MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jacquesm | 2025-11-10 05:16:35+00:00
That's all true. But the list could have been a lot longer. The UK had a lot more industry than it does today and there definitely were quality issues. At the same time: competition that wasn't even on the horizon back then (for instance: Korea) became a major factor and at some point you need the scale. For the UK driving on the left side of the road made that all of their exports had to be made for domestic or foreign use, foreign manufacturers often chose to simply not field a model in the UK, so that was an extra cost.

It's funny, I've a complete love/hate relationship with cars from the UK. I love them, love the looks, love to drive them. But I hate the unreliability that was part and parcel of it and I hated even more to buy a spare part and then to find out that it subtly didn't fit because of some defect in body geometry with as a result that it looked like crap (fenders... subframes... don't get me started on that one, I can bore you to death about the kind of crap they sold).

The Metro could have been what the 206 was for Peugeot, instead they made fairly nice design in the most cheap and unsafe way possible. In comparison the 206 was a little tank.
by Kinrany | 2025-11-10 05:17:30+00:00
A game-agnostic social/legal/financial overlay for virtual worlds. Minecraft, Rust, Roblox, etc.: legal ownership claims (vs possession), titles (recognized by other players or not), laws, player-issued currencies. Smart contracts but with as little blockchain stuff as possible.

The iron rule is no direct interaction with the world. These are things that players can in theory always start on their own as long as they can communicate.
by pkulak | 2025-11-10 05:17:33+00:00
Turn on the news. The party agrees with me. I’ve been saying it since this folly was started, but they finally realized that you can’t negotiate with someone when your threat is their ideal outcome.

They want flights cancelled. They want people to starve. They want the FDA and the CDC shut down. They want chaos. More chaos is more excuse to take more control. It’s the classic fascist playbook. See : Reichstag fire.
by yes_really | 2025-11-10 05:18:13+00:00
This is a disgusting comment. There exists no parallel here. The nazis engaged in a systematic, colossal campaign to exterminate as many Jewish people as possible. You are saying that this is somehow equivalent to Israel simply existing. Iran became hostile to Israel and to the US in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution.

Also, the US entered WWII because of Pearl Harbor, and engaged in a normal war against the Axis. Iran engages in terrorism by financing and arming terrorist groups that perform terrorist attacks on civilians. The US action in WWII defeated the nazis. The actions of the Iranian dictatorship caused deaths and terrors targeted at civilians in other countries and destroyed the lives of its own people in Iran.
by defrost | 2025-11-10 05:19:33+00:00
It's a pity you bailed, no drama - it's an area of long term interest to me and from the look of your comment you've never worked in mining, you've assumed Forrest never has, nor worked the land, and took an ankle deep search for "bad things about Forrest".

The interesting thing about Forrest is he grew up on Aboriginal land side by side with aboriginal people who themselves have deeply divided views about their past and their future - Forrest has gone well out of his way to provide jobs and education for native people and to sit down at length and discuss deeply contentious issues.

In a domain rife with trolley problems he's been considerably better than most, still with unavoidable warts, and hasn't blown up and destroyed anything on the order of that which Rio Tinto and US Gas companies have.

If you lack any on the ground local context and knowledge there's no shartage of bad press about Forrest, he gets no end of it from the likes of Gina Rhinehart, Clive Palmer, and other resource billionaires who despise him for turning much of his wealth to a greater good (an area of debate, of course) and suggesting that others do the same.

For your interest, this is Jill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UKu3bCbFck

I've known both her and Forrest pretty much my entire life, her land is just to north of where Forrest is operating, she is dealing with many issues - some of which are touched upon here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt6Hmp9ndkI

( Mainly about Canada, but comes back to touch upon Jill's 50,000 year strong family art collection )

> It is our collective society's fault, yes, but the billionaires are the ones who exploit it.

I'd be interested in your suggestions for how to do better.

