MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Which agentic AI code assistant is more future proof?
by behnamoh | 2025-11-02 18:55:48+00:00
There are so many options out there:

Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Cursor, VSCode, Zed, RooCode, Cline, Kilo Code, Qwen Code, Gemini, Jules, Aider, etc.

Which one do you think is more worth investment? With Anthropic being so anti open source, do you still think Claude Code is worth it when it comes to future proofness of your workflow?
by lrvick | 2025-11-02 18:56:28+00:00
Not anymore. Real pain in the ass to bootstrap but thanks to mrustc combined with our work in stagex we have an easy to audit path now in a 100% bootstrapped distro.

Unfortunately due to no first party support or interest from the Rust team, we have to build through 15+ versions to get to latest and it takes 6+ hours to build with a 20+ core system, but it works.

https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/packages/...
by awillen | 2025-11-02 18:56:28+00:00
I would say a couple of things:

1. Just because I don't use something doesn't mean that I think it shouldn't exist or be sold. People can make their own choices. A product isn't bad or useless or unnecessary because it doesn't align with my preferences. I'm fine with people being able to make their own choices about what they buy. Also, I generally don't think people should have to live a totally ascetic lifestyle. I have three monitors - certainly redundant, but fine. I have art on my walls - could've gone without that. I have a dog who I buy toys and food for - not strictly necessary. These things are all more than fine in my book.

2. There are other reasons to be in business besides deeply caring about the business itself. The biggest benefit to this business is that it doesn't require a lot of day-to-day work, and I can do that work whenever I want. That means I can almost always be there for my kids. That's what matters to me. I would take a job that I don't particularly care about that lets me put them first over one that I'm deeply passionate about that takes them away from me any time.
by Scipio_Afri | 2025-11-02 18:57:19+00:00
Hey Simon, do you have any posts diving into how one might be able to deal with evaluating LLMs or Machine Learning models in general when reproducibility is so difficult given non-determinism? Pytorch has an article on it https://docs.pytorch.org/docs/stable/notes/randomness.html but then doesn't really go into how one would then take this deterministic result, and evaluate a model that is in production (which would very likely need for performance reasons the non-determinism features enabled).

While this affects all models it seems, I think the case gets worse for in particular LLMs because I would imagine all backends, including proprietary ones, are batching users prompts. Other concurrent requests seem to change the output of your request, and then if there is even a one token change to the input or output token, especially on large inputs or outputs, the divergence can compound. Also vLLM's documentation mentions this: https://docs.vllm.ai/en/latest/usage/faq.html

So how does one do benchmarking of AI/ML models and LLMs reliably (lets ignore arguing over the flaws of the metrics themselves, and just the fact that the output for any particular input can diverge given the above). You'd also want to redo evals as soon as any hardware or software stack changes are made to the production environment.

Seems like one needs to setup a highly deterministic backend, by forcing non-deterministic behavior in pytorch and using a backend which doesn't do batching for an initial eval that would allow for troubleshooting and non-variation in output to get a better sense of how consistent the model without the noise of batching and non-deterministic GPU calculations/kernels etc.

However then, for production, when determinism isn't guaranteed because you'd need batching and non-determism for performance, I would think that one would want to do multiple runs in various real-world situations (such as multiple users doing all sorts of different queries at the same time) and do some sort of averaging of the results. But I'm not entirely sure, because I would imagine the types of queries other users are making would then change the results fairly significantly. I'm not sure how much the batching that vLLM does would change the results of the output; but vLLM does say that batching does influence changes in the outputs.
by oscaracso | 2025-11-02 18:57:40+00:00
A large part of geopolitics is concerned with limiting the spread of weapons of mass destruction worldwide and to the greatest possible degree of efficacy. Moreover, the investment to train state-of-the-art models is greater than the Manhattan project and involves larger and more complex supply chains-- it cannot be done clandestinely. Because the scope of the project is large and resource-intensive there are not many bodies that would have to cooperate in order to place impassable obstacles on the path that is presently being taken. 'What if they won't cooperate toward this goal?' -- Worth considering, but the fact is that they can and are choosing not to. If the choice is there it is not an inevitability but a decision.
by dlcarrier | 2025-11-02 18:58:12+00:00
US federal regulations are full of laws that take something minor or completely legal, and add huge punishments because someone used technology. All the way back in 1952, fraud punishments were worse if someone used a telephone to commit fraud. In 1982 the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act added even more punishment, if someone used a computer.

Fraud is bad, and it should be illegal, but why have different punishments based on what technology someone used?

