MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dangus | 2025-11-26 12:00:19+00:00
This piece started relatively well but devolved by the end.

Is AI resource-intensive by design? That doesn’t make any sense to me. I think companies are furiously working toward reducing AI costs.

Is AI a tool of fascism? Well, I’d say anything that can make money can be a tool of fascism.

I can sort of jive with the argument that AI is/will be reinforcing the ideals of those in power, although I think traditional media and the tooling that AI intends to replace like search engines accomplished that just fine.

What we are left with is, I think, an author who is in denial about their special snowflake status as a programmer. It was okay for the factory worker to be automated away, but now that it’s my turn to be automated away I’m crying fascism and ethics.

Their friends behave the way they do about AI because they know it’s useful but know it’s unpopular. They’re trying to save face while still using the tool because it’s so obviously useful and beneficial.

I think the analogy is similar to the move from film to digital. There will be a tiny amount of people who never buy in, there will be these “ashamed” adopters who support the idea of film and hope it continues on, but for themselves personally would never go back to film, and then the majority who don’t see the problem with letting film die.
by sph | 2025-11-26 12:01:22+00:00
I am strongly considering abandoning Github for tarball + email to send git patches to.

No centralisation of my code in siloes like Github, I won't have to care about bots making hundreds of requests on my self-hosted Gitea instance, would prove to be a noticeable source of friction to vibe coders, and I don't care about receiving tons of external contributions from whomever.

For serious people, it'll only be a matter of running `git format-patch` and sending me an attachment via email.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-26 12:01:54+00:00
> What I want from my tools is reliability. Which is a spectrum, but LLMs are very much on the lower end.

"reliability" can mean multiple things though. LLM invocations are as reliable (granted you know how program properly) as any other software invocation, if you're seeing crashes you're doing something wrong.

But what you're really talking about is "correctness" I think, in the actual text that's been responded with. And if you're expecting/waiting for that to be 100% "accurate" every time, then yeah, that's not a use case for LLMs, and I don't think anyone is arguing for jamming LLMs in there even today.

Where the LLMs are useful, is where there is no 100% "right or wrong" answer, think summarization, categorization, tagging and so on.
by lm28469 | 2025-11-26 12:02:06+00:00
> Would you prefer we heat our homes by burning wood, carry water from the nearby spring, and ride horses to visit relatives?

I'm more surprised that seemingly educated people have such simplistic views as "technology = progress, progress = good hence technology = good". Vaccines and running water are tech, megacorps owned "AI" being weaponised by surveillance obsessed governments is also tech.

If you don't push back on "tech" you're just blindingly accepting whatever someone else decided for you. Keep in mind the benefits of tech since the 80s have mostly been pocketed by the top 10%, the pleb still work as much, retire as old, &c. despite what politicians and technophiles have been saying
by Glemkloksdjf | 2025-11-26 12:02:36+00:00
Dark age was dark. Human rights, female! rights, hunger, thirst, no progress at all, hard lifes.

So are you able, realisticly, to stop progress around a whole planet? Tbh. getting an alignment across the planet to slow down or stop AI would be the equivilent of stoping capitalism and actually building a holistic planet for us.

I think ai will force the hand of capitalism but i don't think we will be able to create a star trek universe without getting forced
by zamadatix | 2025-11-26 12:02:59+00:00
My concern is Kagi isn't/doesn't make as much as they need/hope to with their brand model. If they are ever disappointed in the results of building their brand, it's quite easy to see why they would be fine selling out.

Hell, WhatsApp started out as a privacy focused messaging app before selling out to Facebook/Meta. Now it's getting ads, nobody believes a privacy focus anymore, it's had a commercial message channel push, and so on. They are far from the first example of a tech company/product trading the mission/brand value for more money.

Bless the VLC developer for refusing offers for millions of dollars to put crap in VLC even though he knows the project could just be forked after and bless Gorhill for the same on uBO but the real trust in these things comes from the code being open source rather than faith the developers would never sell out.
by zokier | 2025-11-26 12:03:11+00:00
The whole article is bit of a mess. Like this thing:

> My mutation block contained no awaits. The only awaits happened before acquiring the lock. Therefore:

> * The critical section was atomic relative to the event loop.

