MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by menaerus | 2025-11-26 17:25:41+00:00
Incidentally, I worked on the exact same thing - Kalman filtering for tracking objects in hard real-time systems. And it is not quite as simple as one would think - developing mathematical models for all kinds of different objects that one might wanna track is far from trivial, and it was difficult to model the real-world with more or less simplistic discrete equations. And it didn't work completely reliably so we needed an extra layer of confidence - I don't remember what we used back then but it was yet another algorithm with yet another source of data.
by jrm4 | 2025-11-26 17:25:43+00:00
"Hacker" of course, has overwhelmingly mostly lost the plot. Especially here, but elsewhere too.

"Hacker" was a recognition that there existed a crusty old entrenched system (mostly not through any fault of any individual) and that it is good to poke and chip away at it, though exploring the limits of new technology.

Whatever we're doing now here, it's emphatically not that.
by estimator7292 | 2025-11-26 17:25:45+00:00
Good news: the primordial oceans were so vast (literally planet-scale) and persisted for so long (millions to billions of years) that you can run a trillion trillion individual random reactions.

You are being severely restricted by your imagination. You seem to have presupposed that random abiogenesis is impossible and reconstructed the facts to support that claim because you can't conceive of the alternative.

Planets are really, really big. Any one chemical reaction is on the scale of molecules. If you let those figures compound for a long time, the number of total reactions gets very, very large. Far larger than you imagine. Many times more.
by thunky | 2025-11-26 17:25:50+00:00
> the point is they don't have human level intelligence > If you want to ASSIGN a task to something/someone then you need a human or artificial human

Maybe you haven't experienced it but a lot of junior devs don't really display that much intelligence. Their operating input is a clean task list, and they take it and convert it into code. It's more like "code entry" ("data entry", but with code).

The person assigning tasks to them is doing the thinking. And they are still responsible for the final output, so if they find a computer better and cheaper at "code entry" than a human well then that's who they're assign it to. As you can see in this thread many are already doing this.
by locknitpicker | 2025-11-26 17:26:03+00:00
> I disagree. I learnt good stuff from this article and it’s enough.

That's perfectly fine. It's also besides the point though. You can learn without reading random people online cynically shit talking others as a self promotion strategy. This is junior dev energy manifesting junior level understanding of the whole problem domain.

There's not a lot to learn from claims that boil down to "don't have bugs".
by jakub_g | 2025-11-26 17:26:09+00:00
In my first big job in a big legacy company, 30% of ongoing effort was "how to implement this feature which needs a database without a database".

We also paid some security company to use it as a proxy in front of our server to implement some server redirects because it was simpler than configuring our own servers. Simple one-liner conf changes were a week of emails with support staff.
by swatcoder | 2025-11-26 17:26:18+00:00
That might happen, but it hasn't yet.

So far, the tools help many programmers write simple code more quickly.

For technically adept professionals who are not programmers, though, we still haven't seen anything really break through the ceiling consistently encountered by previous low-code/no-code tools like FoxPro, Access, Excel, VBA, IFTTT, Zapier, Salesforce etc.

The LLM-based tools for this market work differently than the comparable tools that preceded them over the last 40 years, in that they have a much richer vocabulary of output, but the ceiling that all of these tools encountered in the last has been a human one: most non-programmers don't know how to describe what they need with sufficient detail for anything much beyond a fragile, narrow toy.

Maybe GPT-8 or Gemini 6 or whatever will somehow finally be able to shatter this ceiling, and somebody will make finally make a no-code software builder that devours the market for custom/domain software. But that hasn't happened yet and it's at least as easy to be skeptical as it is to be convinced.
by pshirshov | 2025-11-26 17:26:28+00:00
> Is success mostly the result of it being able to test its output reliably, and of how easy it is to set up the environment for this testing?

I won't say so. From my experience the key to success is the ability to split big tasks into smaller ones and help the model with solutions when it's stuck.