Bear in mind that if individual billionaires were not operating here then the demand for resources would still exist and would be met by corporations (eg: Rio Tinto) who would chew through the landscape just as you claim others do: https://antar.org.au/issues/cultural-heritage/the-destructio...
by nradov | 2025-11-10 05:20:16+00:00
Unfortunately Apple Watch devices are kind of garbage as fitness trackers. They have good optical heart rate sensors but none of the other stuff really works well. For better or worse it's just not a use case that Apple cares about. If this matters to you then you might be better off with different smart watch from the likes of Garmin, Coros, Amazfit, etc.
by Frannky | 2025-11-10 05:21:20+00:00
I started with ChatGPT, then moved on to Claude, and then discovered Grok. But now I've stopped paying for any of them. Claude edged out ChatGPT in quality, while Grok stood out with its generous usage limits. That all changed, though, once they rolled out the agent system and RLHF. Suddenly, the model slowed to a crawl, veering off on wrong paths and getting lost in its own reasoning. Those endless, super-annoying RLHF popups didn't help either.

My theory? They were scrambling for a competitive edge and were willing to swallow some short-term pain. Plus, it feels like they shifted focus away from keeping coders deeply in the loop.

In the end, we vote with our wallets—if it doesn't click, just walk away. I still dip into Grok, but only the free tier: Grok 4's fast mode for tackling planning and first generation, and then Qwen Coder for the code editing and clerical tasks. The latest version of grok hold up about as well as the old Grok 3, just with way more steps...
by Dylan16807 | 2025-11-10 05:21:29+00:00
Three years would be an impressive timescale to move a company from one country to another.

Except they didn't do that. They moved the HQ.

I'll accept for the purpose of this argument that they fully split the company into two separate companies. But both of those companies are still mostly Chinese, going by the numbers in this thread.

> Did you not read the article? It's hard to take your comment in good faith if you didn't.

This is a weak attempt at turnabout. The article doesn't present any evidence of separation or non-Chinese-ness, it just quotes the company (and even that quote admits a bunch of Chinese assets). But even if it did, it wouldn't be bad faith to skip reading it.
by radius89 | 2025-11-10 05:21:57+00:00
I'm building a Meetup.com alternative, of sorts - https://www.radius.to/

It's intended to be a sort of social network focused on IRL groups/communities and finding others with the same interests in the same area, and just building local communities in general.

It's currently still a part-time venture, but I'm planning a launch on HN soon to get input/gauge interest in the latest iteration. FWIW, I posted the initial version on HN just over a year ago and got a ton of amazing feedback, much of which I've incorporated over the last year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398
by hchtin | 2025-11-10 05:22:18+00:00
A TUI to monitor your OpenAI and Anthropic usage inside your terminal.

https://github.com/htin1/toktop

I use codex and claude code daily, also build apps with openai and anthropic api keys, so i always go to openai dashboard and anthropic dashboard to track my usage. Since I spend most of times inside cursor or terminal, I wanted to quickly check my usage without leaving my terminal/ide, so i built this!

It's open-source, MIT, and built with ratatui (awesome name).
by dpark | 2025-11-10 05:22:56+00:00
That’s a really interesting study. Thanks for sharing that.

This seems like the kind of thing to share when making a bold claim about being able to detect AI with high confidence. This is a lot more weighty than not so subtly asserting that I’m too dumb to recognize AI.

> a human deliberately trying to sound like an LLM (I feel the need to reiterate this as many of the counterarguments to what I'm saying are to claims of this form).

I assume this is a reference to me. To be clear, I was never referring to humans specifically attempting to sound like AI. I was saying that a lot of formulaic stuff people attribute to AI is simply following the same patterns humans started, and while it might be slop, it’s not necessarily AI slop. Hence the AITA rage bait example.
by yeutterg | 2025-11-10 05:23:48+00:00
Still very focused on making light healthier. 3 new products:

Bedtime Bulb v2[0]: A massive improvement over our original Bedtime Bulb, a light bulb meant for use in the evening to reduce blue light. The headline feature is the re-introduction of infrared, which was removed from lighting to make it more efficient, but emerging research suggest it's beneficial for health. After a long wait, this is shipping in 2 weeks!