Laws like this go outside of fraud, and often are clearly unconstitutional, like the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, which made lawful gambling illegal too, until it was effectively overturned with Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association in 2018.
by bgwalter | 2025-11-02 18:58:34+00:00
Why should he leave? The IETF pretends on its sponsor page (https://www.ietf.org/support-us/endowment/):

The IETF is a global standards-setting organization, intentionally created without a membership structure so that anyone with the technical competency can participate in an individual capacity. This lack of membership ensures its position as the primary neutral standards body because participants cannot exert influence as they could in a pay-to-play organization where members, companies, or governments pay fees to set the direction. IETF standards are reached by rough consensus, allowing the ideas with the strongest technical merit to rise to the surface.

Further, these standards that advance technology, increase security, and further connect individuals on a global scale are freely available, ensuring small-to-midsize companies and entrepreneurs anywhere in the world are on equal footing with the large technology companies.

With a community from around the world, and an increased focus on diversity in all its forms, IETF seeks to ensure that the global Internet has input from the global community, and represents the realities of all who use it.

There is only one IETF, and telling dissenters to leave is like telling a dissenting citizen to go to another country. I don't think that people (apart from real spammers) were banned in 1996. The CoC discussion and power grab has reached the IETF around 2020 and it continues.

"Posting too many messages" has been deemed a CoC violation by for example the PSF and its henchmen, and functionally the IETF is using the same selective enforcement no matter what the official rationale is. They won't go after the "director" Wouters, even though his message was threatening and rude.
by Jasper_ | 2025-11-02 18:58:35+00:00
That Wayland keylogger is not the same thing. X11 has several mechanisms (XTest, XRecord, XI raw inputs) to receive a global raw key input stream, accessible to anyone who connects to the X server, without even making a visible window surface. It even bypasses grabs, meaning that your lock screen password entry can be snooped on.

The Wayland keylogger acts like an application; all Wayland compositors will only send key events to the focused surface, so the user has to focus an active surface in order to get key events. Even in the scenario where you've LD_PRELOAD-hooked all applications, you still will never get the lock screen password, as the compositor never sends it out across the wire.

LD_PRELOAD is problematic from a security perspective, but it's not Wayland-specific: the same issue is true for CLI applications and X11 applications, and any attacker with the ability to write files could also just replace your binaries with malicious ones (stuff them somewhere into ~/.hidden, and then add a $PATH entry to the start).
by saghm | 2025-11-02 18:58:59+00:00
> In general, neither can ensure at compile time that an index only known at runtime is in bounds, even if the bounds themselves are statically known.

Yeah, this seems like matrixes might not be a great first example for explaining the value of dependent types. It's fully possible to define a matrix that uses a generic type as the index for each dimension that doesn't allow expressing values outside the expected range; it would just be fairly cumbersome, and the usual issues would creep back in if you needed to go from "normal" integers back to indexes (although not if you only needed to convert the indexes to normal integers).

I find that the potential utility of dependent types is more clear when thinking about types where the "dimensions" are mutable, which isn't usually how I'd expect most people to use matrixes. Even a simple example like "the current length of a list can be part of the type, so you define a method to get the first element only on non-empty lists rather than needing them to return an optional value". While you could sort of implement this in a similar as described above with a custom integer-like type, the limitations of this kind of approach for a theoretically unbounded length are a lot more apparent than a matrix with constant-sized dimensions.
by babaneemkaroli | 2025-11-02 19:00:04+00:00
Author here. Built this translator that handles OOP↔Functional, Dynamic↔Static, etc.

Red-teamed with 7 edge cases (C++ pointers → Haskell, Ruby metaprogramming → Rust, etc.). All produced idiomatic code.

Live demo: https://jaibabaneemkaroli-1.github.io/universal-code-transla...

Uses Claude API. Not affiliate - you need your own API key (free $5 credits).

Happy to answer questions about the method (Cultural Grammar Synthesis) or specific translations.
by gretch | 2025-11-02 19:00:18+00:00
All of those people have already pass through a filter of self-selection

There's a person out there that's 1) knows how to bake amazing cookies 2) has no desire to record tik toks

Why is that you need both of those things combined to have a successful cookie business? Can't we desire a world where just being good at baking cookies is good enough? You don't ALSO have to record a bunch of tik toks?
by rootusrootus | 2025-11-02 19:02:42+00:00
Yeah, I don't do metric by default, so I sometimes mixup the exact conversions, especially from memory. It was certainly cL, not dL. It was a bottle of this, which is not special, but a novelty souvenir my wife wanted to bring home: https://stagsbreath.co.uk/products/stags-breath-liqueur-10cl

She ended up just having a 70 cL bottle shipped to us and we wrote off the one stolen at Heathrow.
by redwall_hp | 2025-11-02 19:03:41+00:00
There are a lot of phpBB/XenForo/Discourse/etc fouls out there too that get slammed hard by those, and many cases of them just shutting down rather than eating much higher hosting costs. Which, of course, further pushes online communities in the hands of corporations like Reddit and Facebook.