Reproducible environments (Nix) help a lot, yes, same for sound testing strategies. But the ability to plan is the key.
by DoughnutHole | 2025-11-26 17:27:01+00:00
The blindness is to reality and nuance.

If you stare at your GPS and don’t pay attention to what’s in the real world outside your windshield until you careen off a cliff that would be “blindly” following your GPS. You had data but you didn’t sufficiently hedge against your data being incomplete.

Likewise sticking dogmatically to your metrics while ignoring nuance or the human factor is blindly following your metrics.
by jonas21 | 2025-11-26 17:27:07+00:00
Indeed, this line of reasoning goes all they way back to Socrates who argued that outsourcing your memory to writing would make you stupider [1]:

> For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

I, for one, am glad we have technologies -- like writing, the internet, Google, and LLMs -- that let us expand the limits of what our minds can do.

[1] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
by Decabytes | 2025-11-26 17:27:15+00:00
Python pays the bills. If it was up to me I'd use a different language, but there is no denying that its got a strong story in just about every field now. As I've gotten older, I've come to realize that programming languages are vehicles for solving computer based problems, and I've learned to find joy in solving those problems in whatever language my company/project is using.

But in my personal projects, my favorite language to use it Dart.
by Sanzig | 2025-11-26 17:27:20+00:00
Provided we don't wipe ourselves out, there's no technical reason why we can't go interstellar. It's just way harder and more energy intensive than most people imagine, so I doubt it's happening any time in the next few hundred years.

But we already understand the physics and feasibility of "slow" (single-digit fractions of c) interstellar propulsion systems. Nuclear pulse propulsion and fission fragment rockets require no new physics or exotic engineering leaps and could propel a probe to the stars, if one was so inclined. Fusion rockets would do a bit better, although we'd have to crack the fusion problem first. These sorts of things are well out of today's technology, but it's not unforeseeable in a few centuries. You could likewise imagine a generation ship a few centuries after that powered by similar technology.

The prerequisite for interstellar exploration is a substantial exploitation of our solar system's resources: terraform Mars, strip mine the asteroid belt, build giant space habitats like O'Neill cylinders. But if we ever get to that point - and I think it's reasonable to think we will, given enough time - an interstellar mission becomes the logical next step.

Will we ever get to the point where traveling between the stars is commonplace? No, I doubt it. But we may get to the point where once-in-a-century colonization missions are possible, and if that starts, there's no limit to humanity colonizing the Milky Way given a few million years.
by WorldMaker | 2025-11-26 17:27:21+00:00
I think Flexbox is so much worse than CSS Grid. If Flexbox makes sense to you, it I don't think it should be that hard to learn CSS Grid, you'll already have many of the properties you need to understood learned. Grid just works properly in 2 whole dimensions where Flexbox sort of gives up after 1 and a half dimensions.
by jrm4 | 2025-11-26 17:27:36+00:00
"Dignifies work done by developers?"

Hmm. No. Not really. I don't think "hacker" ever much meant this at all; mostly because "hacker" never actually was much connected to "labor for money."

"Going to work" and "being a hacker" were overwhelmingly mutually exclusive. Hacking was what you don't do on company time (in favor of the company.)
by mikkupikku | 2025-11-26 17:27:53+00:00
It really depends on the voice. For some reason, AI impersonations of Dagoth Ur are remarkably accurate even though Dagoth Ur has only a few sentences of dialogue. I've listened to several audiobooks made with his voice and they're very close to dead on, just with some cadence issues and occasional heterophone fumbling.

Other voices cloned with the same tech are usually much worse. There's something about the nature of Dagoth Ur's voice in particular that makes it work well.
by SoftTalker | 2025-11-26 17:28:20+00:00
Why is being able to "capture the market" something we want to encourage? This leads to monopolies or oligopolies and makes possible various types of abuse that a free competitive market would normally correct.