> * No other task could interleave inside the mutation.

> * More locks would not increase safety.

That is exactly the same as with e.g. JS. I'm sure there are lot of subtle differences in how Python does async vs others, but the article fails to illuminate any of it; neither the framing story nor the examples really clarify anything
by timonoko | 2025-11-26 12:03:26+00:00
Ultimate .emacs on termux, note python-hook

(menu-bar-mode -1) (setq inhibit-splash-screen t) (setq inhibit-startup-echo-area-message t) (global-set-key "å" 'hippie-expand) (global-set-key "∆" 'toggle-truncate-lines) (global-set-key (kbd "<f12>") 'toggle-truncate-lines) (xterm-mouse-mode 1) (global-set-key (kbd "<mouse-5>") 'scroll-up-command) (global-set-key (kbd "<mouse-4>") 'scroll-down-command) ; (global-set-key (kbd "<wheel-up>") 'scroll-up-command) (global-set-key (kbd "<wheel-down>") 'scroll-down-command) ; (setq case-fold-search t) (setq-default truncate-lines t) (setq sort-fold-case t) (autoload 'scad-mode "scad-mode" "A major mode for editing OpenSCAD code." t) (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.scad$" . scad-mode)) (require 'scad-preview) (global-set-key (kbd "Å") 'dabbrev-expand) (add-hook 'python-mode-hook 'whitespace-mode) (setq whitespace-line-column 128) (custom-set-faces '(default ((t (:background "#000000" :foreground "#ffffff")))) '(whitespace-space ((t (:background "black" :foreground "blue")))) '(whitespace-tab ((t (:background "black" :foreground "blue")))) '(whitespace-newline ((t (:background "black" :foreground "blue")))) '(whitespace-empty ((t (:background "black" :foreground "grey50")))))
by matu3ba | 2025-11-26 12:03:37+00:00
> Forming deterministic actions is a sign of computation, not intelligence.

What computations can process and formalize other computations as transferable entity/medium, meaning to teach other computations via various mediums?

> Intelligence is probably (I guess) dependent on the nondeterministic actions.

I do agree, but I think intelligent actions should be deterministic, even if expressing non-deterministic behavior.

> Computation is when you query a standby, doing nothing, machine and it computes a deterministic answer.

There are whole languages for stochastic programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_programming to express deterministically non-deterministic behavior, so I think that is not true.

> Intelligence (or at least some sign of it) is when machine queries you, the operator, on it's own volition.

So you think the thing, who holds more control/force at doing arbitrary things as the thing sees fit, is more intelligent? That sounds to me more like the definition of power, not intelligence.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-26 12:04:10+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.

If you don't trust me, give a non-programming job a try for 1 year and then come back and tell me how much more comfy $JOB was :)
by skydhash | 2025-11-26 12:05:33+00:00
The thing about reading code and understanding is logical reasoning, which you can do by knowing the semantic of each tokens. But the semantics are not universal. You have the Turing Machine, the lambda calculus, horn clauses, etc… Then there are more abstractions (and new semantics) built on top of those.

Writing code is very easy if you know the solution and the semantics of the coding platform. But knowing the solution is a difficult task, even in a business settings where the difficulty are more communication issues. Knowing the semantics of the coding platform is also a difficult one, because you’ll probably be using others’ code and you’ll face the same communication issue (lack of documentation, erroneous documentation, etc…)

So being good at programming does not really means knowing code. It’s more about knowing how to bypass communication barriers to get the knowledge you need.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-26 12:06:11+00:00
Yes, you'll end up in situations where peers/bosses/clients aren't the most pleasant, but compare that to any customer facing job, you'll quickly be able to shed those moments as countless people face those seldom situations on a daily basis. You can give it a try, work in a call center for a month, and you'll acquire more stress during that month than even the worst managed software project.
by paranoidrobot | 2025-11-26 12:06:36+00:00
Well, you're entitled to your opinion.