Atmos Bedside Lamp[1]: A fully automated circadian lamp that automatically shifts in color and brightness throughout the day, helping you prepare for sleep and wake up more naturally. Working on some machine learning features that mimic the functionality of the Nest Learning Thermostat, but for lighting. The first units are shipping by Christmas.

Circadian Mode for Philips Hue[2]: A web app that gives your Philips Hue lights circadian powers, so that they gradually shift from bright light during the day to dim, low-blue light at night. It's way more powerful and easier to use than first- and third-party options from Hue, Apple, and Home Assistant. Just launched this week; looking for beta testers to give feedback!

[0] https://restfullighting.com/products/bedtime-bulb-v2-preorde...

[1] https://restfullighting.com/products/restful-atmos-preorder

[2] https://restfullighting.com/pages/circadian-mode-for-philips...
by burningChrome | 2025-11-10 05:23:51+00:00
>> though maybe taking 3x the time to get things done is worth it if they're cheap enough.

Started doing automation about 6 years ago. We had several offshore teams. The one caveat was that the company was vying for several government contracts. One of the requirements was the ability to pass a low level security clearance and on yeah, you cannot, under any circumstances off shore any of the work.

Therefore, they needed an onshore team to handle the government work.

Well, when things got slow, our team was essentially the clean up team. We had several hockey players on our team so we nicknamed our team "Zamboni". A large chunk of what we were doing was fixing the off shore teams coding and things would break so regularly two of devs became full-time off shore support.

The company was literally paying our off-shore team to build an automation. Then when it constantly break, they would pull us in to fix it.

Absolutely maddening they couldn't understand they were paying triple or quadruple for work we could do once properly instead of two or three times before we got it.
by Spivak | 2025-11-10 05:24:23+00:00
I see it as the same issue as doctor's notes. They're extremely useful but it's a waste of time to actually make the doctor do them. At some places it's a person's whole job to follow around a doctor and do all the busy work for them.

I'm not nearly important enough to have an intern write my commit messages but now that AI can do them, and do them extremely well, I'm more than happy to offload the work and get back to the actual work. The AI is far more thorough than I would be and because it takes away nearly all the mental effort the end result is, I think, better.
by lynx97 | 2025-11-10 05:24:58+00:00
Just happened to me yesterday. I realized I'd really like to watch a long-form video on Huygens Clock. Something between a short (god damnit) and Quicksilver. Thought there must be something detailed. Nope, at least Youtube let me down. Or the search algo, who knows. Since they removed the "20+ minutes" button it has become basically useless to search on YT.
by knappe | 2025-11-10 05:25:08+00:00
What really reinforced this for me was learning to what lengths some hedge funds are willing to go to get an edge. Case in point: buying GIS data on major retailer's parking lots to get a feel for holiday earnings. No retail investor is ever going to be able to match that kind of Intel, ever.

I buy index funds and leave the majority of my money there but allow myself to make small bets on trends in the market that I think will play over long periods. Sometimes it works, like buying lithium stocks in the 2010s and other times it sucks and doesn't, like buying solar stocks in the 2010s and watching the entire industry get shredded to pieces in the last 5 years.
by fouc | 2025-11-10 05:25:12+00:00
>it presents the shell command on a REPL like line that you can edit first and hit enter to run it.

Oh genius, that's the best UX idea for the situation of asking an LLM to flesh out the CLI command without relying entirely on blind faith.

Even better if we can have that kind of behavior in the shell itself. For example if we started typing "cat list | grep foo | " and then suddenly realized we want help with the awk command so that it drops the first column.
by blutoot | 2025-11-10 05:25:24+00:00
Since the cat is out of the bag (i.e. there's no stopping of LLM-generated code / PR / issues now that vibe-coding is fairly universally accessible), the only thing in our (especially those who are custodians of software systems and products) control is to invest a lot more in testing and evals. Just plain opposing LLM-generated content as a policy is a losing battle at this point..
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-11-10 05:25:32+00:00
> I said nothing about analog.