Most of them are simply throwing one of those tools on a VPS or such, which is perfect for their community size, and then falls over under LLM companies' botnets DDoSing them.
by ac29 | 2025-11-02 19:03:51+00:00
The only company making EUVL machines is ASML. The EUV light source was invented in the US and according to wikipedia is used under licence by ASML.

If you have a source that says "modern, high-yield EULV" does not use ASML machines, or does not use the laser pulsed tin plasma light source invented in the US, I'd be interested
by spaceman_2020 | 2025-11-02 19:03:54+00:00
What you’re talking about is the primary marketing collateral. But any good marketing campaign needs a ton of secondary or even tertiary marketing collateral

The first “real video” you talked about is meant to grab attention and tell users, honestly, what the product is about

But they’re not customers - yet. They need to be reminded about your brand again and again

You can’t run the same video every time - for one, its repetitive. And for two, its disruptive on the wrong channels

You will need static images and basic videos and even tweets across platforms to remarket to your audience

That’s where tools like this come in handy. You grabbed attention with the first video. But now you need to tell users that if they buy tomorrow, they get 15% off.
by dingnuts | 2025-11-02 19:03:55+00:00
The tools mechanical and civil engineers use are predictable. You're confusing the things these engineers design, which have tolerances and things like that, with the tools themselves.

If an engineer built an internal combustion engine that misfired 60% of the time, it simply wouldn't work.

If an engineer measured things with a ruler that only measured correctly 40% of the time, that would be the apt analogy.

The tool isn't what makes engineering a practice, it's the rigor and the ability to measure and then use the measurements to predict outcomes to make things useful.

Can you predict the outcome from an LLM with an "engineered" prompt?

No, and you aren't qualified to even comment on it since your only claim to fame is a fucking web app
by seemaze | 2025-11-02 19:05:17+00:00
To address some of the issues outlined in the article, I've settled on running Alpine Linux in my homelab. Things I enjoy:

- Runs completely from ram and is incredibly small which makes it easy to grok all running processes.

- It has a reasonably complete catalog of packages due it's popularity as a container distro.

- The LBU backup utility and APKOVL artifacts make committing, aborting, or reverting config changes a breeze so I can tinker to my hearts content without fear of borking the system.
by metmac | 2025-11-02 19:05:55+00:00
Now do this in containers with gMSAs. It eliminates the need of passing around Admin creds. Which I cannot stress enough. You shouldn’t be throwing your DA credentials into your random Linux machine’s Kerberos cache.

Amazon open sourced a project trying to solve similar problems.

https://github.com/aws/credentials-fetcher

Nifty, but was clearly made with AWS assumptions and we had to roll our own with the various hooks we needed for our cloud infra.
by shermantanktop | 2025-11-02 19:06:12+00:00
:raises hand

At my mid 90s Unix shop, everyone had to use someone’s script which in turn called sccs. I don’t recall what it did, but I remember being annoyed that someone’s attempt to save keystrokes meant I had to debug alpha-quality script code before the sccs man page was relevant.

Adding -x to the shebang line was the only way to figure out what was really going on.
by zzo38computer | 2025-11-02 19:06:14+00:00
It is not only that directly; the domain name might be reassigned to someone else, resulting in a valid certificate which is different than the one you wanted. (If you have the hash of the file which you have verified independently then it is more secure (if the hash algorithm is secure enough), although HTTPS is not needed in that case, it can still be used if you wish to avoid spies knowing which file you accessed. You can also use the server's public key if you know what it should be, although this has different issues, such as someone compromising the server (or the key) and modifying the script.) (There is also knowing if the script is what you intended or not anyways (or if there is something unexpected due to the configuration on your computer); if that is your issue, you can read it (and perhaps verifying the character encoding) before executing it, whether or not you trust the server operator and the author of that script.)
by dang | 2025-11-02 19:06:22+00:00
Related:

Fil-C: A memory-safe C implementation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45735877 - Oct 2025 (130 comments)

Safepoints and Fil-C - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45258029 - Sept 2025 (44 comments)

Fil's Unbelievable Garbage Collector - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45133938 - Sept 2025 (281 comments)

InvisiCaps: The Fil-C capability model - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45123672 - Sept 2025 (2 comments)

Just some of the memory safety errors caught by Fil-C - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43215935 - March 2025 (5 comments)

The Fil-C Manifesto: Garbage In, Memory Safety Out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42226587 - Nov 2024 (1 comment)

Rust haters, unite Fil-C aims to Make C Great Again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42219923 - Nov 2024 (6 comments)

Fil-C a memory-safe version of C and C++ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42158112 - Nov 2024 (1 comment)