If you're going to step into the role of managing a large percentage of public internet traffic, maybe you need to be held to a different standard and set of rules than a startup trying to get a foothold among dozens or hundreds of other competitors. Something more like a public utility than a private enterprise.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-11-26 17:28:23+00:00
"You exaggerate, and the evidence is PMs are pushing it. PMs can't be wrong, can they?" Somebody really has to know what makes developers tick to write ragebait this good.

I can't even get the most expensive model on Claude to use "ls" correctly, with a fresh context window. That is a command that has been unchanged in linux for decades. You exaggerate how reliable these tools are. They are getting more useless as more customers are added because there is not enough compute.
by schiffern | 2025-11-26 17:28:55+00:00
>Maybe I'll go ask the AI

I never know if, when people say this, they mean

Maybe I'll go ask the AI oracle, it's only slightly fallible

Or

Maybe I'll go poke an ML model a few different ways to see if it emits interesting word sequences, that I'll then fact-check and study to develop real, deep knowledge.

I'm actually optimistic we can increase the second one, but it requires everyone to help educate our less-technical friends, family, and colleagues.

This isn't new. It's the same person who used to say "but Google said...!" This is a solvable education problem, because we've solved it before.
by hearsathought | 2025-11-26 17:29:30+00:00
> There is evidence that Parameswara converted to Islam following his infatuation with and marriage to a girl from the Samudera Pasai Sultanate.

Doesn't that seem like the silliest thing you ever read? When the infatuation ended ( like all infatuations do ), did he convert back? The only thing royals are infatuated with is wealth and power. If anything, don't you think the guy converted to get preferable treatment from the arab traders or get special access to the arab trading network? There is more to the story for sure. But I'm not buying that fanciful story.
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-26 17:29:36+00:00
>LTT wants to do it, he can.

LTT does not have a choice

Youtube's system is adversarial. There's more content than eyeballs, so if your brand new video is placed in front of like three people who do not click on it, it stops getting shown to people entirely including subscribers!

Clickbait thumbnails and titles are what Google wants, and they provide tooling to encourage it, and punish you if you do not use it.

You want to get rid of clickbait titles and thumbnails? Kill google. Then also legislate it away because it will naturally arise in any such adversarial system.

>They like the Mr. Beastification of Youtube.

Google likes the Mr. Beastification of Youtube. Google would rather every LTT go away and be replaced with another Mr. Beast. It's more profitable that way.
by tarsinge | 2025-11-26 17:30:15+00:00
Problem is the day Google puts a similarly priced and more powerful chatbot similar to ChatGPT and powered by Gemini most users will switch without a second thought, and Google will get all that data about their personal life too. OpenAI having a free tier with powerful models is unsustainable, brand loyalty is a joke at this stage, people will not bother going to ChatGPT if the search bar in their browser starts a discussion with Google. I’m sure big players like Google know OpenAI is a temporary scheme to get free money, they are surfing along now but they are playing the long game.
by hotsauceror | 2025-11-26 17:30:22+00:00
I don't quite follow this point. Master Chief is recognizable. So is Lara Croft. So is Darth Vader's voice. Networks could easily develop virtual personalities with distinctive, bankable, appealing characteristics.

They wouldn't have off-air scandals, require insurance, pensions, teams of wardrobe and makeup artists, security details; They wouldn't need to travel. And that is just the on-air talent. You can replace thousands of tv studios all over the world with a handful of workstations and compute power.
Show HN: We built a free tool to help game devs better set Steam regional prices
by juliebelz | 2025-11-26 17:30:23+00:00
Hi HN! We’re Antoine and Julie. Over the past few months, we’ve been publishing data-driven analyses about the video game market.

Steam regional pricing recommendations are broken. We didn’t fully realize how broken until we read the recent GDCo Newsletter and several other articles discussing it. So we decided to take a short detour from our usual market-analysis work to tackle the issue.

Steam’s pricing recommendations haven’t been updated since 2022, which creates major inconsistencies. For example, Polish players (2.3% of Steam traffic) pay about 26% more than Americans for the same game, even though their income is roughly half as high.