But:

> basically minimally tech and maximally maintainable and maximum longevity.

Kind of implies it.

Tech is used to lower prices, not raise them, if you want minimize tech, and you want to make it as maintainable by end user or relatively cheap mechanics, and you want it to last as long as possible, that is going to cost a lot. Or you basically want a Lada Laika, the old ones, that could be repaired super easily. Anything with microchips is going to suffer if those chips die, and they aren't going to be easy to repair.
by LoganDark | 2025-11-10 05:27:00+00:00
In my experience, the best way to get hired is not actually to apply traditionally, but to put yourself in places people are actually looking. For me that has been Hacker News. Both of my latest jobs I've gotten from posting in the HN jobseekers thread, and all of the applications I've made outside of HN have never even gotten a reply. I think employers looking for exceptional candidates are more likely to look in exceptional places rather than "normal" places.
by kemayo | 2025-11-10 05:27:12+00:00
I actually have. I have a bunch of long-running projects, and it has sometimes been useful to be able to look back to the commit that added some behavior I'm not sure about now and go "oh, okay, this was part of a commit in 2014 where I said I was doing X".

(And sure, you could also say that I should have added better documentation back in 2014...)
by numpad0 | 2025-11-10 05:27:16+00:00
I'm thinking there's something deeper or wider than even that. Apparently there's something in Windows 11 right now that says "3 minutes 21 number 2", down to inclusion of the number, because, you know, seconds.

I have my own essay on this matter to post on the Internet, but, to say the least, I don't think this mode of failures happen nearly as often in most other languages, if ever.

1: https://twitter.com/inasoft_ayacy/status/1986739607237722409
by mostlyk | 2025-11-10 05:27:23+00:00
I work on Robotics, so was recently implementing slamkit in rust. https://github.com/MostlyKIGuess/slam-rs

But a lot of what I work on is my classes giving me less time to open source nowadays, but I have also worked in implementing and mashing new Papers coming out in Robotics. Anyone who wants to talk more should please connect!
by anovikov | 2025-11-10 05:27:52+00:00
Western political systems, by design, are aiming to make government incapable and gridlocked, in order to prevent dictatorship, and usually do the job quite well - as it seems from the last by-elections, even a very determined would-be dictator with a wide support base, is failing at that.

This is what we want from the government - fuck off, and not get in the way. Sure, it has to tax us in order to keep the serfs from revolting, we understand this danger so are willing to chip in, but that's about it.
by aadv1k | 2025-11-10 05:29:10+00:00
About 2 years back I began working on a very simple markdown compiler, it was “immediate” in that it would consume markdown and immediately spit html. That project turned into a whole static site generator called Kevlar — https://github.com/aadv1k/kevlar

Entirely built from scratch in C without any dependencies. Now I wrote this code when I was 16, so many memory leaks and generally issues that I wanted to rectify and begin using third project for my own blog (currently old version is used — https://aadvikpandey.com)

The Kevlar v3 (https://github.com/aadv1k/kevlar/tree/kevlar-v3) here is all that it includes; more spec compliant markdown AST-based parsing; A better .ini config parser (right now it’s literally strtok on ‘=‘ and generally very hacky) as well as name spacing; more powerful templating tags like IF, FOR with lisp-like configuration

Of course staying true to the spirit of “from scratch” :)

Honestly I did scope creeped a little since I mainly wanted to fix a memory leaks issue in the markdown compiler lol; anyway I will share it once it gets completed on hacker news :)
by IgorPartola | 2025-11-10 05:29:15+00:00
It occurred to me recently while driving in a high traffic area that (a) this area is congested every single day at this time and (b) if I shipped a piece of software that literally crawled to a stop for a two hour period every morning and a two hour period every evening that I would be deeply ashamed of myself and my work and that if I ran a department that did that I would have no priorities other than fixing this bug until it was fixed.

