimeout (() => resolve(), t) }） } async function child() { console.log("child start") await sleep(500) console.log("child end") } async function parent () { console.log("parent start") await child() console.log("parent end") } parent()

It will print:

parent start child start child end parent end

Just like the Python version. This article is confusing the fact that JS has a lot more code that returns a promise than Python and thinks it means the behavior is different. It isn’t.

You can roll your own event loop without asyncio by accumulating coroutines in Python and awaiting them in whatever order you want. There is no built-in event loop, however. You can do the same in JavaScript but there you do have a fairly complex event loop (see microtasks) as in there is no running environment without it and if you want a secondary one you have to roll it yourself.

create_task() simply registers a coroutine with the event loop and returns a “future” which basically says “once the main event loop is done awaiting your coroutine this is the ticket to get the result/exception”. That’s the whole magic of an event loop. It is the difference between dropping off a shirt at a dry cleaner and waiting there for them to be done with it (no you aren’t doing the work but you are also not doing anything else), and dropping it off then leaving to get lunch then coming back to wait until the cleaner is done with your pickup ticket in hand (concurrency).

But fundamentally awaiting an async function that doesn’t actually do anything async won’t give you parallelism in a single-threaded environment. More at 11.