Adapting your game’s price to local economic realities isn’t charity. It’s primarily a question of profit. Following Steam’s outdated recommendations often means: - Overpricing your game, pushing players toward grey markets or alternative entertainment (e.g., Poland). - Underpricing your game, leading to lost revenue (e.g., Australia).

So we built this tool to calculate optimal regional pricing for your Steam game, based on up-to-date economic data. You enter a USD price and export a CSV you can directly upload to Steamworks. It updates all 40 regional prices in one go.

Bonus: We added an option to mimic Netflix’s regional pricing strategy.

We also wrote an article explaining what we did, why we did it, and why getting regional pricing right matters (it’s not just about fairness but also about avoiding unnecessary revenue loss): https://newsletter.hushcrasher.com/p/steam-regional-pricing

We’ll make the repo public if anyone’s interested.

Feedback welcome!
by 0xEF | 2025-11-26 17:31:03+00:00
Your profile: Former staff software engineer at big tech co, now focused on my SaaS app, which is solo, bootstrapped, and profitable.

Yep. Makes sense.

> And by any metric

Can you cite one? Just curious. I enjoy when people challenge the idea that the advancement of tech doesn't always result in a better world for all because I grew up in Detroit, where a bunch of car companies decided that automation was better than paying people, moved out and left the city a hollowed out version of itself. Manufacturing has returned, more or less, but now Worker X is responsible for producing Nx10 Widgets in the same amount of time Worker Y had to produce 75 years ago, but still gets paid a barely livable wage because the unchecked force of greed has made it so whatever meager amount of money Worker X makes is siphoned right back out of their hands as soon as the check clears. So, from where I'm standing, your version of "improvement" is a scam, something sold to us with marketing woo and snake oil labels, promising improvement if we just buy in.

The thing is, I don't hate making money. I also don't hate change. Quite the opposite, as I generally encourage it, especially when it means we grow as humans...but that's generally not the focus of what you call "change," is it? Be honest with yourself.

What I hate is the argument that the only way to make it happen is by exploiting people. I have a deep love technology and repair it in my spare time for people to help keep things like computers or dishwashers out of landfills, saving people from having to buy new things in a world that treats technology as increasingly disposable, as though the resources used to create are unlimited. I know quite a bit about what makes it tick, as a result, and I can tell you first hand that there's no reason to have a microphone on a refrigerator, or a mobile app for an oven. But you and people like you will call that change, selling it as somehow making things more convenient while our data is collected, sorted and we spend our days fending of spam phone calls or contemplating if what we said today is tomorrow's thought crime. Heck, I'm old enough to remember when phone line tapping was a big deal that everyone was paranoid about, and three decades later we were convinced to buy listening devices that could track our movements. None of this was necessary for the advancement of humanity, just the engorgement of profits.

So what good came of it all? That you and I can argue on the Internet?
by Glemkloksdjf | 2025-11-26 17:31:08+00:00
Capitalism is bad.

I'm not ignorant to this fact that it helped us for quite a long time but it also created climate change. Overpopulation.

We are still stuck on planet earth, have not figured out the reason for live or the origin of the universe.

I would prefer a world were we think about using all the resources earth provides sustainable and how to use them the most efficient way for the max amount of human beings. The rest of it we would use to advance society.

I would like to have Post-Scarcity Scientific Humanism
by dakna | 2025-11-26 17:31:10+00:00
At the time, a standard LAMP stack setup wasn't prepared for the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C10k_problem. Quite often you had no DB connection pool and every request for dynamic data opened/closed a DB connection. Having a fixed number of connections available also quickly hit the limits unless it was a dynamically configured pool. Which also filled up eventually.

If you were lucky you could reduce load by caching the URLs taking up the most resources and generate a webpage copy in the filesystem, then add some URL rewrite logic to Apache to skip going through your application logic and bypass the DB.