Fil-C: Memory-Safe and Compatible C/C++ with No Unsafe Escape Hatches - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41936980 - Oct 2024 (4 comments)

The Fil-C Manifesto: Garbage In, Memory Safety Out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39449500 - Feb 2024 (17 comments)

In addition, here are the major related subthreads from other submissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45568231 (Oct 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45444224 (Oct 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45235615 (Sept 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45087632 (Aug 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44874034 (Aug 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43979112 (May 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43948014 (May 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43353602 (March 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43195623 (Feb 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43188375 (Feb 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41899627 (Oct 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41382026 (Aug 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40556083 (June 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39681774 (March 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39542944 (Feb 2024)
by dingnuts | 2025-11-02 19:06:32+00:00
Woodworking is to civil engineering as being an IT help desk rep is to being a software engineer. Woodworking isn't engineering either. If you build a system with aspects you can measure and predictably tune, you're engineering. If you're making skilled alterations to an existing structure or system without applied math or science, you're partaking in a craft.

Software engineering blurs the lines, sure, but woodworking isn't engineering ever.
by godelski | 2025-11-02 19:06:40+00:00
Doesn't Chrome use libavcodec?

I'm somewhat with you but we're also talking about a $3.4T company that's depending on an OSS project with what... under a $1m budget? It seems they're pretty resource constrained.

I'm pretty sure Google makes more through Chrome's usage of libav than ffmpeg's entire budget. So yeah, I think Google should put effort back in and I think it's in their best interest.

Trillion dollar companies standing on top of open source projects and giving little to nothing back is not okay. It's also just stupid since they're eating their own foundations
by walterbell | 2025-11-02 19:06:42+00:00
"US declines to join more than 70 countries in signing UN cybercrime treaty", 200 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45760328

the first global framework “for the collection, sharing and use of electronic evidence for all serious offenses”.. the first global treaty to criminalize crimes that depend on the internet.. [it] has been heavily criticized by the tech industry, which has warned that it criminalizes cybersecurity research and exposes companies to legally thorny data requests. Human rights groups warned.. [it] forces member states to create a broad electronic surveillance dragnet that would include crimes that have nothing to do with technology

World Cybercrime Index: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-04-10-world-first-cybercrime-...

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/the-un...

> states parties are obligated to establish laws in their domestic system to “compel” service providers to “collect or record” real-time traffic or content data. Many of the states behind the original drive to establish this convention have long sought this power over private firms.
by pingou | 2025-11-02 19:06:58+00:00
The average emissions for a car is 4.6 tons of co2. The average carbon intensity of U.S. electricity generation is around 384 grams of co2 per kWh. 1230000 * 0.384 / 1000 = 472 tons. But 185000 cars emit 851000 tons so 500 tons is like a rounding error, unless I am mistaken.
by ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 | 2025-11-02 19:07:10+00:00
I think I finally see what we’re clashing on. Where do you draw the line between “this is a tool assisting me in creating my art” and “here is my AI film I stitched together with 10 Sora prompts”?

The songwriter for K-Pop Demon Hunter’s Soda Pop used AI to help them write the lyrics - fine. The hacks on X calling themselves incredible artists because they can prompt Dall-E - slop.
by Izkata | 2025-11-02 19:07:45+00:00
> 2. It makes it easier for people to use the history for analysis, which is especially important when you may not be able to speak directly to the original author.

I've been on a maintenance team for ~5 years and this has saved me so many times in svn, where you can't squash, for weird edge cases caused by a change a decade or more ago. It's the reason I'm against blind squashes in git.

My favorite was, around 2022, discovering something that everyone believed was released in 2015, but was temporarily reverted in 2016 while dealing with another bug, that the original team forgot to re-release. If the 2016 reversion had been squashed along with the other bug, I might never have learned it was intended to be temporary.

I'm fine with manually squashing "typo" commits, but these individual ones are the kind where you can't know ahead of time if they'll be useful. It's better to keep them, and use "git log --first-parent" if you only want the overview of merges.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-11-02 19:08:59+00:00
Is China dominating the US in terms of AI? Given that they currently have a model that beats the best models at all formal quantitative benchmarks?

What is the state of AI in China? My personal feeling is that it doesn't dominate the zeitgeist in China as it does in the US and despite this because of the massive amount of intellectual capital they have just a small portion of their software engineering talent working on this is enough to go head to head with us even though it only takes a fraction of their attention.
by godelski | 2025-11-02 19:09:35+00:00
> because they use FFmpeg in a bunch of commercial products like Youtube and Chrome

Not to mention they just have a vested interest in getting the problem solved. Even if we don't talk about money.

I'm not sure why this is an unpopular idea, but contribute back to your upstream dependencies. If they're a dependency, they're part of *your code*.