For what it's worth - my day job does involve running a bunch of infrastructure on AWS. I know it's not good value, but that's the direction the organisation went long before I joined them.

Previous companies I worked for had their infrastructure hosted with the likes of Rackspace, Softlayer, and others. Every now and then someone from management would come back from an AWS conference saying how they'd been offered $megabucks in AWS Credit if only we'd sign an agreement to move over. We'd re-run the numbers on what our infrastructure would cost on AWS and send it back - and that would stop the questions dead every time.

So, I'm not exactly tied to doing it one way or another.

I do still think though that if you're going to do a comparison on price and performance between two things, you should at least be somewhat experienced with them first, OR involve someone who is.

The author spun up an ECS cluster and then is talking about being unsure of how it works. It's still not clear whether they spun up Fargate nodes or EC2 instances. There's talk of performance variations between runs. All of these things raise questions about their testing methodology.

So, yeah, AWS is over-priced and under-performing by comparison with just spinning up a machine on Hetzner.

But at least get some basics right. I don't think that's too much to ask.
by VimEscapeArtist | 2025-11-26 12:07:08+00:00
For those wondering what Affinity is: it's now a package of 3 programs (Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher) combined into one tool. These are alternatives to Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Photo handles raster image editing, Designer is for vectors, and Publisher for desktop publishing (layouts for books, magazines, brochures, etc.).

All these tools are real competition to Adobe. They're roughly at the same level of functionality, and in some cases even better.
by lm28469 | 2025-11-26 12:07:11+00:00
> A tool is a tool. These AI critics sound to me like people who have hit their finger with a hammer, and now advocate against using them altogether.

Speaking of wonky analogies, have you considered that other people have access to these hammers and are aiming for your head ? And that some people might not want to be hit on the head by a hammer
by techblueberry | 2025-11-26 12:07:21+00:00
The older I get the more incredibly naive this perspective seems to me. Never in history has “freedom” been defined in a way that was this nihilistic before. We can either try and answer some of these questions, or die trying.

Something I’ve started to internalize is, every time there’s been an invention… the book, movies, television, the internet, where everyone clutched pearls on how it was going to be the downfall of civilized engagement. They were right.
by a96 | 2025-11-26 12:07:29+00:00
https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Get_F-Droid/

I think you're kind of right. I was surprised that that's two clicks away from the front page, under docs. That's where I'd look but it probably should have a nice visible link that's the first thing you see. There is a picture of the program running on an android device and a QR code.

Perfectly adequate for people who know how it all works or people who look for software install instructions on the regular, but not the best first contact for people who don't.

Edit: Actually, even the instructions page doesn't tell you to download and run the package on the device's browser. A user visiting on a laptop or something will just have a weird useless file in the downloads dir (unless they go the adb route or otherwise figure out it needs to go on the device first).
by fennecfoxy | 2025-11-26 12:07:36+00:00
Except it's more a case of "my phone won't teleport me to Hawaii sad faec lemme throw it out" than anything else.

There are plenty of people manufacturing their expectations around the capabilities of LLMs inside their heads for some reason. Sure there's marketing; but for individuals susceptible to marketing without engaging some neurons and fact checking, there's already not much hope.

Imagine refusing to drive a car in the 60s because they haven't reach 1kbhp yet. Ahaha.
by wk_end | 2025-11-26 12:07:53+00:00
> Also the phonetic simplicity of Japanese is likely to have been caused by an Austronesian substrate related to that of the aborigine Taiwanese people.

That's being asserted with too much confidence, I think. While I was aware some kind of Austronesian connection has been suggested, as far as I know there's zero actual consensus among linguists on any kind of relationship between Japanese and any other language family. Like, there's theories relating Japanese to everything from Korean to Turkish to Greek floating around - but nothing to my knowledge that we should really be describing as "likely" at the point, even a connection with the grammatically extremely similar Korean.