Then you discovered there is a limit of open file descriptors in Linux. After updating this and also shutting down all log files you ran out of things to change pretty quick and started pricing a beefier server. For next time.
by whoknowsidont | 2025-11-26 17:31:11+00:00
AKA people who are willing to be honest about its faults. .NET has a lot of social commentary on how stable and robust it is yet for some reason in every project I've had the displeasure of brushing up against a .NET solution it's always "we're updating" and the update process magically takes longer than building the actual feature.

Or what is a pretty standard feature in other tech-stacks needs some bespoke solution that takes 3 dev cycles to implement... and of course there's going to be bugs.

And it's ALWAYS been this way. For some reason .NET has acolytes who have _always_ viewed .NET has the pinnacle of programming frameworks. .NET, Core, .NET framework, it doesn't matter.

You always get the same comments. For decades at the point.

Except the experience and outcomes don't match the claims.

Just before I get the reply, I'm pretty familiar with .NET since the 2000's.
by dfabulich | 2025-11-26 17:31:34+00:00
That's entirely right. Products have to transition from fast-moving exploratory products to boring infrastructure. We have different goals and expectations for an ecommerce web app vs. a database, or a database vs. the software controlling an insulin pump.

Having said that, at this point, Cloudflare's core DDOS-protection proxy should now be built more like an insulin pump than like a web app. This thing needs to never go down worldwide, much more than it needs to ship a new feature fast.
by shikib | 2025-11-26 17:31:42+00:00
An ideal evaluation system should surface failure modes and usage patterns, provide actionable insights, adapt to your product -- and continuously improve over time.

Nothing out there met our eval needs.

So we built AgentLens: a multi-agent system which surfaces deeper insights and continuously learns what matters for your product.

Checkout our blogpost for a deep dive on the system and example dashboards produced by AgentLens!
by verisimi | 2025-11-26 17:31:47+00:00
Soul, yes.

You may be right, that RealPeople do seek RealInteraction.

But, how many of each RealPerson's RealInteractions are actually that - it seems to me that lots of my own historical interactions were/are RealPersonProjections. RealPersonProjections and FakePerson interactions are pretty indistinguishable from within - over time, the characterisation of an interaction can change.

But, then again, perhaps the FakePerson interactions (with AI), will be a better developmental training ground than RealPersonProjections.

Ah - I'll leave it here - its already too meta! Thanks for the exchange.
by nradov | 2025-11-26 17:31:47+00:00
Smart move. The Constellation class was going to be too little, too late. The threat environment has escalated since the initial design and with even terrorist groups like the Houthis having access to advanced precision weapons the Constellation would no longer have the area air-defense capability necessary to act as an effective convoy escort. The limiting factor right now is shipyard capacity so better to devote it toward building more capable Arleigh Burke Flight III ships.

Every major recent Navy shipbuilding program has been a disaster. Besides this latest debacle, the LCS, DDG-1000, and CVN-78 classes have also basically failed. Hopefully this move signals a course correction.
by schmuckonwheels | 2025-11-26 17:32:01+00:00
No one in 2025 should be allowed to criticize early 2000s web practices as we have come full circle in many ways.

They were limited by tools and resources. Now you'll just see some async "API endpoint error -32768 timeout" and 8,000 spinning pinwheels on the page instead of it simply hanging. Because now you need to allocate 650MB RAM so you can output Hello World in some buggy "stack" with "memory safety".

The smart ones were using Java 25 years ago and what needed some 80lb Solaris box could run off a mobile phone now.
by techblueberry | 2025-11-26 17:32:16+00:00
Seems like ad targeting might be a tough sell here though, it’d basically have to be “trust me bro”. Like - I want to advertise coca-cola when people ask about terraforming deserts? I think I wouldn’t be either surprised by amazing success or terrifying failure.

Perplexity actually did search with references linked to websites they could relate in a graph and even that only made them like $27k.

I think the problem is on Facebook and Google you can build an actual graph because content is a thing (a url, video link etc). It will be much harder to I think convert my philosophical musings into active insights.