Yet we all know so many industries and products that just do not work like that and in fact the longer something is broken and it doesn’t seem to stop people from using it, the more it is accepted that it is ok for it to remain broken. I think that is somehow just a part of human psychology.
by deaux | 2025-11-10 05:31:42+00:00
It is more ethics driven, taking it as the likes of EE, CS and such since we'reon HN. That doesn't apply to every individual, but "more" is about the average. Of course it is. Like how people who study philosophy or veterinary medicine are on average gojng to be more ethics driven than those studying petrochemical engineering.

> Things are no different at companies where the founders are engineers.

Look at companies where engineer CEOs are replaced by MBA CEOs vs companies where the oppposite happens.

Pretty sure that when saying founders you're selecting for unicorn founders as well, sample bias going through the roof. Huge majority of engineer founders never seriously aims to reach that level, they end up with a small or medium-sized, product-driven company.
by Animats | 2025-11-10 05:33:08+00:00
That is indeed a good insight. What's being hollowed out are jobs for the middle of the bell curve, which, of course, is where most of the people are. The author says that in several different ways, pointing out that a quiet, reliable long-term job is no longer something that's even a likely possibility.

Then he says it's only a matter of time until the outliers are automated too. That's more speculative, but may not be wrong. It's only been three years since ChatGPT shipped. This is just getting started.
by o11c | 2025-11-10 05:33:25+00:00
If people can't make a good (PR, story, or whatever) without AI, they certainly can't do it with AI, because using the AI is strictly more difficult - it requires all the original skill, plus the skill to work around the AI's quirks.

This is arguably isomorphic to Kernighan's Law:

> Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
by eduction | 2025-11-10 05:33:51+00:00
In the boom times people get too cocky and in the retrenchment they get too pessimistic.

Bill Gates came to my university in 2001 or 2 urging people to major in computer science because the dot-com bust was bad and everyone was convinced coding was going to move mostly offshore. People who followed his advice did well.

Now everyone is convinced coding will be taken over by AI… and move offshore. It seems like ai will change things more than offshoring but once again not as much as everyone seems to think. We still have offshoring but it didn’t stop programmers ramping toward and beyond seven figure salaries.

To the author’s credit this doesn’t read like panic, it’s level headed, but it is inevitably quite dark. In the 90s recession people temped, worked in coffee shops, and made or listened to amazing music. Not to be flip but maybe for a college grad (no kids) getting sidetracked from a tech developer job for a while is a blessing in disguise.
by burningChrome | 2025-11-10 05:33:52+00:00
At least you got to interview them.

One of the first startups I worked at in the early aughts, I started as a front-end dev. Indian dude a few cubes over. I'm not kidding, he had a "Learn .Net Nuke" Wrox book he was constantly pouring over.

He was gone on my second day. Apparently the company had hired an outside recruiter who interviewed someone and when they got the job, this dude showed up. Apparently this was a really common scam back then.

I see not much has changed.
by throw234234234 | 2025-11-10 05:34:00+00:00
Most businesses have a limit to growth in general (e.g. market size, etc). Doesn't mean they are bad businesses just means they can't grow forever and there is a limit to the demand of that given activity. I argue this applies more so to tech products since they generally are relatively affordable already and for most people aren't price demand constrained. A dead end business w.r.t growth could be a cash positive asset for a very long time depending on what it does and maybe that's OK.

Its why I'm not the biggest believer in "Jevon's Paradox" when it comes to software. Most software projects scale and as such they aren't really cost constrained. Or another way of stating this is "if the idea is good and can make lots of money the cost of dev's isn't a limiting factor" - hence why AI doesn't necessarily increase demand all that much. This is unlike say physical industries where cost can absolutely matter especially if the good is constrained already by affordability.

I think most SWE's know this - they see it with outsourcing as well where cheaper costs don't necessarily mean more software is done; but there is some "hope" that things will be OK.