Now that said, I don't know a lot about the Austronesian languages or this particular hypothesis. I did find an article about a possible Austronesian substratum ("Does Japanese have an Austronesian stratum?" by Ann Kumar), but it seemed mostly preoccupied with drawing that connection through similarities in vocabulary rather than phonology. Do you have pointers to scholarly sources on the subject?
by twoodfin | 2025-11-26 12:07:58+00:00
My New Year’s Resolution will be to give up complaining about this on hn, but for now:

I find ChatGPT’s style and tone condescending and bland to the point of obfuscating whatever was unique, thoughtful and insightful in the original prompt.

Trying to reverse-engineer the “Not this: That!” phrasing, artificial narrative drama & bizarre use of emphasis to recapture that insight and thought is not something I’m at all enthusiastic to do.

Perhaps a middle ground: HN could support a “prompt” link to the actual creative seed?
by nchmy | 2025-11-26 12:08:30+00:00
I don't see the benefit of keeping things out of WordPress.

It also seems like you're recreating or even bypassing existing mechanisms

* why do the processing in wordpress first rather than just offload it completely to cloudflare's image optimization service? I don't think you even need the worker for that - it can be done automatically in various ways.

* are you deleting the files from the server after offloading? That's largely the point of such wp offload media plugins, some of which support r2.

My point about pricing was don't offer flat fee.
by 6r17 | 2025-11-26 12:09:45+00:00
For anyone somewhat interested in task & scheduling I highly recommend phil-op tutorial on building a kernel - there is a late branch on the github that specifically focus on asynchronous task - I implemented multi-core this week and it high a profound enlightenment on what the f* was actually going on. This is something Claude / Gemini helped me achieve so I didn't require me to spend nights on kernel debugging methodology & documentation ; Best experience I could get on async
by roxolotl | 2025-11-26 12:10:27+00:00
I came here to quote the same quote but with the opposite sentiment. If you look at the history of work, at least in the states, it’s a history of almost continual devaluation and automation. I’ve been assuming that my generation, entering the profession in the 2010s, will be the last where it’s a pathway to an upper middle class life. Just like the factory workers before us automation will come for those who do mostly repetitive tasks. Sure there will be well paid professional software devs in the future just as there are some well paid factory workers who mostly maintain machines. But the scale of the opportunity will be much smaller.
by dangus | 2025-11-26 12:11:26+00:00
The software on the computer would cost more if it was ad-free and consumers have made the clear choice that they prefer not to pay for OS updates. We know this because the updates used to cost money. Apple was charging over $100 just for a point release, and they charged hundreds for updates to bundled software like iLife and iWork.

Everyone would love it if the NFL had zero ads but most NFL fans wouldn’t pay $XXX/month to watch the games.

OEMs pay pennies on the dollar for Windows and in some cases $0, the retail license is $200 but you can buy a mini PC for the same cost with a legitimate Windows license.

I dislike ads as much as the next person and use Linux myself for my main machine, but I’m not completely lacking in pragmatism on this subject. Commercial operating systems fund their development through paid services and App Store revenue sharing.

I think the status quo is relatively reasonable and, again, I find the commercialization to be very easy to dismiss and disable.

We are spending more time debating this subject than it took me to disable all forms of advertising in Windows.
by jacquesm | 2025-11-26 12:11:30+00:00
Classic. I had a similar run-in with the CTO of a company a decade or so ago who point blank refused to use version control for the source code. He insisted on having directories that got zipped and passed around from developer to developer and good luck figuring out how to integrate someone else's changes.

I won that particular battle but it was uphill all the way, at least he had the grace to afterwards admit that he'd been an idiot.
by IgorPartola | 2025-11-26 12:11:37+00:00
Oh I agree. The problem is that they are two different languages. Inside a Python file, SQL is just a string. No syntax highlighting, no compile time checking, etc. A Kwisatz Haderach of languages that incorporates both its own language and SQL as first class concepts would be very nice but the problem is that SQL is just too different.

For one thing, SQL is not really meant to be dynamically constructed in SQL. But we often need to dynamically construct a query (for example customer applied several filters to the product listing). The SQL way to handle that would be to have a general purpose query with a thousand if/elses or stored procedures which I think takes it from “flows beautifully” to “oh god who wrote this?” Or you could just do string concatenation in a language that handles that well, like Python. Then wrap the whole thing in functions and objects and you get an ORM.

I still have not seen a language that incorporates anything like SQL into it that would allow for even basic ORM-like functionality.
by vigile | 2025-11-26 12:11:47+00:00
Thanks! That's the goal. You prompt and specify mostly at the user story level (or more technical if you have the skill for that) and then Kodaii can generate a full working backend when each user story have been validate by one or more integration tests. In a first setup, 1. you have something that works and save you days and weeks, and 2. you can update the code-base if you want to with existing vibe coding tools. Feel free to check the code and share feedbacks!
by flir | 2025-11-26 12:11:55+00:00
> A motorbike wants to be ridden that way

That's a lovely example. But is the dangerous thing the bike, or the infrastructure, or the system that means you're late for work?

I completely get what you're saying. I was thinking of tools in the narrowest possible way - of the tool in isolation (I could use this gun as a doorstop). You're thinking of the tool's interface with its environment (in the real world nobody uses guns as doorstops). I can't deny that's the more useful way to think about tools ("computation undoubtedly shapes society").
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-26 12:12:21+00:00
But in the end, we didn't end up with less factories that do more, we ended up with more factories that does more.

Why wouldn't the same happen here? Instead of these programmers jamming out boilerplate 24/7, why are they unable to improve their skill further and move with the rest of the industry, if that's needed? Just like other professions adopt to how society is shaped, why should programming be an exception to that?
by auxiliarymoose | 2025-11-26 12:12:37+00:00
Some off the top of my head...

- Instead of trying to get LLMs to answer user questions, write better FAQs informed by reviewing tickets submitted by customers

- Instead of RAG for anything involving business data, have some DBA write a bunch of reports that answer specific business questions

- Instead of putting some copilot chat into tools and telling users to ask it to e.g. "explain recent sales trends", make task-focused wizards and visualizations so users can answer these with hard numbers

- Instead of generating code with LLMs, write more expressive frameworks and libraries that don't require so much plumbing and boilerplate

Of course, maybe there is something I am missing, but these are just my personal observations!
by lm28469 | 2025-11-26 12:12:47+00:00
Anecdotes are cool but we came up with a neat little thing known as statistics.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tech-job-postings-fall-across...

> Among the 27 countries analysed, European nations saw the steepest fall in tech job postings between 1 February 2020 and 31 October 2025,

> In absolute terms, the decline exceeded 40% in Switzerland (-46%) and the UK (-41%), with France (-39%) close behind.

> The United States showed a similar trend, with a decline of 35%. Austria (-34%), Sweden (-32%) and Germany (-30%) were also at comparable levels.
by scribu | 2025-11-26 12:12:57+00:00
> Awaiting a coroutine does not give control back to the event loop.

I think this is a subtler point than one might think on first read, which is muddled due to the poorly chosen examples.

Here's a better illustration:

import asyncio async def child(): print("child start") await asyncio.sleep(0) print("child end") async def parent(): print("parent before") await child() # <-- awaiting a coroutine (not a task) print("parent after") async def other(): for _ in range(5): print("other") await asyncio.sleep(0) async def main(): other_task = asyncio.create_task(other()) parent_task = asyncio.create_task(parent()) await asyncio.gather(other_task, parent_task) asyncio.run(main())

It prints:

other parent before child start other child end parent after other other other

So the author's point is that "other" can never appear in-between "parent before" and "child start".

Edit: clarification
by sph | 2025-11-26 12:14:35+00:00
Good timing, now that the inept PMs at YouTube have decided to move the Subscription and Watch Later buttons on my desktop UI and make them more cumbersome to reach. What the hell are they even doing?

Like a sibling commenter mentioned, I used to happily pay for Premium, but I'd rather put up with the misery (and ad-block) than give them a single cent ever again. Why should I reward pervasive enshittification?

Sort yourselves out, Youtube.